Top 10 Cool Alternative Uses of Microsoft Word That You Don't Know About

10. Font Tester

If you happen to be a professional font designer who is about to submit a typeface to a major corporation, then you might want to thoroughly check it's functionality. Type some lorem ipsum and make sure that you have covered all of the symbols you want to cover ("Insert... Symbol") gives you a long list of different ones.

9. Abstract Art Drawing Tool

Hey, you've seen that Autoshape feature in Microsoft Word. Sure, it doesn't have the most shapes in the world and does not produce the highest quality artwork but putting a few shapes and colours together could make something quite good.

8. Photo Editor

Again, Microsoft Word does not offer the best tools for this but for amateur photographers who don't want to waste $80.00 on an Adobe Photoshop that won't be of any use to them can alter brightness, colour type, contrast, transparency and other aspects of images right in Word with the picture toolbar.

7. Account Log

You can't remember every username and password and security question for every account you register for online. Just make a log of them here with these and possibly other things. Plus, you can use the Permissions feature to restrict others' access to this document.

6. Back-up

If you're the type that publishes a lot of stuff online, you're also the type that should be worried about losing content when a site crashes or is taken down. Thus, you can copy and paste all of your writing or possibly codes into a Word document for safekeeping.

5. Research Tool

If you just need a quick definition, synonym or a few succinct facts and you already have Microsoft Word open, then you might choose this software to give you these. You can access the Encarta dictionary, thesaurus and translation service as well as Live Search, Highbeam Research and MSN Money Stock Quotes from Word.

4. Agenda

If you just want a simple sheet of paper to remind you what to do instead of using a Blackberry, you could log all of your tasks in Microsoft Word, then print them out for your reference. You can easily detail time, location, importance and other things with the tools present.

3. Journal/Diary

Instead of reserving an amount of time every day to manually write in your diary, just casually make a few entries while doing something else on the computer. It's quicker and easier and can be just as private with the permissions feature. You may even want to employ the speech recognition program that comes with Word so you can say what's on your mind.

2. Thought Organizer/Notebook

You don't have to buy an expensive mind map software just for this purpose. Simply put your ideas and thoughts down with bulleting or numbering. To act as the different branches in mind maps, you could have different symbols as bullets at different indentations.

1. Blog

Now, you don't have to wait for your browser to load every time you want to make a blog post on Blogger. You can install
"Blogger for Word", a free Microsoft Word add-in and you'll be able to publish to your blog, save drafts and edit posts from Word. The great part about this is that you can apply all the things that can be done in Word to every blog post to really enhance your blog.