What are running headers? Think of the top of a phone book, dictionary or encyclopedia (the types printed on paper). The headers show what content is on the page, like “Smith – Smythe”. This is often used in legal documents and catalogs, and is anything but straightforward to do.

Download this zip file for a PDF of detailed instructions and a sample document with the completed exercise.

In older versions of Word, you had to fight with it a little bit. You also had to decide which of five methods (if I’m counting right) you wanted to use to create one. In Word 2010, you can do it in two clicks.

First, understand that Word creates TOC entries from built-in headings (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.). It was that way in previous versions too, but now it’s more automatic. Headings you have tagged as Heading 1 style will become major entries in the table, headings you have tagged as the Heading 2 style will become second-level entries and so forth.

Then go to the References tab on the Ribbon bar, click the Table of Contents drop-down button and choose a TOC style that you want.

And that’s it! The table will be inserted where your text cursor is. So you might want to insert a page break (Ctrl + Enter) at the top of your document before inserting the table.

The mail merge feature in Word 2010 is much improved — this feature undergoes a big change in every version — and is easier to use than before. But it undoes an earlier fix: if your data source is an Excel file that contains formatted numbers and dates, these data will lose their formatting when they get placed into your document. For example, $10,000 will become 10000 and April 22, 2011 will become 4/22/11.

You can still edit the field codes in Word to manually insert formatting instructions (press Alt + F9 to toggle codes on and off and Ctrl + F9 to insert brackets), but it doesn’t always work properly and the codes can be inscrutable. I’ve found that the best solution is to use the Mail Merge Wizard (rather than simply choosing the data source manually) and connect to the Excel data using DDE.

Rather than go through all the steps here, download my PDF that has detailed instructions and screen shots. You can print it, if you want.

Microsoft SharePoint and Office 2010 work and play together very well. In fact, it could be hard to tell that your files are on a secure web server, rather than on your own hard drive. Here is a quick tutorial showing several ways of saving, opening and moving files around using Office and SharePoint 2010.