Ever felt held back with Word documents that just look too plain almost like they’re stuck in the past. You might have put hours of work into writing the text that goes into your document, but no one wants to read them because they look boring and tedious, but it doesn’t have to be that way because word gives you the power to dramatically enhance your documents, turning Them from drab to Fab in minutes with just a few clicks in this video, I’m going to share the shortcuts to rapidly transform boring documents into captivating content quickly and efficiently. And if you want to get a copy of the completed document to steal ideas from you.
Can download it from the link in the video description before we start? I should point out that this is a mockup of Cell Biology revision notes, I’m not a scientist, and I have no idea if this information is correct, so don’t use it for exam revision. Oh and I apologize in advance if I mispronounce any terminology first to make it quick to format I’ll start by changing the document, theme color palette by the design, Tab and then on the colors drop down scroll down, and this is the color palette. I want called median simply click on it and now, if I go back and look at the color palette for the fonts, you can see my theme color palette’s available. It’S just going to make it quick and easy for me to work with next, I’m going to format this heading in a different font.
We’Ll go with this one here, Modern Love, grunge, I’ve used it recently and we’ll make the font size 72. You can just type it in: let’s also change the color to this dark, green and I’ll Center. The text, let’s also change the font, for these subheadings to something more fun, I’ll right, click and go into expand and collapse and collapse all the headings and then I’ll.
Just expand this down one level, and now I can see my subheadings and if I click on each one you can see the style applied is heading number two and that’s going to make it quick and easy for me to change them. All I need to do is right, click on the style in the gallery and modify, and here I can change the font this time. I want ink free, we’ll make it size 20 and we’ll change the color to this brown. I’M going to add this to the Stars gallery for future use just in case. I need it again and I’m only going to use it in this document. I’Ll click. Okay, now we can see it in the star Gallery ready for use and all of my subheadings are updated. Let’S right click and expand them expand all headings on the second page, I need a diagram for the ukar IC cell structure. To do this, I’m going to right click on it and then go into search. This brings up the search pane with images Wiki Pages.
If we scroll down there’s web pages and more, I want an image so I’ll click on view all and let’s see if we can find one, that’s suitable. This one looks okay, let me scroll down and I’m just going to place my cursor, where I want the image inserted and then click the plus to pop it in let’s just control and scroll up to zoom zoom in it’s looking a little bit blurry around the Text, so I’m not particularly happy with that one: let’s click on it and delete it.
Instead of inserting one of these images, let’s go back and look at the web pages that it found. Let’S see if there’s anything here, we can use there’s one here from K Academy.
Let’S click on that. It’S going to open in a web page and we’ll see if there’s anything suitable here that we can use. Ah there we go. That looks good all right. Let me go back to my document and on the insert tab of the ribbon, I’m going to use the screenshot tool. Now I can insert any of the screens that I currently have open or I can go into screen clipping and select a specific area, so we’ll just wait till it changes my mouse cursor to the plus and then left click and drag to select the area that You want to insert great, let’s go back to the web page and I’m just going to copy the URL and we’re going to add it to the document underneath the image as the image source all right.
Let’S Center, that on the page and that’s our image done, don’t forget: there’s lots of other options here available under search and I’ll leave you to explore them in your own time for now I’ll close down the search pane. Next on the insert tab of the ribbon. We’Ve got quick parts and we can use them to insert frequently used text Snippets like standard responses. You simply select s the text and then save the selection to your auto text. Gallery and it’ll be available to use in any document. We also have document properties and Fields, and these allow you to save time and ensure consistency across your documents, I’m going to insert a date field so from the categories I want date and time here I can insert the date the documents created today’s date, how long It’s taken me to edit it the print date save date all the time.
I want today’s date, and I want it in this format, so I’ll click, okay and this inserts it into your document. If I click on it, I’ve got the option to update the date. So, if I use this file in the future as a template, all I need to do is click on update to get the current date and we can format this text like any other text, so just select it and then on the Home tab. I’M going to write, align it and let’s change the font, to inked keeping with my theme I’ll make it slightly bigger and green, and bold actually we’ll make it 14 point. That’s better! Okay, before we dive deeper, a quick heads up, I’ve just launched a 3-hour. Microsoft, Word masterclass, that’s built to transform your document skills, whether you’re, just starting out or looking to refine your Advanced skills. This course is designed to double your productivity and Elevate the impact of your documents.
You can find the link in the video description scrolling down to this section here. We can make this text easier to read by wrapping it into two columns to help with this, I’m going to turn on the paragraph marks on the Home tab of the ribbon and then click on the show all button. Now that we’ve got these paragraph marks, I can place my cursor, where I want to insert the start of the section, and we do that by the layout tab breaks and I want a continuous section break. So that’s the start of my continuous section break, and this will be the end. So I just insert another one at the end, and now I need to do is place. My cursor at the start of my section braak go to columns and I want two columns here and now. My text is nicely formatted in two columns.
Now we don’t need the paragraph marks anymore, so I can use the keyboard shortcut.
Control shift asterisk to turn them off to help these points stand out. I’M going to make the first word bold, so just double click to select it and then the mini toolbar pops up, and I can choose bold from there and then to reapply that format. I’M going to double click, the format painter and now notice. My mouse cursor has changed to a paintbrush. I can just left click to apply that formatting wherever I need. If it’s just one word, I can just left click the word. It will apply it to the whole word once I’m done press escape to clear it. Let’S also apply an italic format to these two words. These are subsets of this one here now, speaking of this set of text with it selected, I’m going to hold down shift all and down arrow, just to move it across into the next column, just gives it more space and keeps it together.
The other thing I’m going to do with this text selected on the Home tab of the ribbon under the paragraph setting I’m going to remove the space after the paragraph. It’s just going to bring those sub points closer to The Heading. By the way, this shift, alt and up or down arrow, also works in Outlook and PowerPoint for bullet points or text all right. Let’s tidy up the tables because look pretty ordinary to quickly format the headings in both tables.
With this text selected up on the Home tab of the ribbon over and select, I can select all texts with similar formatting and you can see all four headings are now selected, so I can go about formatting it going to give it this gold font and, let’s See how it looks in uppercase, I’m going to use the keyboard shortcut shift. F3. Now it’s in uppercase. Let’S try shift F3 again now, it’s all in low lower case. I think I prefer uppercase. So, let’s go back I’ll shift F3 two more times and we’ll go back to uppercase all right. That looks good. Next, let’s get rid of the cell borders on these tables so on the table design tab under borders. I want no border and let’s repeat that, for this table just clicking on the icon in the top left table design, Tab and because I’ve already selected no borders, I can just click the icon, okay, much better!
Next, let’s do something to improve this section. I’Ll start by formatting, the font we’ll choose this same gold, color and I’ll make it slightly bigger and bold. And let’s apply that same formatting to this heading and for this mitosis stages, let’s use Smart art to create a diagrammatic view of the stages. So, I’m just going to insert a few Carriages turns to make some space for it and then on the insert tab of the ribbon smart art – and here I want a process, and this Circle process will be good. Let’s insert that it comes in massive, let’s resize, it just drags the pull handles and the other thing I want to do is put it behind the text. That’s just going to allow me to move it into a smaller space and not worry about the overall size of the object.
Let’s go into here and we’ll just add a carriage return to move that down as Smid all right before we get started, we’ll, go and format it and we’ll change the colors in keeping with our theme. Okay, now all I need to do is cut the text out of here and I can either paste it into the shape or I can paste it over here, which I prefer to do right. Let’s repeat for each one of those and I’m just putting a hyphen in here to allow the text to wrap and that just allows the font in the small tart to be a bit bigger. Let’s add a hyphen there and the last one, and that’s done now, we’ll just get rid of these punctuation marks, and the other thing I want to do is change the font here, so that it’s in keeping with my theme and we’ll go with the ink free.
Okay, that looks good using diagrams, like this not only adds more interest to your document, but it also makes it much easier to consume and more memorable all right.
Let’s take a look at the completed version. What have we got left? We need to insert some shapes at the top and the bottom and behind our two columns. So, let’s go ahead and do that for the header I’m going to insert regular shapes we’ve all got access to these so on the insert tab under the shapes drop down. I want this double wave, just left click and draw it in, and you can resize it using the pull, handles and rotate it. And what have you, but in the interest of time I’m going to go to the shape format, Tab and type in the size and click on the button here to launch the layout d box. And here I want this – to be 336 rotation. And now I can bring it over, let’s also place it behind the text and I’ll just move it roughly into place.
Let’s also get rid of the outline and we’ll format the color, so this one is going to be pale, shade of yellow and, let’s add a shadow and then I’m going to duplicate that contrl D to duplicate, just move it up and we’ll change the color of This one to a shade of green and now all I need to do is duplicate that again and this one’s going to be for the other side. So, let’s go in and change the rotation instead of 336 we’ll make it 29 all right and we’ll just roughly move it into place. Now this one should be in between the two on the left, so we’re going to send it backwards and we’ll change the fill color to this light brown and we’ll just move it down slightly and control D to duplicate and then we’ll move it up, and this One will make a pale blue all right, that’s the top done now.
We need to do the bottom of the page, and if you have a Microsoft 365 account you can use the icons on the insert tab of the ribbon in here. We can go into illustrations and there’s a group called Art now they’re, not always in the same order, which is annoying so I’m just scroll across until I find it there’s art and in here we have lots of free form, shapes abstract kind of shapes. This is the one I want to use so I’ll, insert that it gets inserted with the formatting in line with text and that shoves all the text out the way and Mak some mess of your document. So, let’s change it to behind text and now it’s down here: let’s bring it up, so we can see it and we might also crop it because there’s a lot of white space that we don’t need and then I can resize it just stretch it out a Bit and we’ll just pop it slightly off the page, all right.
Let’s give this one, this pale green color and then I’m going to control D to duplicate it I’ll just offset it, and this one I’ll make light blue, and we’ll add a shadow for interest. All right, we can bring them a bit closer together. If you want, I won’t spend too much time on. Let you get the idea so holding down shifter select them both I’m going to hold down control notice. My mouse has changed to pointer with a plus sign that allows me to duplicate the shape and we’ll just bring it across here now. We need to arrange some things on this page because they’re all shoved down a bit too low and that’s primarily because of this smart art taking up so much space. Now I can move this heading up now. I can grab the shapes and move them down until they’re below the image right. We’ve also got a spare page down here, so let me back space until we get rid of that all right. So that’s the bottom done.
Let’s hold down shift to select them again and this time I’m going to ju, locate them and then bring them up to the top of the page. Holding down shift I’m going to rotate them. That just allows me to easily rotate them and have them snap to the horizontal axis and we’ll move them up there. Let’s move the blue one offset above the green one: okay, one last embellishment I’ll, add our shapes for the columns just to make them easier to read so on the insert tab of the ribbon shapes I’m going to go with this rounded rectangle. Now, if you want to insert multiple shapes one after another, you can right click on the shape that you want to insert and lock drawing mode and then I’ll draw in my first shape and then repeat, drawing in the second shape and when I’m done drawing in My shapes I can press the Escape key to exit drawing mode now, they’re, not the same size, so I’m actually going to delete that one and I’ll just duplicate this one.
But first I’m going to get rid of the outline, we’ll change the fill color to this pale Brown and I’ll change the radius on the corners and then I’m just going to send it behind the text holding down controll and shift. I’M going to left click and drag to copy it across to my other column. Okay, that’s looking good now, if you spend a lot of time, formatting shapes getting the color in the border and the shadow Etc. Just right, you can right click a shape and set it as the default shape. Now it’s not setting the shape as the default as such.
It’s setting the formatting so next time you insert any shape it’s going to come out with that same color, shadow border, Etc effect. Without you having to go and do all the formatting over and over again by the way, these tips for shapes work in Excel PowerPoint and Outlook all right, let me double click the ribbon tab to hide it and we’ll zoom out a little. I think, you’ll agree. It looks way more interesting and easier to read than when we started. Let me know in the comments which was your favorite tip and if you have a tip that I didn’t cover be sure to share it also, don’t forget to check out my new course and this video next on the most common mistakes Excel users make. So, you can avoid that too I’ll see you there.
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