Being an American software package, Word defaults to American “English”. To switch this to British English: 

Left click on Tools at the top of the screen.

This generates a drop-down menu.

Scroll down and left click on Language.

This generates a pop-up dialogue box.

		Highlight in the Mark Selected Text As box, by left clicking, the option English (UK).
		If necessary, scroll up and down the Mark Selected Text As box with the scroll bar until the language you want appears in the box.
		Left click Default.

Another dialogue box pops up asking you if you wish change the Default language.

Left click Yes

The package will reset to default the English spelling.

As you type, Word underlines misspellings with a wavy red line. You can, of course, just ignore these and correct mistakes with the Spell Check at the end of the document. Alternatively:

		Place the cursor at the beginning, immediately after or within the underlined word.
		Right click the mouse.

A drop-down menu will appear.

		Move the mouse arrow until the correctly spelt word within this menu is highlighted.
		Left click on your selection.

The incorrectly spelt word will be automatically corrected within your document, the wavy red line will disappear and you can continue typing.

If you are too fast on the mouse, you could end up overwriting a previous, important, saved document with the same name.

If you wish to change the name that Word has selected for you:

over-type the new name while the automatically selected name is highlighted in blue.

If the highlight has disappeared you will see a blinking cursor at the end of the automatically selected word:

		back delete the automatically selected word; then
		type in your preferred file title.

When you want to make textual comments within a manuscript but want others to be able to tell which are your comments and which are in the original text, Word allows you to do so in colour.

		Left click Format at the top of the screen
		This generates a drop-down Menu.
		Scroll down and select to highlight Font.
		Left click on Font and a dialogue box appears.
		Left click on the little arrow to the right of the filed called “Color”.

A drop-down of colour options appears.

Scroll down to highlight the colour you want -- for example, red -- and click OK.

The text you type from then on will appear in your selected colour.

To revert to black text, repeat the above, highlight black then left click OK.

And the text will revert to black.

You can colour blocks of text by highlighting your selection then going through the steps above.

Most publications give commissioned authors a word length for articles. In the past, authors used various tricks to count the number of words they had written. Now, with Word, you can do it in a trice.

		Select Tools at the top of the screen.
		Scroll down to highlight Word count and left click.

A dialogue box pops up giving you the number of:

		pages;
		words;
		characters;
		paragraphs; and
		lines

in your article or document.

But bear in mind that the word could include punctuation marks and special symbols.