Tip #10 – Status Bar

This is a very short video to bring your attention and awareness to one of the important areas of the Microsoft Word interface – the status bar.

There’s enough clutter in the Word interface, but regardless of what happens ‘up top’ the status bar always lets us know what’s going on in our currently selected—active—document.

This is useful because, regardless of whatever stage of the document life-cycle we’re at, it’s important that we know what’s going on in our documents. For example:

• the language in use (when you create Word templates for clients with offices in multiple countries, it’s important the correct language is used.
• the word count (for article, academic, SEO, or other types of writing)
• the document section (especially when editing and even fault finding)
• the character count (for when you’re trimming the title into a slug for SEO purposes)
• the page number and page count (for navigation/orientation purposes)
• quickly record macros
• for page viewing, focus, and zooming in and out, etc.

The status bar is a handy tool that’s always there and is worth familiarising yourself with it.

Next Steps

My Free Introduction to Microsoft Word course is here.