By now, you’re pretty well a Word guru. You’ve probably mastered tasks like inserting graphics, creating tables, drawing diagrams, inserting spreadsheets, and enhancing long documents with indexes, tables of contents, subdocuments, and references. So now what?

Well now that you’re familiar with how to do everything in Word, it’s time to learn how to customize Word’s interface and behavior through the Options dialog box. Depending on what you use Microsoft Office Word 2003 for, you may never use any of these options. More likely, you’ll find a few ways to make life with Word a whole lot easier.

All of these options are accessed by clicking the Tools menu and clicking Options. The Options dialog has 11 different tabs. Some, like Track Changes and User Information, we’ve covered already. Others, like View and Security, we’ve looked at a bit. There are still others we haven’t covered at all. We’re going to cover all eleven tabs in this section to give you a good overview of what you can customize in Word and what you can’t, so don’t panic if you missed some of the earlier sections.

All of the options that you set in these dialog boxes will apply to all new documents based on normal.dot (the global template), although there are some options that you can set for specific templates. None of the tabs have a Reset to Default option, so it’s best to go slow when changing options. Make sure you remember what you’ve changed so that if it goes awry you can easily change it back; the Undo command doesn’t work for these options. Also note that the order that the tabs appear in changes depending on which one you selected, and which one you selected the last time the box was open.