Microsoft Word Trivia
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98 free Microsoft Word trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Microsoft Word has been the default way to put words on a page for more than thirty years, yet most people use a fraction of it. It began in 1983 as a mouse-driven oddity on DOS, survived a bruising fight with WordPerfect, and now lives inside a subscription beside an AI helper. This quiz covers the whole story: the people who built it, the file types behind .doc and .docx, the keyboard shortcuts that save real time, reviewing tools, templates and bulk letters, plus a dedicated run of questions on Word 2013 and what that release changed. It suits office workers, students, IT trainers and anyone revising for a Word 2013 skills test. Every answer comes with an explanation and a source, so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1999 virus hid in a Word attachment called list.doc and mailed itself to the first 50 Outlook contacts?
Melissa
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.
Q 02Which Lucas de Groot typeface became Word's default font with Office 2007, ending the reign of Times New Roman?
Calibri
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.
Q 03Which Word shortcut inserts a page break, sparing you from hammering the Return key to reach the next page?
Ctrl+Enter
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.
Q 04Word's Show/Hide button displays a backwards-P mark after every paragraph; what is that ¶ symbol properly called?
Pilcrow
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.
Q 05Which CP/M-era word processor, Word's earliest big rival, has George R. R. Martin famously stuck with for his novels?
WordStar
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.
Q 06Word underlines a possible grammar slip in which colour today, after years of marking them in green?
Blue
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.
Q 07A Word .docx file is really a package of XML parts in which archive format, so renaming its extension unpacks it?
ZIP
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.
Q 08Which AI assistant, unveiled by Microsoft in March 2023, drafts and rewrites text inside Word from a typed prompt?
Copilot
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.
Q 09Which comedian voiced Clippy in Microsoft's 2001 campaign that showed the Word paperclip losing his job?
Gilbert Gottfried
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.
Q 10Word 6.0 of 1993, which synchronised version numbers across platforms, was the last Word released for which system?
MS-DOS
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.
Q 11WordPerfect, Word's great rival, began in 1979 as code for the city of Orem's minicomputer at which school?
Brigham Young University
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.
Q 12Which WordPerfect feature opens a second pane exposing every hidden formatting tag for editing?
Reveal Codes
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.
Q 13Which Xerox PARC editor of 1974, the first WYSIWYG program, was the direct ancestor of Microsoft Word?
Bravo
Q 21Which Xerox PARC veteran, hired to start Word, later flew twice to the space station?
Charles Simonyi
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.
Q 22Word 2013 integrated which Microsoft cloud service, which a trademark ruling forced to change its name in 2014?
SkyDrive
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.
Q 23Which Track Changes display in Word shows only a red line in the margin where edits sit, hiding the inline clutter?
Simple Markup
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.
Q 14Which programmer wrote Word's first version in under seven months, later penning the memetics book Virus of the Mind?
Richard Brodie
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.
Q 15Word reached which 16-bit home computer in the late 1980s as Microsoft Write, a port of the Mac version 1.05?
Atari ST
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.
Q 16Which Steve Matteson typeface, first called Bierstadt, beat four rivals from a 2021 trial to become Word's default font?
Aptos
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.
Q 17Which file extension marks a modern Word document that is allowed to carry macros, unlike a plain .docx?
.docm
.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.
Q 18Every blank Word document inherits its styles from which template file, loaded each time Word starts?
Normal.dotm
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.
Q 19Which view, new in Word 2013, lays pages out as a horizontal sequence you flip through like a tablet book?
Read Mode
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.
Q 20Word 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.
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.
Q 24Which Review-tab option lets a Word author set a password so reviewers cannot stop their edits being recorded?
Lock Tracking
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.
Q 25Which placeholders show Word where each recipient's name goes when it batch-personalises a form letter?
Merge fields
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.
Q 26Which Word shortcut cycles selected text between upper case, lower case and title case with each press?
Shift+F3
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.
Q 27Ctrl+K in Word opens a dialog to insert which element?
A hyperlink
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.
Q 28Ctrl+E in Word applies which paragraph alignment?
Center
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.
Q 29Which Word shortcut inserts a footnote, one key away from the combination that inserts an endnote?
Ctrl+Alt+F
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.
Q 30Which Word shortcut switches the current paragraph to double line spacing, the format teachers demand on essays?
Ctrl+2
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.