I want to be one of those people who knows how to do absolutely anything in Word. Anything.
How should I go about learning?
Use a real typewriter…write a book.
After constant frustration, you will eventually get better.
**Then **you will know what all the buttons in Word are for.
(but you might find the typewriter much easier to work by then)
Pay attention to tooltips and help files. Office’s documentation is often excellent and usually underrated.
Try to learn what every button does. Try to extend functionality using macros. Go on forums and try to answer other people’s questions, in the process learning more yourself.
Accept that there is sometimes no easy way of doing something mind bogglingly trivial – like binding “Paste as Unformatted Text” to a keyboard shortcut, or anchoring something to a particular page. Find peace in how inconvenient these things are. Only then can you become a true Word guru.
Start with a free tutorial and learn enough to look for more advanced training (How To-books or computer based programs).
Learn just enough (and be able to type fast enough) to pass a test and get a job in the document processing center of a large law firm. In six months, you’ll know everything there is to know.
Seriously.
**Reply’s **suggestion about answering other people’s questions is a good one. Go to any Word or word processing form. Read some of the questions. Figure out the answers by yourself. You’ll learn a lot.
You could study for and pass the Microsoft Certified Application Specialist exam. That way, you can call yourself a certified expert.
You’re going about it backwards. Word and WordPerfect are too powerful for you to really know everything about it.
What you need to do is say, “Why do I need to know this?” Perhaps you are going to be an administrative assistant. OK then find out what that entails and learn the features of Word and/or WordPerfect that will help you do that job the most efficent.
The “…for Dummies” books are excellent places to start to learn the basics and then expand. It could easily take you years to learn everything programs like Word and WordPerfect have to offer.
Also learn how to integrate the various programs. For instance, I have seen secretaries making whole charts in Word when they could’ve done it much easier in Excel, but they never bothered to learn Excel.
Good advice, so far. As an aside, I took the test to become a Microsoft Office User Master a few years ago (I don’t know if they even offer it any more), which covered Access, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Publisher. The most difficult test by far was for Word. I don’t think most people realize just how much you can control in Word.
Become a technical writer, then work for a shop that uses Word (instead of something else, like HTML or FrameMaker). Bob’s your uncle.
Hang out at http://www.wopr.com/. This is (or used to be … my experience with them is a few years old) a place to learn the very nitty-gritty about the Office products from people who are very good Power Users.
Also, you might get into some of the VBA programming stuff. By learning how to manipulate a document through code, the rest of Word starts to make sense. (Prepare to be frustrated, but it is a pretty good way to go.)
Use it. Use it a lot.
Everytime you do something the slightest bit odd, go search the helpfiles and web to see if there’s another way to do it.
Peruse the helpfiles and pertinent websites in your spare time, looking for nifty tricks.
That’s how I learn stuff, anyway. I’m more ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ than ‘expert in X’, though.
This is how I became a Word expert. Here’s another place to soak up expertise: Word MVP.