I often notice people using Word ‘stock,’ as in, just using Word, as it’s presented by default, with no changes. Now, these are not writers I’m talking about, these are office-based people. But, I wonder how many people who use word more seriously are also not ‘tweaking’ their environment.
I like Word. I think it’s the single best word processor ever made. There is no tool for processing words which compares, at least not in my experience.
That said, I think I will try Scrivener again for my next novel as it has some more advanced tools which I miss. But, the topic of this post is ‘Word,’ so let’s talk about what settings I change to make sure my writing environment is as good as it can be (for me and my workflow.)
This is how the top of my Word looks
Oh, and the bottom
Because we’re writers, not formatters (shrug) we don’t need to see things that are not useful all the time, so we want the ribbon to appear when we need it.
Click on the “home” and then the little down arrow. Click that, select ‘Classic’ and then ‘More options’ - now click “Show tabs only’
While you’re here, make sure the ‘Quick access’ tool bar is ‘above’ the ribbon, and enabled.
If ‘Toolbar’ is ticked, untick it. It’s useless, and super annoying. A combination that I don’t enjoy.
Now when we click at ‘tab’ (title) and the ribbon appears, we make a selection, and it vanishes. You won’t be needing it during most writing sessions so don’t worry too much about it.
The quick access toolbar is row of tiny icons that live next to the control box (icon thingy) on the left, in the title menu. Mine looks like this:
My Word title bar.
I know, at first it looks like a cluster-fluff but I assure you, it’s invaluable once you learn to use it in a way that you configure yourself.
On mine, working from left to right I have:
It’s also for bookmarking items or plot points you may want to tweak later, while I usually use ‘Comments’ for this, the bookmark menu is a lot cleaner, in a busy document.
