I updated to Office 2019 during the pandemic but didn’t use Word much during that time. Now I’m setting it up the way I like.

Show Non-Printable Characters

I find it useful to display the whitespace/line breaks etc. This was easy to turn back on.

Word > Preferences > View and then check “All” for “Show Non-Printing Characters”

Adding Styles Quickly

I need to quickly choose styles. In the previous version of Word I had this was a pull down in the top right of the ribbon. In Office 2019, it is Home > Styles Pane. Then my entire right pane is the list of styles. Include the current style as a derived style on top (ex: paragraph + italic)

This pane also has checkboxes for “show style guides” and “show direct formatting guides.” The former puts numbers/colors on the left side that matches the style. The later, highlights text with special styles (like italics).

This approach takes up more real estate than older Word. (where I could just see the text name of the style). I imagine I’ll get used to this quickly and the colors will start to mean something to me. Right now, it feels a bit like a map with the legend “elsewhere”.

Navigation

I chose View > Navigation Pane and chose “Document Map” so I can quickly navigate to different parts of my document.