By Rick Broida

Click to viewMicrosoft Word can drive you nuts. It piles on features few people need, plagues you with annoying auto-corrections and just generally acts like a pain in the ass.


No more. It's time to take back the word processor, to put Word in its place and make it your ally instead of your adversary. Follow these tips and you'll be a much happier writer.

Note: Everything here applies to Word 2003, though earlier versions may benefit as well. I haven't seen enough of Word for Vista to know if it's equally annoying (oh, who am I kidding, of course it is).


Turn off unnecessary toolbars

The more toolbars you've got stacked up in Word, the less space you have for viewing your actual document. So banish the ones you seldom use. Just right-click anywhere on any toolbar, then left-click any toolbar that has a checkmark next to it. It'll immediately disappear from the screen. (You can restore a toolbar using the same method.) For the record, most users need only the Standard and Formatting toolbars.

Streamline the toolbars you keep

Ever use the "show/hide paragraph" button? How about "decrease indent"? Didn't think so. Even if you keep just two toolbars, they're probably so bloated with unused buttons that you have to keep them stacked. Fortunately, you can excise extra buttons with ease. Here's how:


Click the little down arrow at the right end of any toolbar. In the menu that appears, click Add or Remove Buttons > Formatting, then clear the checkmarks from any buttons you don't need. Remember, removing these buttons doesn't eliminate their corresponding features—it just streamlines your toolbar.

Once you've trimmed the fat, you should be able to fit some or all of your toolbars side-by-side, thus giving you even more extra workspace.


Add a word-count button

With all that button-bloat, Microsoft doesn't see fit to include one for word-count? Maybe it's because I'm a writer, but I use that feature constantly. To add a word-count button, click Tools > Customize, and then click the Commands tab. In the Categories section, click Tools. In the Commands section, scroll down until you find Word Count, then drag it out of that box and onto a toolbar.


Turn off hyperlinks

Word just loves to hyperlink e-mail addresses and URLs. Sure, this might come in handy from time to time, but mostly it's just distracting. To remove all the links from an individual document, select all the text by pressing Ctrl-A, then press Ctrl-Shift-F9.


To stop Word from hyperlinking in the future, click Tools > AutoCorrect Options, then click the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Clear the checkbox for "Internet and network paths with hyperlinks." Then click the AutoFormat tab and clear the same checkbox. If you want to manually add a hyperlink, select the desired text, right-click it and choose Hyperlink.

Expand the recently used documents list

By default, Word shows only four of your most recently used documents when you click the File menu. I don't know about you, but I'm usually juggling a lot more documents than that. If you click Tools > Options and then the General tab, you'll see an item called "Recently used files list." Click the arrows to bump the number up to nine, the maximum Word allows.


Turn off "smart quotes"

Word's curly quotation marks may look nice, but they can wreak havoc when you copy and paste them into blogs, other applications, web forms, etc. To turn off these "smart" quotes, click Tools > AutoCorrect Options, hit both the AutoFormat and AutoFormat As You Type tabs, and clear the checkbox marked "straight quotes with smart quotes."


Turn off entire-word selection

Ever notice that when you select text, Word automatically selects entire words at a time? Hey, guess what, Word? I'll decide how much of a word I want to select, thank you very much. To turn off this "feature," click Tools > Options and then click the Edit tab. Clear the checkbox for "When selecting, automatically select entire word."


Turn off automatic numbered lists

Once again, Word assumes facts not in evidence—in this case, that when you put a number in front of a new line, you're planning to create a numbered list. Stop these unwanted assumptions by clicking Tools > AutoCorrect Options, then the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Clear the checkbox for "Automatic numbered lists."


After that, if you want to number a list, just select the text and click the Numbering icon (or click Format > Numbering if you turned off that icon to reduce toolbar clutter).

Turn off superscripting and fractions

If you're creating text that's headed to a blog or other web-based document, superscripted text and fraction characters will usually come out looking messed up. Word automatically turns ordinals (e.g., "1st") into superscript and fractions into special fraction characters. To stop this pesky behavior, click Tools > AutoCorrect Options, hit both the AutoFormat and AutoFormat As You Type tabs, and clear the two checkboxes relating to fractions and ordinals.


Access full pull-down menus

Because Word's pull-down menus are so freakin' cluttered with unused features, I can understand the logic behind the abbreviated menus. Of course, the feature you actually want is never visible, so you have to click again at the bottom of the menu or wait a few seconds for the full menu to appear. Bleh.


To override this annoying obstacle, click Tools > Customize, then the Options tab and then the "Always show full menus" checkbox.


Ditch Word altogether

You knew this was coming. If Word simply causes you too many headaches (or you're looking for a free alternative), consider beloved open-source alternatives like AbiWord and OpenOffice.org. Heck, if you have modest word-processing needs and you're always online, it's hard to beat Google Docs and Zoho Writer, both of which are also free (and make it easy to access your documents from nearly any PC).


Know of any other ways to keep Word from driving you insane? Share your insight with the world by posting in the comments! In the meantime, check out our post on keyboard shortcuts for Word.


Rick Broida, Lifehacker associate editor, has lived in Word for years, but living with it hasn't been easy. His special feature, Alpha Geek, appears every Monday. Subscribe to the Alpha Geek feed to get new installments in your newsreader.