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Not a tip, but this made me laugh-cry.
Search “format painting” on YouTube. Thank me later.
Confession: My wife (then-gf) taught me format painter. It’s the reason I married her.
Click the paragraph symbol to see why you are having formatting issues on the most basic level. Consider draft view to see all the random styles you are using. Keep with next is your friend. Borders and shading can apply to text, paragraph, cell or table. If something is happening you can’t explain, it’s not magic/broken, it’s usually just that you can’t see it and you don’t know where to find the setting. So google or wait 2 days for doc services to tell you they just reformatted the whole document because they couldn’t figure it out either.
If you’re transactional, learning how to use automatic cross references makes life a lot easier.
Yes, always: "select all", "update references", ctrl+f "error" before comparing, pdfing, printing, or emailing
Mentor
Learning how to do a table of contents and table of authorities. Most secretaries aren’t really good at this, and it made my life so much easier after I was facile enough to do my own formatting. In one way, doing this is below my pay grade, but it does make life a lot easier and makes me less dependent on others. Also, for me, at least, being well versed in excel has been invaluable. No secretary I ever had knew anything about excel, which I use all the time these days.
Mentor
Pricing real estate properties/potential acquisitions.
Formatting for a paragraph is stored in the return at the end of the paragraph. This is why if you delete a section or page break, the formatting/page layout/style from the following section is retained for everything. This is also can cause ordered or bulleted lists to experience weird formatting. Its counterintuitive. If you want to change the paragraph formatting, or change formatting from a single list number, you need to enable hidden characters and make sure the paragraph symbol at the end of the paragraph is selected. If you want to delete a break but retain the preceding section’s formatting, Google a good tutorial because it’s complicated.
When you run the Document Inspector and remove metadata, and specifically Personal Information, it will change the name on all all existing redlines and comments to “Author”. Doing this will also automatically check a box in the privacy settings that will continue to remove new personal information each time you save the document in the future. If you ever start redlining a document that shows your name on the redlines but your name changes to “Author” as soon as you save, this setting was turned on in the document. You can’t restore personal information once it’s been removed, so if you need your redlines and comments to be attributed to you the easiest thing to do at that point is open a clean copy of the document, uncheck the box next to “Remove personal information from file properties on save.” Then run a compare of your redlines against the original and make sure your name is correctly identified in the compare settings.
Macros are your best friend for automating repetitive actions that don’t have a shortcut built in. You can either record them or write them (or, if you don’t care to learn VBA, you can find tons of macro scripts online that will do what you want).
QuickParts are easy to learn and can be helpful if you have blocks of text that you use repeatedly across documents. Just make sure they’re saved in a separate building blocks gallery and not in a specific document that you’re working on.
Word works best at an organizational and formatting level if you use styles. You can select individual paragraphs or sections and change the format settings like justification, spacing, font, etc., and most people format like that, but it doesn’t really like that. Chances are if you are having increasingly complicated formatting difficulties every time you try to change something, it’s because different pieces of the document have been formatted and reformatted too many times. Styles can be almost infinitely customized, and setting all of the formatting within consistent styles that you use for page headings, section headings, paragraph formatting, signature block, etc. make for better and more reliable use of other Word functions like cross references, tables of contents, tables of authorities, etc. Learn to use styles and your documents will be more polished with less effort.
Seems a bit basic, but be sure to save often, or have automatic save on!
Define your own autocorrects to easily and intuitively insert symbols. E.g., whenever I type "ss.", Word drops in the section symbol.
You can use the same function to delete/modify autocorrects you rarely/never use. I'm entirely US based nowadays so I have little use for the Euro symbol; but I will type (e) a bunch.
Need to update auto cross-references ? ctrl+a, F9 updates the entire doc. Pro tip: crtl+f “Error” for any error codes in the docs to catch post-update.
Need to manually check the references are actually correct but hate scrolling back up to the cross-ref to keep going? Press alt+ < takes you back to the ref you clicked. Saves me hours.
Get a mouse woth multiple input keys and save commonly used short cuts or words as commands.
CTRL + full stop (period) for a square bracketed blob.
Also CTRL + SHIFT + E for turning track changes on and off.
As others have said, format painter is a must.
Also, paragraph spacing, especially for fiddly tables. Also helpful for tables is SHIFT + ENTER, for starting a new line without using spacing.
I use CTRL + SHIFT + Arrows a lot to highlight words (right / left) or paragraphs (up / down) that I want to move (and then copy / paste).