If you're using Word 2002 only as a word processor, you're missing out on its powerful tools. Use these seven tips to save time, perform tasks, and power up your Word documents. Word 2002 offers more tools and toys for writers, including faster formatting, quick word counts, and language translators. These seven tips take advantage of the improvements.

Turn off Single Document Interface
Word 2002 puts Single Document Interface (SDI, Word 2000's new window for each new document) on permanent holiday and lets us, not Microsoft, choose how Word displays windows. To force Word to put all documents in one parent window, go to Tools > Options, click the View tab, and clear the check mark in the Windows In Taskbar box. Click OK.

Now that Office XP includes the Task Pane, a sidebar-style panel that displays a variety of editing tools, it's a cinch to finesse text formatting. To bring up the Task Pane and display formatting choices, go to View > Task Pane, click the down arrow at the right, and pick Styles And Formatting from the drop-down menu. The ensuing pane lists all available formatting, including formatting in use in the document, all styles you've created, and some standard heading styles.

Select the text that you want to alter and click the appropriate format in the Task Pane. This one-step process saves you time, since you don't have to open the Format > Font or Format > Paragraph dialogs or wander up to the Formatting toolbar to apply changes to selected text.

Bring up the Task Pane with a keystroke
Too bad you have to use the mouse to bring up the new Task Pane. Or do you? We've saved ourselves tons of mousing by assigning a keystroke command to the Task Pane. Here's how:

• In Word, choose Tools > Customize, then click the Commands tab.

• Click the Keyboard button near the bottom of the dialog.

• Select Edit in the Categories list on the left and scroll through the Commands list on the right to find and select View Task Pane.

• Enter your shortcut key combination in the "Select new shortcut key" field. We used Ctrl+K (that was originally assigned to Insert Hyperlink, which we seldom use), but you may want a different combination. Click the Assign button.

Press Ctrl+K (or whatever combination you've assigned to the Task Pane) to make it appear. A second Ctrl+K makes it disappear.

Word 2002 gives you three new ways to choose separate sections of text simultaneously--handy for fast formatting and document-wide changes.

Control key: Excel has always allowed you to select noncontiguous cells with the Ctrl key, but now Word lets you choose nonadjacent text as well. To use this function, select a word, a sentence, or a paragraph, then, while holding down the Ctrl key, select another word, sentence, or paragraph. Word highlights both.

Task Pane: Need to make documentwide changes to a particular format? Open the Task Pane (if it's not already visible) with View > Task Pane, click the arrow at the top right of the pane, then select Styles And Formatting from the drop-down menu. Select any format you see in this list by hovering the mouse pointer over it, then click the arrow that appears beside the format and choose Select All Instance(s). Word then highlights all text with that format; you can now reformat or delete all such text with a single command.

Find: To use the Find command to count how many times you've used a particular word or to find out where your most common phrases appear in your documents, open the Find dialog by pressing Ctrl+F, then type the word or words you want to locate. Check the "Highlight all items found in:" box, then press Enter or click the Find All button. Word tells you how many instances of that word or words are in the document and also highlights all instances of the word or phrase for easy spotting.

Word's new Word Count toolbar speeds up the counting of words, characters, lines, pages, and paragraphs. If you commonly write to word count--students cranking out reports and papers, take heed--you'll love this feature.

To display the toolbar, select View > Toolbars > Word Count. To check a document's total word count, just click the small arrow at the right of the toolbar's blank field and choose Words from the menu. (You can also count by characters, lines, pages, and paragraphs.) The field displays the word count. You can count the words or other aspects of a selection using the Word Count toolbar; select the desired text and click the Recount button in the toolbar.

An even faster way to recalculate word count: Hit Alt+C, the shortcut key combination for the Recount button. Press Ctrl+C, and the new word count appears in the toolbar.

Save paper when printing
There's no such thing as a paperless office, but Word 2002's new Zoom feature keeps you from wasting more paper than you have to by printing multiple pages on a single sheet.

With a Word document on the screen, choose File > Print, then mouse over to the bottom right corner of the dialog to the Zoom section. Select the desired number in the Pages Per Sheet field, leave "Scale to paper size" at the default No Scaling, then click OK.

At two pages per sheet, a document using 12-point type is readable, and you've just cut your paper consumption in half. At four pages per sheet, readability falls off fast. Anything higher is useful only for looking at the general layout of the document, such as section or page breaks, heads, and table or image placement.

Although Word does sport a new language translator, it's useful only for translating single words. Don't expect this tool to turn your ragged English into fluent French with a single click.

To run the translator, select text in a Word 2002 document, then choose Tools > Language > Translate to bring up the Translate Task Pane. Make sure Current Selection is selected, pick the dictionary (Office XP includes English to French, English to Spanish, French to English, and Spanish to English dictionaries), and click the Go button. One or more translations appear in the Results box.