Word for Microsoft 365 cheat sheet

Word has always been the workhorse app of the Microsoft Office suite. Nearly everyone who uses Office ends up using Word at some point, whether it be for writing memos, typing up agendas, creating reports, crafting business correspondence or any of a thousand other uses.

Microsoft sells Office under two models: Individuals and businesses can pay for the software license up front and own it forever (what the company calls the “perpetual” version of the suite), or they can purchase a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription, which means they have access to the software for only as long as they keep paying the subscription fee.

When you purchase a perpetual version of the suite — say, Office 2019 or Office 2021 — its applications will never get new features, whereas apps in the “365” subscriptions are continually updated with new features. For more details, see our in-depth comparison of the two Office models.

This cheat sheet gets you up to speed on the features that have been introduced in Microsoft 365’s Word for Windows desktop client since 2015. We’ll periodically update this story as new features roll out. (If you’re using the perpetual-license Word 2016 or 2019, see our separate Word 2016 and 2019 cheat sheet. We’ll be updating that story for Word 2021 soon, but in the meantime, check out “What’s new in Office 2021?”)

In this guide:

• Use the Ribbon
• Collaborate in real time
• Search to get tasks done quickly
• Use Smart Lookup for quick online research
• Use Researcher for in-depth research
• Get instant translations with Translator
• Add new types of charts
• Use AutoSave as a safety net while you work
• Review or restore earlier versions of a document
• Other new features worth checking out
• Use keyboard shortcuts

Use the Ribbon

The Ribbon interface is alive and well in the current version of Word. Since it has been included in Office applications since Office 2007, you’re probably familiar with how it works, but if you need a refresher, see our Word 2010 cheat sheet.

In September 2018, Microsoft overhauled the way the Ribbon looks, and the company has continued to tinker with the design since then. It’s now flatter-looking, cleaner, and less cluttered, and it has high-contrast colors, which makes the icons and text on the Ribbon easier to see. Some time after Microsoft released Windows 11, the company again gave the Ribbon (and Office overall) a slight facelift, so it more closely aligns with that new version of Windows. But it still works in the same way, and you’ll find most of the commands in the same locations as in earlier versions.

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The new look appears in both Windows 10 and Windows 11, but depending on your installation, it may or may not show up by default. You can check by clicking the icon of a megaphone near the top right of the screen above the Ribbon. In the Coming Soon screen that appears, look at the “Try the new experience” slider. If it’s “On,” it likely means you’re using the new interface. If it’s “Off” and you’d like to turn it on, move the slider to “On” and restart Word. That should turn on the new look. However, in my tests, changing back and forth was often flaky, especially on PCs running Windows 11.  

To find out which commands live on which tabs on the Ribbon, download our Word for Microsoft 365 Ribbon quick reference. Also note that you can use the search box above the Ribbon to find commands.

Just as in earlier versions of Word, to make the commands underneath the tabs on the Ribbon go away, press Ctrl-F1. (Note that the Ribbon tabs — File, Home, Insert, and so on — stay visible.) To make the commands appear again, press Ctrl-F1. You can also make the commands on the Ribbon go away by clicking the name of the tab you’re currently on. To make the commands reappear, click any tab.

You’ve got other options for displaying the Ribbon as well. To get to them, click the Ribbon display options icon (a down arrow) on the bottom of the Ribbon at the far right, just below the Share button. A drop-down menu appears with these four options:

• Full-screen mode: This makes Word take up your entire screen and hides the Ribbon. To get out of full-screen mode, click the three-dot icon at the upper right of the screen.
• Show tabs only: This shows the tabs but hides the commands underneath them. It’s the same as pressing Ctrl-F1. To display the commands underneath the tabs when they’re hidden, press Ctrl-F1, click a tab, or click the Ribbon display options down arrow and select Always show Ribbon.
• Always show Ribbon: This displays the entire Ribbon, both the tabs and commands underneath them.
• Show Quick Access toolbar: This displays the Quick Access toolbar, which gives you fast access to Word features you want to have always available, such as New, Save, Print, and many others. When you enable the toolbar, it starts off empty. To populate it, click a small down arrow that appears at the right of the toolbar and from the drop-down menu that appears, choose which features to put on it. If you don’t see a command you want, click More Commands. Find the command you want on the left and click Add. To make the Quick Access toolbar go away, click the Ribbon display options down arrow and select Hide Quick Access toolbar.

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To customize the title bar above the Ribbon, select File > Options > General. In the “Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office” section, click the down arrow next to Office Theme and select Dark Gray, Black, or White from the drop-down menu. To make the title bar blue again, choose the Colorful option from the drop-down list. Just above the Office Theme menu is an Office Background drop-down menu — here you can choose to display a pattern such as a circuit board in the title bar.

There’s a useful feature in what Microsoft calls the backstage area that appears when you click File on the Ribbon: If you click Open, Save a Copy, or Save As from the menu on the left, you can see the cloud-based services you’ve connected to your Office account, such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Each location now displays its associated email address underneath it. This is quite helpful if you use a cloud service with more than one account, such as if you have one OneDrive account for personal use and another one for business. You’ll be able to see at a glance which is which.

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Possibly in the works: A simplified Ribbon

Microsoft has been working for some time a simplified version of the Ribbon for all Office applications. Like the existing Ribbon, it will have tabs across the top, and each tab will have commands on it. But it’s more streamlined and uses less space than the existing Ribbon.

For now, Outlook for Windows is the only Microsoft 365 desktop app that uses the simplified Ribbon. However, you can get a preview of what it will look like in Word by going to the online version of Word. Click the Ribbon Layout icon (a down arrow) at the far right of the Ribbon and choose Simplified Ribbon to use it. To revert to the larger, older version of the Ribbon, instead select Classic Ribbon. Microsoft has made the simplified Ribbon the default in the online version of Word, so you may not need to do anything to display it.

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In the simplified Ribbon, all the commands are still there for each tab, but only the most commonly used are visible. Click the three-dot icon at the far right end of the Ribbon to show the rest of the commands in a drop-down menu.

In the Outlook desktop client, you can toggle between the streamlined and traditional Ribbon by clicking a small down arrow icon at the right edge of the Ribbon. We assume this will work the same way in Word, but at this point we have no details. We’ll update this section when the simplified Ribbon rolls out to Word for Windows. It may be some time before that happens, though, because the simplified version has been in the works for years and still hasn’t made an appearance in the desktop app.

Collaborate in real time

The biggest feature that’s been introduced in Word for Microsoft 365 subscribers since 2015 is real-time collaboration. It lets people work on documents together from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, a feature that Google Docs has long had. Microsoft calls this “co-authoring.”

There are only three requirements for collaboration in Word for Microsoft 365: You must be logged into your Microsoft or Office 365 account; the document must be stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online; and AutoSave must be turned on.

To share a document so you can collaborate on it with others: first open it, then click the Share button in the upper-right part of the screen. If you haven’t yet saved your file in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online, you’ll be prompted to do so.

Clicking the Share button pops up the “Send link” window. Here you can send an email with a link where others can access the document.

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First, decide whether anyone with a link can edit the document, or only those whose email addresses you enter. If you see the text “Anyone with the link can edit” near the top of the pane, you can change that by clicking it, then choosing Specific people on the screen that appears. Similarly, if “Specific people” appears above the email addresses, you can change that by clicking it, then choosing Anyone with the link can edit from the screen that appears.

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On this second screen you can also uncheck the Allow editing box to set the document to read-only for everybody. You can also set an expiration date after which people won’t be able to access the file. And you can set a password so that only people who have the password can access it. (If you use a business, enterprise, or education edition of Office, you may have slightly different sharing permissions and options set up by your IT department, such as an option to allow anyone within your organization to edit the document.)

Back in the main “Send link” window, enter the recipients’ email addresses (as you type, Word will suggest people from your address book whom you can select), optionally type in a message, and click Send. An email is sent to all the recipients with a link they can click to open the document.

(If you’d rather send recipients a copy of the file as a Word document or PDF rather than a link, and thus not allow real-time collaboration, click Send a copy at the bottom of the “Send link” screen.)

There’s another way to share a file stored in a personal OneDrive for collaboration: At the bottom of the “Send link” window, pane, click Copy link. When you do that, you can copy the link and send it to someone yourself via email. Note that you have the same options for allowing editing, not allowing editing, and so on as you do if you have Word send the link directly for you. Just click Anyone with the link can edit or Specific people below Copy link, and follow the instructions above.

To begin collaborating: When your recipients receive the email from you, they click a button or link to open the document, which opens in Word Online in a web browser rather than in the Word desktop client. They can either edit or read it in Word Online, depending on the permissions you granted, or click Open in Desktop App and use it from the Word desktop client.

The web version isn’t as fully featured as the client version — for instance, there aren’t as many formatting options and you can’t insert shapes, take screenshots, use mail merge, or use several other features. But for basic editing, it works fine.

When any collaborators open the document, you’ll see a colored cursor bar for each person that indicates their presence in the document. Each person gets their own unique color. Hover your cursor over anybody else’s cursor bar to see their name. Once they begin editing, you can see what each collaborator does as they do it, including deleting, editing, and adding text. They see what you do as well.

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Collaboration includes the ability to make comments at specific places in a document without actually changing the document’s contents. To do it, place your cursor in the document where you want the comment to appear (or select a word or phrase), click the Comments button in the upper right of the screen and select New Comment. A new comment box appears in the right margin; type in your comment there.

If you want to draw a colleague’s attention to a comment, @ mention them in the comment — type @ and the first few letters of the person’s name, then choose their name from the list that appears. They’ll receive an email notification with a link to the comment in the document.

Everyone collaborating can see all comments in the right margin. To reply to a comment, hover over it, click the Reply button, and type your response. There’s also a Resolve button that grays out the comment.

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Be aware that how well real-time collaboration works depends on the strength of your internet connection. On slow or flaky connections, you won’t immediately see edits that other people make and they won’t see yours immediately — there will be a lag. So it’s always best, when possible, to have the strongest connection possible when collaborating.

At any time, you can see who has access to the file by clicking the Share button. In the “Send link” screen that opens, click the three-dot icon in the upper right and select Manage access to see a list of people who can access the file. Here you can change edit/view permissions, revoke someone’s access, or remove the sharing link altogether.

Search to get tasks done quickly

A very useful addition to Word 2016 was called Tell Me — basically, an enhanced search feature for finding commands in Word. Now renamed simply Search, it’s extremely helpful when you want to do a task that you haven’t done before or have forgotten how to do.

To use it, click in the Search box — it’s above the Ribbon in the blue title area. (Keyboard fans can instead press Alt-Q to go to the Search box.) Type in a task, and you’ll get a list of possible matches. Click the task you want to get instructions on how to do it.

For example, I typed address an envelope and chose the Envelope result, and the screen you use for addressing envelopes appeared. When I typed in the more general query write an essay, it popped up a link to Word’s Researcher feature that lets you do research from within Word, add sources from the research you find, and then cite the sources in the document. (More on Researcher in a moment.) If you type in a query and hover your mouse over a result instead of clicking it, you’ll see a screen describing what you can do if you click the results.

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It’s a big time-saver, because you don’t have to hunt through the Ribbon to find the command you want. And it remembers the features you’ve previously selected in the box, so when you click in it, you first see a list of previous tasks you’ve searched for. That way, tasks that you frequently perform are always within easy reach.

Search is gaining more capabilities, too. Some users of enterprise and education editions of Microsoft 365 are now able to use the Search box to find people in their organization, SharePoint resources, and other personalized results from within Word.

Use Smart Lookup for quick online research

Word has a handful of features that help you do research or fact-checking when working on a document. The most useful for most people is being able to search the internet for words or phrases from directly in Word. Right-click a word — or highlight a group of words and right-click them — and from the menu that appears, select Smart Lookup. Word then uses Microsoft’s Bing search engine to do a search on the word or phrase and displays the results in a Search pane that appears on the right side of the screen. Microsoft says it uses the context around the words, not only the words themselves, to give you more relevant results.

For web links, click any result to go to the web page that is the source of the results. The first result may be a brief definition of the word. Following that is often an entry from Wikipedia, followed by a variety of other results. For example, when I searched for “gravity waves,” the first result was a definition of gravity wave, and the next was from Wikipedia for “Gravitational Wave.”

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Depending on how much information Bing gathers, you may see the results put into groups, such as ”Top Media Results” and “Web.” When you click an image thumbnail in the “Top Media Results” section, you’ll embed the image or video into your document, along with information about where it was pasted from.

Click the three-dot icon to the right of the entry to perform other actions. You’ll be able to open the web page, insert the page’s link into your document, insert a citation to the page into your document, or flag the result as inappropriate.

Note that in order to use intelligent search in Word or any other Office app, you might first need to enable Microsoft’s Intelligent Services feature, which collects your search terms and some content from your spreadsheets and other documents. (If you’re concerned about privacy, you’ll need to weigh whether the privacy hit is worth the convenience of doing research from right within the app.) If you haven’t enabled it, you’ll see a screen when you click Smart Lookup asking you to turn it on. Once you do so, it will be turned on across all your Office applications for all features that use Intelligent Services.

Use Researcher for in-depth research

Academics, students, and those wanting to do in-depth research will welcome Word for Microsoft 365’s Researcher tool. Like Search and Word’s Translator feature (see below), Researcher uses Microsoft’s AI-driven Intelligent Services feature. If you haven’t already enabled it, you’ll need to do so before using Researcher.

To use it, select References > Researcher in the Ribbon. The Researcher pane appears on the right side of the screen. Type your search term into the text box, and you’ll see a list of results that are focused more on academic sources than on general web results, as with the Search feature described above.

At the top of the screen you’ll find topics related to your search. For example, when I searched for “gravity waves” it found “Gravity wave,” “Gravitational Wave,” and “Speed of Gravity.” Click any topic and you’ll get more in-depth information about it, including results from Wikipedia and from other academic and general-interest sources.

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Underneath those topics you’ll find individual results from academic journals and websites. The results are sorted into All, Journals, and Websites tabs. Click the appropriate tab to see the results filtered. Click any link to open a summary of the article or website, then click the Open in browser button to go to the full article or site in your browser.

You can add a citation directly from an academic journal or website from the Researcher pane into your document. Click the + sign to the right of the item, and Researcher adds the citation at the current location of your cursor, along with a bibliographical entry at the bottom of the document. You can edit the citation in your document by clicking on it, then clicking the small down arrow that appears to its right.

To read the journal or website, click it and from the page that appears, click in Open in reading view. (Longer sources may not offer this option, in which case you’ll need to open it in a browser.) The article then appears directly in the Researcher pane. You can copy and paste text from it into Word, but not using Word’s ordinary copy and paste tools. Instead, select the text you want to add, and from the menu that appears, select Add. If you want to include a citation, select Add and Cite.

Get instant translations with Translator

Another useful addition is the Translator pane, useful for those who need to work in multiple languages. To translate words or phrases, select them, right-click your selection, and choose Translate from the menu that appears.

The Translator pane appears. The top of the pane shows your selection, and the bottom shows the translation. The top pane attempts to identify the original language, which it does with uncanny accuracy. If it misidentifies the language, though, simply select the right one. After that, in the bottom of the pane select the language you want to translate to.

The translation appears. To insert it somewhere into the document, move your cursor to the spot where you want it to appear, and click the Insert button at the bottom of the pane. You can also copy and paste any part of the translation into the document or another document.

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Translator can also translate an entire document. To do it, go to the Review tab on the Ribbon, and in the Language section, click Translate > Translate Document. The Translator pane appears. You can let it auto-detect the original language or click the From drop-down to set it. Then click the To drop-down to set the language you want to translate the document to and click the Translate button. Word opens the translated document in a new window.

Keep in mind that Translator is part of Microsoft’s Intelligent Services, the artificial intelligence behind other Office features including Search and Researcher. You’ll need to enable it before using any of these features.

Translator is also available in Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint; see our story on translation in Office for details.

Add new types of charts

Since 2015, Microsoft has added several new types of charts you can add to documents, spreadsheets, and presentations: Treemap, Sunburst, Waterfall, Histogram, Pareto, Box & Whisker, Funnel, and Map charts. Each provides a unique way to display data visually. See our Excel for Office 365 cheat sheet for details about the new chart types, including what each one looks like and what type of data it’s best suited for.

To insert any of the new chart types (or any other chart) in a document, select Insert > Chart and then choose the type of chart to insert. When you do that, the chart appears in your document with placeholder data, and a pop-up window appears that looks like a mini Excel spreadsheet. Enter or edit the data, or else click the Edit in Excel button to open it up in Excel and edit it there.

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Note that the Pareto chart does not show up when you select Insert > Chart. To insert one, select Insert > Chart, select Histogram, and at the top of the screen that appears, select the option to the right, Pareto.

Use AutoSave as a safety net while you work

If you’re worried that you’ll lose your work on a document if you don’t constantly save it, you’ll welcome the AutoSave feature. It automatically saves your files for you, so you won’t have to worry about system crashes, power outages, Word crashes, and similar problems. It only works only on .docx documents stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online. It won’t work with files saved in Word’s older .doc format or files saved to your hard drive.

AutoSave is a vast improvement over the previous the AutoRecover feature built into Word. AutoRecover doesn’t save your files in real time; instead, every several minutes it saves an AutoRecover file that you can try to recover after a crash. It doesn’t always work, though — for example, if you don’t properly open Word after the crash, or if the crash doesn’t meet Microsoft’s definition of a crash. In addition, Microsoft notes, “AutoRecover is only effective for unplanned disruptions, such as a power outage or a crash. AutoRecover files are not designed to be saved when a logoff is scheduled or an orderly shutdown occurs.” And the files aren’t saved in real time, so you’ll likely lose several minutes of work even if all goes as planned.

AutoSave is turned on by default in Word for Microsoft 365 .docx files stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online. To turn it off (or back on again) for a document, use the AutoSave button on the top left of the screen. If you want AutoSave to be off for all files by default, select File > Options > Save and uncheck the box marked AutoSave files stored in the Cloud by default on Word.

Using AutoSave may require some rethinking of your workflow. Many people are used to creating new documents based on existing ones by opening the existing file, making changes to it, and then using Save As to save the new version under a different name, leaving the original file intact. Be warned that doing this with AutoSave enabled will save your changes in the original file. Instead, Microsoft suggests opening the original file and immediately selecting File > Save a Copy (which replaces Save As when AutoSave is enabled) to create a new version.

If AutoSave does save unwanted changes to a file, you can always use the Version History feature described below to roll back to an earlier version.

Review or restore earlier versions of a document

There’s an extremely useful feature hiding in the title bar in Word for Microsoft 365: You can use Version History to go back to previous versions of a file, review them, compare them side-by-side with your existing version, and copy and paste from an older file to your existing one. You can also restore an entire old version.

To do it, click the file name at the top of the screen in an open file. A drop-down menu appears. Click Version History, and the Version History pane appears on the right side of the screen with a list of the previous versions of the file, including the time and date they were saved. (Alternatively, you can select the File tab on the Ribbon, then click the Version History button.)

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In the Version History pane, click Open version under any older version, and that version appears as a read-only version in a new window. Scroll through the version and copy any content you want, then paste it into the latest version of the file. To compare the two versions, click Compare on the old version, and you’ll see them side-by-side, and also see edits made to the older version. To restore the old version, overwriting the current one, click the Restore button at the top of the editing window.

Version History works best when used in conjunction with AutoSave. You can use it without AutoSave, but it’s not as useful because you don’t get as many saved versions to go back to.

Other new features worth checking out

Several other features may prove useful for some business users:

Focus mode

If you’re the kind of person who needs help focusing on the work at hand, you’ll be pleased with Word’s Focus mode. When you put Word into Focus mode, the Ribbon and all toolbars are hidden, and all parts of you screen that aren’t Word turn black. So you’ll find no distractions at all.

To put Word into Focus mode, choose View > Focus (the Focus button is in the Immersive group near the left end of the Ribbon) or press Alt-W, then O. To get out of Focus mode, press the Esc key. When you’re in Focus mode, if you want the Ribbon to appear (with white text and icons against a black background), move your cursor to the top of the screen. Press Esc or start typing in Word to make the Ribbon go away.

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Create a Sway web page from a document

If you’re one of the few people who uses Microsoft’s Sway app, which lets you easily create simple, web-based presentations, you’ll want to try out a feature that lets you create a Sway page from a Word document.

To do it, select File > Transform. The Transform to Web Page pane appears. Select a style in the pane, then click the Transform button. A web page is created on the web and opened in the Sway app in your browser. To share it with others, select the Share button on the Sway page and follow the instructions.

Write better with the Editor

Those who want to make sure their writing is concise and grammatically correct should turn to the Editor, a beefed-up version of grammar- and spell-checking. Select Home > Editor, and the Editor pane appears with an easy-to-scan summary of a document’s readability, along with tools to improve it. At the top you’ll see your overall score, with 100% being the best.

It then shows you the number of sentence-by-sentence improvements you can make in various writing categories, including corrections in spelling in grammar and refinements for clarity, concision, and so on. Click any category, and Editor will bring you to each issue that can be improved, and offer recommendations.

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Get to favorite folders quickly

You likely have a handful of folders where you frequently save and frequently open files. And you likely get annoyed every time you have to browse through your disk to get there. Pinned folders solve the problem.

When saving or opening a file, in the Save or Open dialog, hover your mouse over any folder that you want to pin, and then click the pin icon. From now on, that folder will stay at the top of the Save or Open dialogs, so you can get to them quickly.

Note that Save and Open don’t share pinned folders — you pin them separately.

Use keyboard shortcuts

Using keyboard shortcuts is one of the best ways to accomplish tasks quickly in Word. You can even use them to navigate the Ribbon. For instance, Alt-H takes you to the Home tab, and Alt-G takes you to the Design tab.

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But there are many other keyboard shortcuts to help you accomplish a vast array of tasks in Word. See our story “Handy Word keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Mac” for the ones we find the most useful.

Also don’t forget to download our Word for Microsoft 365 Ribbon quick reference!

This article was originally published in October 2019 and updated in July 2022.

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