I don't know about you, but the first time I had to work with MS Word professionally, I hated it. As I began to work with it more, I liked it even less.

One day a colleague took of her valuable time to spend the better part of a day sitting with me and giving me tips about how to work with Word. I learned about styles, templates, and field codes. From there I began to play. The next thing you know, I was the expert where I worked.

So if you are struggling with Word, whether as a beginner, an average home user, or as a technical writer faced with handling complex documentation, this site is the one you need to bookmark.

For those of you really struggle, I am providing some resources to help you better understand Word and how it works. If you need help to open the links below, or to download them to your computer, click "How to Download Files" to the left of this text.

1. Getting Started with Word: The opening screen and orientation to menus : This presentation may seem a bit basic, but few people actually take the time to look at all that is there. A small investment of 10 minutes or so, can open help you see that the basics of MS Word are not that difficult.
2. Pagination in Word: Section Breaks - Page Breaks -What's the Difference? : This document provides text and visual explanations for understanding the differences betwen section breaks and page breaks in MS Word.
3. Templates for Engineers (How They Really CAN Help You) : I've worked with many engineers who simply want to type and get their document written. But the amount of time wasted doing things wrong is huge. If you are an engineer, find out why a small investment to learn to work with MS Word will save a lot of time for you in the long run.

Oh, and if you find something here that helps you... maybe you weren't as MS Word Challenged as you thought!