The Microsoft Word in Academic Communications
In academic communications, you engage in large volume creation, editing, and printing of documents. Microsoft Word is a contemporary powerful word processor that helps you to create, edit and print documents.
It is the most ubiquitous word-processing application on the market; it‘s intuitive even for the most technologically illiterate computer users and is backed by the powerful Microsoft Office suite (Dashevsky & Cohen, 2019).
It has become a tool of What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) which shows you exactly what would print on your final document. It is a full-featured document processor with advanced features that include (Beal, 2019).
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Grammar checking: Identifies sentences, paragraphs, and punctuation that does not appear to meet commonly recognized rules of grammar.
Footnotes and cross-references: Automates the numbering and placement of footnotes and enables you to easily cross-reference other sections of the document.
Automated lists: Automatically creates bulleted or numbered lists, including multi-level outlines.
Graphics: Allows you to embed illustrations, graphs, and possibly even videos into a document.
Headers, footers, and page numbering: This allows you to specify customized headers and footers that the word processor will put at the top and bottom of every page.
The word processor automatically keeps track of page numbers so that the correct number appears on each page.
Layout: Allows you to specify different margins within a single document and to specify various methods for indenting paragraphs.
Macros: Enables users to define and run macros, a character or word that represents a series of keystrokes.
The keystrokes can represent text or commands. The ability to define macros allows you to save yourself a lot of time by replacing common combinations of keystrokes.
Merge: This allows you to merge text from one file into another file. This is particularly useful for generating many files that have the same format but different data. Generating mailing labels is a classic example of using merges.
Tables of contents and indexes: This allows you to automatically create a table of contents and index based on special codes that you insert in the document.
Thesaurus: Allows you to search for synonyms without leaving the word processor.
Collaboration: Allows users to track changes to the document when more than one person is editing. Some cloud-based word processors also allow multiple users to edit the same document at the same time.
Internet features: Allows users to embed Web links into their documents and format their documents for the Web. Some also link to Web services that can help users create their documents.
Translation and speech: As artificial intelligence capabilities become more commonplace, some word processors have gained the ability to read text aloud, accept voice commands, and translate text from one language to another.
Microsoft Word is a go-to tool for producing important documents. It is dependable, customizable, and has lots of baked-in functionality that makes preparing academic communications easier.
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