Certificate in Microsoft Word

It starts by setting Word up for UK work and fixing the habits behind most formatting trouble: spacing, tabs, lists and breaks. Then styles, the skill that changes everything, followed by tables and data from Excel, pictures and page design, and long documents with sections, numbered clauses and an automatic contents page. After that come captions, cross-references and citations, templates and forms, mail merge, reviewing with tracked changes, and publishing accessible PDFs. It ends with a complete document set built from a brief.

Short, illustrated and hands-on, with no video. Each of the 75 lessons starts with a real problem from office work, shows it in a drawing of Word, then has you do it: tasks in a practice copy of Word inside the lesson, questions where you pick the right spot on Word's screens, and the same page done two or three ways to choose between. The 12 modules each end with a checkpoint, and the OBA Tutor is there in every lesson.

If you taught yourself, probably. Styles, section breaks and templates are easy to go years without, and those three alone change how fast you work and how good the result looks. The course also shows you how to rescue a messy document somebody else made.

Yes, end to end: connecting an Excel list, personalising the letter, and merging to letters, labels, envelopes, a print-ready PDF and email, with UK addresses, dates and pounds set out properly. It also covers when an email merge counts as marketing under PECR.

Yes, for the whole course. Word is paid, through a Microsoft 365 plan with the desktop apps or a one-off licence. Microsoft's free Word for the web covers the early modules, comments and co-authoring, but not mail merge, forms or several of the layout tools. Copilot is optional, and nothing you're assessed on needs it. If you'd rather work in free tools, our Google Docs, Sheets & Slides course is built on them.

Word if you produce long, formal or numbered documents, use templates and forms, or run mail merges: it goes much further there. Google Docs if your documents are shorter and live in a shared Google Drive. Our Google Docs, Sheets & Slides course covers Docs.

No. Every module has practice files to download and open in Word: a quote letter with the spacing problems module 1 fixes, a staff handbook for the long-document module, a customer list for the mail merge, and more. Each one is the before, with the problems the lessons fix. Rebuilding a real document from work alongside them helps the skills stick; take out anyone's personal details first.

Either will do. The lessons draw and describe Word for Windows, and they say where the Mac differs whenever Microsoft documents it; where it doesn't, they tell you the steps are for Windows. Sending an email merge is the one place it matters most: on Windows, Word sends it through classic Outlook, and on a Mac it needs a default email program set up first.

Yes. Pass the final assessment and you get the Certificate in Microsoft Word, an OBA certificate of completion that an employer can verify online. It isn't a Microsoft certification, and it doesn't prepare you for the Microsoft Office Specialist exams. The documents you build along the way are the other half of the proof.

Download the free info pack first. It walks you through every module, what you'll build and what you need before you start, so you can enrol knowing exactly what you're getting. If you'd like to talk it through, get in touch and we'll help you choose.