Microsoft Word 2013 Plain & Simple

Q&A with Jay Freedman, author of "Microsoft Word 2013 Plain & Simple"

Q. Why is your book timely-- what makes it important right now?

A. With the recent release of Office 2013, and especially with its inclusion in Office 365, there will be many people in homes, schools, and businesses using Word for the first time this year. Many other users will soon upgrade from an earlier version of Office. My book is designed to help those people to find out how to accomplish common tasks in Word 2013.

Q. What information do you hope that readers of your book will walk away with?

A. Although Word is a very large and complex program, the individual tasks and the tools to do the tasks are generally simple and easy to use. When you know what you want to do, "Microsoft Word 2013 Plain & Simple" will recommend the right tool and explain how to use it. The numbered steps and corresponding screen shots take you from start to finish.

Q. What's the most exciting and/or important thing happening in your space?

A. The integration of the Office programs with cloud storage, roaming profiles, SkyDrive, and social media will make documents more interactive and less paper-oriented. The Office Web Apps contribute to the ability to use documents anywhere, from multiple devices.

Q. What are your top 5 tips and tricks?.

A. 1. In Print Layout view, move the cursor onto a heading paragraph. When a triangle appears in the left margin, click it to collapse or expand the text and lower-level headings under it, similar to the behavior of the Outline view.

2. Word 2013 can open most PDF files and format the resulting content as an editable Word document. If the document content appears but isn’t editable, the PDF file contains a picture of the text instead of the text itself. Word can’t convert pictures to text (this process is called Optical Character Recognition or OCR), but Microsoft OneNote might be able to do that for you.

3. If you insert a header building block and then insert a page number building block from the Top Of Page gallery in the Page Number button, the header building block is automatically removed. To combine a header building block and a page number in the same paragraph, use the Current Position gallery on the Page Number button, instead.

4. In Word 2013, when you move the cursor above a column or to the left of a row in a table, a plus sign (+) in a circle appears. Click the plus sign to add a column or row at that point.

5. When you drag a picture object in Word 2013, green alignment guides appear as the edges of the picture touch any of the four page margins, or as the center of the picture aligns with the horizontal or vertical center of the page, or as the top edge of the picture aligns with the top line of a text paragraph.