The best Word online courses provide a simple way to learn and develop your skills with Microsoft Word.
These days Microsoft Word is most easily available through a subscription to Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) and remains an essential business tool. Still, when it comes to many of its commonly used components, like Excel and Word, many of us are self-taught. By not learning them under the guidance of an expert, we miss out on many of the nested productivity tools in these software.
Just like Excel, Microsoft Word too encapsulates a lot of hidden potential behind its deceptively simple looking interface. Once you master Word’s advanced tools you can make your documents look more elegant and professional, using options that aren’t immediately apparent from a casual perusal of its menus.
In this guide, we’ll roundup some of the best Microsoft Word courses that you can use to enhance your word processing skills, regardless as to whether you're a complete beginner or an advanced user.
We've also featured the best online learning platforms.
The best Word online courses of 2024 in full:
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Best Word course for new users
If you are an absolute green horn to word processing, then let Microsoft handhold you through the basics. The makers of the software have a nice free 'Introductory training to Word', which is as good a starting point as any. The training is made of short video demonstrations and screencasts, which are followed by several textual step-by-step tutorials that are nicely illustrated to help you get working knowledge with the word processor.
The good thing about the training is that since its covers the absolute basics, most of its lessons are applicable to various versions of the software, going from the Microsoft 365 to Word 2019, and Word 2016. Some lessons are applicable to even older versions such as Word 2013, Word 2010 and even Word 2007.
While most of the lessons are divided on specific tasks, such as formatting text and laying out pages, there’s also a special section titled “Use Word for school“ that covers several Word techniques that’ll be of help in an educational setting.
Best Word course for busy people
Kaceli Technology Simplified offers a lot of video tutorials on Microsoft Office and its various components. However, its "Learn Word in 30 minutes" course is available for free on YouTube and does a nice job of familiarizing you with the software’s most notable functions.
The lecture is based on Word 2016 though you can follow through much of it on other versions of the word processor. As the name suggests, the video has a runtime of 30 minutes and covers everything from basic formatting features to inserting tables to creating a mail merge to using Macros. To ease navigation, the video description has 22 timestamp bookmarks for all of the different topics covered in the lecture.
If you have more time, you can view another free course by Sali Kaceli on YouTube that’s a lot more comprehensive. The 'Word 2016 Tutorial: A Comprehensive Guide to Word for Anyone - 32 Modules' not only spends more time on the topics but also covers a lot more ground.
Best Word course for VBA Programming
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is the internal programming language that’s used by the various applications in the Microsoft Office suite. Users can use VBA to extract more functionality from the apps than what is normally available within its menus. The "Microsoft Word VBA Macro Programming - Introduction" course will equip you with the skills you need to write and edit Macros to automate the tasks of Microsoft Word.
You’ll learn how to record macros at the start of the course, before stepping into the Visual Basic Editor to write your own macros. There’s no dearth of VBA course on the Internet, but most of them focus on Microsoft Excel, which wouldn’t be of much use on Microsoft Word.
VBA uses some of the same concepts as programming languages like variables and the good thing about the course is that it is designed for someone who hasn’t done any programming. Of course, if you have programmed before, you’ll be able to get through the 13 hour course a lot faster. However, the instructor insists that you have a fairly good knowledge of Word in order to get the maximum benefit from this course.
The course costs around $70.
Find out more in our full Udemy review.
Best Word course for advanced users
Once you have a fair amount of mileage working with Word, you can enhance your skills by taking the "Word 2016: Advanced Tips and Tricks" course. The course runs a little over 1.5 hours and has a handful of little time saving tricks that’ll help you learn to use the commonly used word processing features more efficiently.
The course begins by helping you customize some of the application’s default settings but can be chiefly divided into two broad sections; one deals with adding and formatting text while the other covers the commonly used tools. The text formatting sections covers topics like automatic text replacement and maintaining proper formatting when copy-pasting text.
Similarly, there are useful lessons in the tools section to help you set a custom spell-check dictionary, and password protect a document. In the final lesson, the instructor explains the various options for compressing images available in Word and the difference between them.
Read our full LinkedIn Learning review.
Best Word course for self-publishing
Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is one of the more popular platforms for authors who want to self-publish. After you’ve penned your best-seller, you can take the "Amazon Self-publishing 2: Kindle eBook Formatting Using Microsoft Word" course to prepare your manuscript for publishing on the platform.
The course is the second part of the instructor’s series of courses on self-publishing on Amazon, and teaches you how to format your document for the KDP self-publishing platform. The instructor uses Microsoft Word 2016 and in the 26 minute course covers all the essential Word tools and functions that you must use in order to format your document for publishing.
What makes the course valuable is that the instructor speaks from experience and tells you how each setting will influence your published manuscript. While the course is designed specifically for KDP, the tips and tricks will more or less work across all publishing platforms.
Read our full SkillShare review.
We've featured the best alternatives to Microsoft Word here.
Best Word online course FAQs
Which Word online course is best for you?
When deciding which of the best Word online courses to use, first consider what level of competency you are currently at. If you've not learned Word before then it would probably be recommended to start with a beginner course, as this will break you into the basics you'll need before you cover more advanced features. However, if you already have a decent amount of experience with Word and word processing programs in general then feel free to try your hand with the more advanced courses.
How we tested the best Word online course
To test for the best Word online courses we searched for a range of popular online learning platforms and took recommendations from people we know who are either learning Word or who are already very familiar with it. Then we followed the tutorials on each platform to get an idea of how easy they were to follow, how easy it was to learn essential tools and processes, and additionally what sort of user level the courses were aimed at, such as beginner, medium, or advanced-level users.
Read how we test, rate, and review products on TechRadar.
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