98 Fun Facts About Microsoft Word

Which 1999 virus hid in a Word attachment called list.doc and mailed itself to the first 50 Outlook contacts?

Melissa was a Word macro virus that the FBI called the fastest-spreading infection of its day, with an $80 million cleanup bill. On certain minutes it typed a Simpsons Scrabble line into the open document.

Which Lucas de Groot typeface became Word's default font with Office 2007, ending the reign of Times New Roman?

Calibri belongs to the ClearType collection of fonts built for reading on screen, and de Groot described its subtly rounded design as having a warm and soft character.

Which Word shortcut inserts a page break, sparing you from hammering the Return key to reach the next page?

Ctrl+Enter forces a page break, so whatever follows starts a fresh page even if the text above later grows or shrinks; Shift+Enter gives only a line break and Ctrl+Shift+Enter a column break.

Word's Show/Hide button displays a backwards-P mark after every paragraph; what is that ¶ symbol properly called?

Pilcrow marks began as a scribe's C for capitulum, Latin for chapter, and the name is thought to be a much-mangled form of the word paragraph. The sign is also sixth in the old asterisk-dagger footnote sequence.

Which CP/M-era word processor, Word's earliest big rival, has George R. R. Martin famously stuck with for his novels?

WordStar 4.0 was still Martin's writing tool decades after the program reached shops in 1979, and its Ctrl-key cursor diamond, kept from the CP/M original, drew old users across to the PC.

Word underlines a possible grammar slip in which colour today, after years of marking them in green?

Blue squiggles took over from the green ones older releases drew; both descend from the red spelling squiggle, added so Word could check quietly as you typed instead of making you wait through a separate pass.

A Word .docx file is really a package of XML parts in which archive format, so renaming its extension unpacks it?

Office Open XML, the standard behind .docx, is a ZIP bundle of XML files rather than a single binary blob. That is why a corrupt .docx can sometimes be rescued with an ordinary unzip tool.

Which AI assistant, unveiled by Microsoft in March 2023, drafts and rewrites text inside Word from a typed prompt?

Copilot was announced on March 16, 2023 as a work-focused cousin of Bing Chat, and it grounds its drafts in your own files and messages, which it reaches through the Microsoft Graph.

Which comedian voiced Clippy in Microsoft's 2001 campaign that showed the Word paperclip losing his job?

Gilbert Gottfried gave Clippy his squawk in web cartoons and a launch-event stunt where a costumed paperclip begged for his job and was dragged off by a giant magnet. The joke was that the new Office switched him off by default.

Word 6.0 of 1993, which synchronised version numbers across platforms, was the last Word released for which system?

MS-DOS got its final Word that year, while the Windows edition leapt straight from 2.0 to 6.0, skipping three numbers so that every platform's Word carried the same one.

WordPerfect, Word's great rival, began in 1979 as code for the city of Orem's minicomputer at which school?

Brigham Young University professor Alan Ashton and graduate student Bruce Bastian wrote it for a Data General machine owned by Orem, Utah, then kept the rights and sold it themselves.

Which WordPerfect feature opens a second pane exposing every hidden formatting tag for editing?

Reveal Codes shows each formatting instruction as a token in the text, so a stray bold or indent can be found and deleted directly; it has been in WordPerfect since its earliest versions.

Which Xerox PARC editor of 1974, the first WYSIWYG program, was the direct ancestor of Microsoft Word?

Bravo drew multi-font text on the Xerox Alto's bitmap display. Its successor BravoX was rewritten in a language called Butte, because a butte is a small Mesa.

Which programmer wrote Word's first version in under seven months, later penning the memetics book Virus of the Mind?

Richard Brodie also wrote Microsoft's first C compiler and the original Notepad before becoming Bill Gates's technical assistant in 1983. After leaving Microsoft he became a motivational speaker and a poker player.

Word reached which 16-bit home computer in the late 1980s as Microsoft Write, a port of the Mac version 1.05?

The Atari ST port came from a 1986 agreement between Atari and Microsoft and was never updated afterwards. In the same era Word also ran on OS/2, SCO Unix and the AT&T UNIX PC.

Which Steve Matteson typeface, first called Bierstadt, beat four rivals from a 2021 trial to become Word's default font?

Aptos took its new name from a town on the California coast once Microsoft picked it; the working title had honoured Mount Bierstadt in the Colorado Rockies.

Which file extension marks a modern Word document that is allowed to carry macros, unlike a plain .docx?

.docm is the macro-enabled twin of .docx, while .dotx and .dotm are the template equivalents and .wbk was the old backup extension. Word keeps the distinction so a plain document can never run embedded code.

Every blank Word document inherits its styles from which template file, loaded each time Word starts?

Normal.dotm holds the default styles and customisations that determine the basic look of a document, which is why one stray font change can haunt every later file. Microsoft's own guide walks through editing it directly.

Which view, new in Word 2013, lays pages out as a horizontal sequence you flip through like a tablet book?

Read Mode hides the ribbon and reflows the text so you browse a document as a horizontal sequence of pages, reachable with Alt+W then F. Word 2003's reading layout view was its ancestor.

Word 2013 added the ability to open and edit which rival document format, converting a copy into an editable file?

PDF support in Office 2013 covers full read, write and edit of the ISO 32000 standard, though Word warns that lines and pages may break in different places after conversion. The original file is left untouched.

Which Xerox PARC veteran, hired to start Word, later flew twice to the space station?

Charles Simonyi paid his own way to orbit as a space tourist in 2007 and then bought a second trip, the first tourist ever to fly twice, long after leading Microsoft's first applications group.

Word 2013 integrated which Microsoft cloud service, which a trademark ruling forced to change its name in 2014?

SkyDrive infringed the trademark of British broadcaster Sky, a High Court judge ruled in 2013; Microsoft first said it would appeal, then settled, and the service became OneDrive in February 2014.

Which Track Changes display in Word shows only a red line in the margin where edits sit, hiding the inline clutter?

Simple Markup keeps the page clean, while All Markup colours each reviewer's insertions and deletions inline and in balloons. Ctrl+Shift+E toggles the recording of changes on and off.

Which Review-tab option lets a Word author set a password so reviewers cannot stop their edits being recorded?

Lock Tracking sits in the Track Changes menu, and once a password is set every edit keeps being recorded until someone types it in again.

Which placeholders show Word where each recipient's name goes when it batch-personalises a form letter?

Merge fields link a main document to a list, spreadsheet or database, and Word then generates one personalised copy per row. Labels, envelopes and bulk email run on the same machinery.

Which Word shortcut cycles selected text between upper case, lower case and title case with each press?

Shift+F3 rotates the case, so a shouting ALL-CAPS title can be tamed without retyping it. Ctrl+Shift+K, by contrast, applies small caps formatting.

Ctrl+K in Word opens a dialog to insert which element?

A hyperlink goes in with Ctrl+K; the letter H was not free, because Ctrl+H opens Find and Replace, while Ctrl+G opens Go To.

Ctrl+E in Word applies which paragraph alignment?

Center takes Ctrl+E, since Ctrl+C belongs to Copy, while the other three keep their initials: Ctrl+L for left, Ctrl+R for right and Ctrl+J for justify.

Which Word shortcut inserts a footnote, one key away from the combination that inserts an endnote?

Ctrl+Alt+F places a footnote, Ctrl+Alt+D handles the endnote and Alt+Shift+X marks an index entry. Word renumbers all of them automatically as more are added.

Which Word shortcut switches the current paragraph to double line spacing, the format teachers demand on essays?

Ctrl+2 follows a simple code in which the digit names the spacing: Ctrl+1 is single, Ctrl+2 double and Ctrl+5 one and a half; Ctrl+Shift+D, by contrast, is double underline.

Which function key repeats Word's last command or action, such as re-applying the same formatting to a new selection?

F4 repeats the last action if possible, while Shift+F4 repeats only the last Find or Go To. F8 instead grows a selection step by step through sentence, paragraph and section.

Ctrl+Alt+1 applies which built-in Word style, while Ctrl+Shift+N drops a paragraph back to the plain default?

Heading 1 sits on Ctrl+Alt+1 and Heading 3 on Ctrl+Alt+3, while Ctrl+Shift+S opens the Apply Styles pane for everything else. Styled headings are what the Navigation pane and automatic tables of contents read.

Which Word shortcut inserts a nonbreaking space, keeping a title and surname together at the end of a line?

Ctrl+Shift+Spacebar glues two words together so that Word moves both to the next line instead of splitting them; plain Ctrl+Spacebar instead strips manual character formatting from a selection.

Ctrl+F3 in Word cuts the selection into which named holding area, which Ctrl+Shift+F3 later pastes out in one go?

The Spike collects every Ctrl+F3 cut in sequence, so scattered passages can be gathered from across a document and dropped together in one place; pasting them out empties it.

Which look-but-don't-touch mode, announced by a yellow bar, greets any file Word opens from the internet or an email?

Protected View disables most editing until you click through the yellow Message Bar, because downloaded files can carry viruses, worms or other malware. Office 2010 introduced it as an isolated sandbox.

Clicking the File tab in Word 2010 and later opens which full-page screen for saving, printing and sharing?

Backstage view consolidated document management into one place, replacing the round Office button of the 2007 release. Its left-hand pane lists recent documents beside Info, Save and Print tabs.

What is Microsoft's official name for the ribbon-and-tabs interface that replaced Word's menus in Office 2007?

Fluent User Interface is the formal name, and its tabbed ribbon swept away the customisable menu bars that Office 2003 had been the last to offer. A 2018 jury later found a rival had copied its patented design.

A 2018 jury found which WordPerfect owner had infringed Microsoft's ribbon design and utility patents?

Corel was found by a Northern District of California jury on 13 February 2018 to have infringed the ribbon patents. It had owned WordPerfect since buying it at a knock-down price in early 1996.

Which Seattle children's-book illustrator, author of Bunnies!!!, designed Word's animated paperclip assistant Clippy?

Kevan Atteberry drew the character whose whole concept Alan Cooper blamed on a tragic misunderstanding of Stanford research into people treating computers as social actors. Windows 11 revived it as the paperclip emoji in 2021.

On April 21, 2020, the consumer subscription that bundles Word and Excel was rebranded under which name?

Microsoft 365 was chosen to signal that the subscription now bundled cloud tools and artificial-intelligence features beyond the core Office apps. An enterprise bundle of Windows and security services had carried the name first.

WordPerfect's famous speed came from being written entirely in which language until version 5.1?

Assembly code for the x86 gave WordPerfect direct screen access and a big performance edge, because no C compiler existed for the IBM PC when work began. C arrived only with 5.1, when ports to non-IBM machines forced the change.

Which 1992 Mac release did Microsoft bring back on sale at users' request after replacing it with a Windows port?

Word 5.1 came back because its successor was a direct port of the Windows program, with an interface that differed sharply from the Mac original; later Mac versions were no longer straight ports.

Which game did Word 97 hide as an Easter egg, a companion to Excel 97's secret flight simulator?

Pinball sat hidden behind a set sequence of typing and clicks; Microsoft later banned such extras, on the reasoning that customers must be able to trust that nothing undocumented ships.

Word 3.0 for Mac in 1987 shipped the first implementation of which cross-application interchange standard?

Rich Text Format became the default of WordPad and TextEdit, but Microsoft froze the spec at version 1.9.1 in 2008, so newer Word features do not survive it. Word 3.0 was so buggy that a free 3.01 was mailed to every registered user.

Free demo disks of Word were bundled with the November 1983 issue of which magazine, a first for any software?

PC World's giveaway made Word the first program distributed on-disk with a magazine, the same year Microsoft showed it running on Windows. Unusually for its day, the newcomer was designed to be driven by a mouse.

Which dummy text, a scrambled Cicero passage popularised by Letraset sheets, will Word generate to fill a mock-up?

Lorem ipsum opens with a truncation of dolorem ipsum, meaning pain itself, and Pages and many LaTeX packages generate it too. Its nonsense Latin stops reviewers reading the copy instead of judging the layout.

Typing =rand() and pressing Enter in Word versions up to 2003 filled the page with repeats of which pangram?

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog was Word's filler sentence until Office 2007 moved it to =rand.old(). Typists and font designers love it because it uses every letter of the alphabet.

Which free add-on let earlier Word versions open the .docx files that the 2007 release introduced as its default?

Office Compatibility Pack let older releases open, edit and save the new XML formats, while the 2007 suite itself could still save in the old .doc format for them. Microsoft kept the download free.

Word for DOS stood out in 1983 for being built around which accessory, new from Microsoft that year?

A mouse was so central to early Word that adverts pictured the Microsoft Mouse beside it. One reviewer grumbled that he did not want to take his hands off the keyboard while writing.

Which symbol font in Word caused a 1992 scare when typing NYC gave a skull, a star and a thumbs-up?

Wingdings turns the letters NYC into a skull and crossbones, a Star of David and a thumbs-up, which Microsoft insisted was a random accident. The later Webdings answered with an eye, a heart and a skyline.

Which Home-tab tool in Word copies the look of one passage onto another?

Format Painter applies just once per click, but a double-click locks it on, so the same formatting can be brushed over any number of selections until Esc is pressed.

Shift+F7 in Word opens which reference tool, whose name comes from the Greek word for a treasure?

Thesaurus comes from the Greek thesauros, a treasure or storehouse, and Roget's title of 1852 fixed its modern sense. Word also lists synonyms when a word is right-clicked.

The first Microsoft Office for Windows in 1990 bundled Word and Excel with which third program?

PowerPoint completed the 1990 bundle, an idea Microsoft had first tried a year earlier as a limited-time promotion for Apple users. Access did not join until the Professional edition of 1993.

Microsoft made Word 5.5 for DOS free rather than patch it against which looming software flaw?

The Y2K bug led Microsoft to release the whole of Word 5.5 for DOS free instead of charging for a fix. The download was still on the company's website a quarter of a century later.

Which Design-tab feature in Word prints faint text such as DRAFT or CONFIDENTIAL behind the page?

Watermark offers ready-made stamps such as DRAFT and Confidential, or takes a custom picture such as a company logo, with a Washout setting that fades it.

Word's Orientation menu, found on the Layout tab, offers Portrait and which wider page option?

Landscape can be applied to selected text alone, so one wide table need not turn a whole report on its side.

Which keyboard shortcut in Word undoes the last action, such as a paragraph deleted by mistake?

Ctrl+Z undoes the previous action and its partner Ctrl+Y redoes it. Word keeps the last 100 undoable steps by default, so a change can be reversed even after the file has been saved.

Which Word feature, new in 1993 alongside AutoFormat, silently fixes common typing slips?

AutoCorrect keeps one replacement list shared by every Office program, so an entry added in Word also applies in Excel. Users can add any word they often misspell.

Which programmer, hired in 1981 to build Word, later flew to the space station twice as a paying tourist?

Charles Simonyi paid his own way to the International Space Station in 2007 and again in 2009. He also devised Hungarian notation, the naming convention for variables used widely inside Microsoft.

Which typeface, renamed after a town in California, became Word's default font in 2023?

Aptos began life as Bierstadt, named after a Colorado mountain, and was one of five designs Microsoft introduced in 2021 before it won the default slot. Steve Matteson drew it.

Which serif typeface, bundled with Windows since version 3.1, was Word's default font until 2007?

Times New Roman was commissioned by The Times of London in 1931 and drawn by Stanley Morison with Victor Lardent, a lettering artist in the paper's advertising department.

Which action inside a paragraph of Word text selects the whole paragraph, a habit that carries over to Outlook?

Triple-click grabs the entire paragraph in Word, and the same action in the left margin selects the whole document. Most plain text boxes take only the line.

Which function key opens Word's Save As dialog, and simply saves the document when pressed with Shift?

F12 alone opens Save As, Shift+F12 saves and Ctrl+F12 brings up the Open dialog, so the last key in the function row handles most of Word's filing chores.

Which Word shortcut deletes the entire word to the left of the cursor, sparing repeated taps of one key?

Ctrl+Backspace clears one word to the left, and Ctrl with the arrow keys moves the cursor a word at a time in the same way, so a clumsy phrase can be fixed from the keyboard.

Which Word shortcut jumps straight to the top of a document, the opposite of its partner that uses the End key?

Ctrl+Home returns the cursor to the start of the document, and adding Shift selects everything from where the cursor was back to that point.

Which Word paragraph format, applied with Ctrl+T, leaves the first line at the margin and pushes the rest in?

Hanging indent is also known as a second line indent, and Word tucks it away in the Paragraph dialog under Special. Ctrl+Shift+T takes it off again.

Pressing Tab in the last cell of a Word table, where there is nowhere left to move, adds what?

A new row appears at the bottom of the table, ready for typing. Anywhere else in a table, Tab just moves to the next cell and selects its content, with Shift+Tab going back.

Which Word ribbon tab holds the tools for envelopes, labels and one letter sent to a whole address list?

Mailings gathers the tools for envelopes, labels and personalised bulk letters. The names usually come from an Excel sheet or Outlook contacts, though a list can be typed up in Word itself.

Which Word divider lets one chapter have its own columns and page borders, separate from the rest of the file?

Section break comes in four kinds, and the Continuous one starts a new section on the same page, the usual way to change the number of columns without moving to a fresh sheet.

Which Review-tab command in Word produces a legal blackline, marking every change between two drafts?

Compare leaves both originals untouched and shows the differences in a third, new document. Its neighbour Combine is the one for gathering several reviewers' edits into one file.

What does Word call the curly quotation marks it swaps in for the straight ones typed on a keyboard?

Smart quotes, also known as typographer's quotes, are switched on and off under AutoFormat As You Type. Word even knows to open a quotation after an em dash rather than close one.

Which Word paste option strips fonts, pictures and tables so copied words match the paragraph they land in?

Keep Text Only throws away all formatting and any pictures, and turns a pasted table into plain paragraphs. Ctrl+Shift+V does the same job straight from the keyboard.

Which Design-tab feature in Word restyles a whole document with one coordinated set of colours and fonts?

Themes can be shared across Word, Excel and other Office programs, so a company's reports and spreadsheets keep one look. Styles, by contrast, format chosen passages rather than the whole file.

Double-clicking the blank strip at the very top of a Word page opens which area for editing?

The header opens for editing on a double-click, and pressing Esc closes it again. A Different First Page setting keeps it off a title sheet.

Which Word tool, run before sharing a file, finds and strips hidden data and personal details from it?

Document Inspector sits under File, Info, Check for Issues, and Microsoft advises running it on a copy, because what it removes cannot always be restored.

Which Word ribbon tab stays hidden until it is switched on in Options, then offers tools for writing macros?

Developer is left off the ribbon by default, and once ticked under Customize Ribbon it stays visible. It also holds the XML commands and ActiveX controls.

Which Word typing mode, once toggled by the Insert key, makes each new letter replace the one to its right?

Overtype answers to the Insert key only when that link is ticked under Advanced options in Word, a guard against existing text vanishing as a user types.

Word sizes its fonts in which printer's unit, defined in desktop publishing as 1/72 of an inch?

Points run twelve to a pica, and six picas make an inch. Word's bracket shortcuts, Ctrl+] and Ctrl+[, nudge a font up or down by one point at a time.

Which panel, new in Word 2010, replaced the Document Map and lets headings be dragged to reorder a file?

Navigation pane took over from both the Document Map and the old Find dialog in Word 2010, which is why Ctrl+F opens it and search hits are highlighted across the page.

Word 2010's File tab replaced which round, logo-stamped control from the top-left corner of Word 2007?

Office Button was placed in the corner in line with Fitts's law on easy-to-hit targets, but many users saw it as branding decoration rather than a control, so a File tab took its place.

Which Insert-tab command, new in Word 2010, drops a picture of any open window straight into a document?

Screenshot shows every open window as a thumbnail to pick from, and a second option dims the display so that any rectangle of it can be dragged out and dropped in.

Which Word 2010 picture tool paints unwanted areas magenta so a photo's subject can be cut out?

Remove Background grew out of Microsoft Research technology: it guesses which part of the picture to keep, then lets the user mark extra areas to hold on to or discard.

Office 2010's free Starter edition, with a cut-down Word funded by adverts, replaced which budget home suite?

Works had been Microsoft's low-cost suite since 1987. Its replacement held only cut-down copies of Word and Excel, and was itself dropped in June 2012.

Word 97 hid which playable game as an Easter egg, while Excel 97 concealed a flight simulator?

Pinball lurked inside Word 97, part of a run of hidden extras that also gave Access a Magic 8 Ball. A secret credits screen in the same program went unnoticed for 29 years.

Since Word 97, macros have been written in a dialect of which programming language, opened with Alt+F11?

Visual Basic for Applications replaced the older WordBasic in Word 97, and the same language drives macros across the rest of Office.

Which Word feature turns a title into a decorative graphic that can be skewed, stretched, shadowed or made 3D?

WordArt is picked from a gallery on the Insert tab, where the letter A models each design. Unlike a picture, its lettering can still be spell-checked.

Which Word safety net brings back unsaved work after a crash or power cut by quietly keeping spare copies?

AutoRecover saves its copies at an interval set under File, Options, Save, and Word opens them automatically after an unexpected shutdown.

Word made its 1983 debut on which operating system, Microsoft's own licensed version of Unix?

Xenix was sold by Microsoft from 1980, built on Unix licensed from AT&T, at a time when the company expected Unix to be its operating system of the future.

Which 1995 virus was the first widely known to spread through macros hidden in Word documents?

Concept served as a proof of concept for a new way of spreading, though it was not the first macro virus ever written. Since 2022 Office has blocked macros in files from the internet by default.

Which readability test, developed for the US Navy in 1975, can Word run to grade a document by school year?

Flesch-Kincaid turns sentence and word length into a US school grade, so a score of 8.0 means an eighth grader can follow the text. Microsoft suggests aiming for about 7.0 to 8.0.

Word equations can be typed as plain text in either UnicodeMath or which typesetting syntax, added in Word 2019?

LaTeX arrived in the same release that taught Word to handle SVG graphics and built-in translation, giving academics a second way to type maths beside UnicodeMath.

Office 2007's second major update taught Word to open and save which rival suite's native file format?

OpenDocument support came only after Microsoft had said in 2005 that its customers showed too little demand for it, a stance that prompted an online petition.

Which formula does Word suggest for totalling a table column, styled like a spreadsheet function plus a direction?

=SUM(ABOVE) adds the numbers in the column over the cell it sits in, but the total does not refresh itself: after a figure changes, the sum must be selected and F9 pressed.

In 2014 the source code of Word for Windows 1.1a was released to the public through which institution?

The Computer History Museum offered the code for educational purposes, so anyone can study how one of the first Windows editions of Word was put together.

Word 97's Office Assistant grew out of the cartoon helpers in which short-lived 1995 home interface?

Microsoft Bob flopped within a year, but its helpers inspired the Office Assistant and its dog Rover became the Windows XP search companion. Its marketing manager was Melinda Gates.

Which word processor, bought by Lotus in 1990, was a strong Windows rival to Word and WordPerfect?

Ami Pro, created by a firm called Samna, held 18 per cent of the Windows market in 1991. Several of its innovations were later adopted by other word processors.

Word reached Apple's desktop machine in 1985 as a more capable alternative to which bundled word processor?

MacWrite came free with the first Macintoshes, yet Word found its buyers: for at least four years after launch the Mac edition outsold Word for DOS.

Which Word shortcut selects all of a document's content at once, an entry on Microsoft's most-used list?

Ctrl+A selects all document content in one go. Microsoft lists it among Word's most frequently used shortcuts, beside the ones for copying and pasting.