If Word fights you every time you open a document longer than three pages — the styles that won’t behave, the table of contents that refuses to update, the mail merge that exploded an hour before the deadline — this is the day that gets the tool out of your way.
Who delivers this: Christopher Ross · Microsoft Word trainer for working professionals · classroom and virtual training delivery since 2007 (broader training practice since 2004) · MA Candidate, Learning and Technology, Royal Roads University
Word 101 is the practical day for the people who write the documents an organization actually runs on — reports, contracts, policies, letters, certificates. By the end of it you will be writing with Styles instead of manually re-formatting every heading, you will have built a document with a table of contents that updates itself, and you will leave with a small set of habits that will save the next person who opens the file from undoing your work.
Who this is for
- Fit. Administrative staff, operations coordinators, communications leads, and executive assistants who live in Word weekly and want documents that look the way they should the first time.
- Fit. Teams who share documents with each other or with clients and keep losing track of which version is the current one, or whose tracked changes someone forgot to accept before sending.
- Not fit. Anyone hoping to be taught keyboard shortcuts as the point of the day. Shortcuts come up where they earn their place; they are not the curriculum.
- Not fit. Designers building branded document templates for an organization — that is template-design work, not Word training. Reach out and we can scope it separately.
Prerequisites: a working Microsoft Word license (Microsoft 365 desktop, Word for the web, or the Word app for Windows or Mac), and one real document you have written or inherited that has been giving you trouble. That is the bar.
What you’ll be able to do after
- Write a document using Styles, so a heading is a heading because of what it is, not because you bolded it and bumped the font size by hand.
- Build a table of contents that updates itself when you add a section, instead of being rebuilt by hand every revision.
- Set up page architecture — margins, sections, headers and footers, page numbering, page breaks — that prints predictably and survives someone else opening the file.
- Use Track Changes and Comments through a real review cycle without losing the document, and accept or reject changes confidently before you send the final.
- Build a basic mail merge for letters, certificates, or labels, with the data source kept clean enough to run again next quarter.
- Save a template the team can reuse, with the Styles and the page setup already baked in, so the next document starts right instead of starting over.
What your manager will see different on Monday
- Reports come in with a working table of contents that updates itself, not one rebuilt by hand at the last minute.
- Tracked changes get accepted or rejected before the document leaves the building, so clients stop receiving drafts with three weeks of internal comments still in them.
- Documents print the way they look on screen, including headers, page numbers that restart where they should, and section breaks that hold.
- Mail merge runs cleanly the first time, instead of being the thing that explodes the morning a hundred letters need to go out.
- The team starts opening a template instead of starting from a copy of the last document and editing out the parts that don’t apply.
Curriculum, in four themed blocks
- Why Word fights you, and how Styles fix it. What a Style actually is, and why hand-formatting every heading is the single habit that breaks every other thing Word can do for you. Modifying built-in Styles instead of making new ones. Why the Styles pane is the screen you will use most often in Word once you understand it. The two-minute fix for a document that someone else hand-formatted from top to bottom.
- Document architecture. Headings, sections, page setup, margins, page numbering that restarts where you need it to, headers and footers that change between sections. Building a table of contents that updates from your Styles. Page breaks versus section breaks — the difference that decides whether your document prints the way it looks. Printing predictably, including on someone else’s printer.
- Working with other people. Track Changes through a real review cycle — making changes, reviewing changes, accepting or rejecting cleanly, and finishing with a document that does not still have someone’s comment from three weeks ago in it. Comments versus changes. Compare and Merge for the version someone forgot to track. Protecting a document so the recipient can fill in the form fields without rewriting the contract around them.
- Templates and mail merge. Saving a template the team can open without breaking your Styles. Mail merge end to end — a clean data source, a working merge document, a preview pass before you commit, and a finished run you can repeat next time the deadline arrives. The small set of habits that keep mail merge from being the thing that explodes the morning a hundred letters need to go out.
Real examples we’ll work through
- A 30-page report with a working table of contents, restarted page numbering after the front matter, and headers that change between sections.
- A multi-page contract with formatted clauses, numbered paragraphs that survive an insertion, and the right kind of breaks between sections.
- A mail-merged certificate run from a clean data source — preview, fix the one record that is wrong, then commit the run.
- A team template with Styles, page setup, and a header already baked in, so the next document the team opens starts the way it should.
Where this fits in the Microsoft Word track
Shaped for: Administrative staff, communications coordinators, executive assistants, and operations leads who write professionally in Word and want the document surface to stop being a fight.
The full training catalogue shows how the Microsoft Office courses sit alongside the WordPress training track.
Delivered as part of these service engagements
This course is included in the training scope of the following build and ongoing engagements — either at full public-cohort scope, or as a compressed version tuned to the documents your team actually produces. The audit-and-build credit policy on the service pages covers the training surface too: training hours already delivered as part of a build credit forward against any larger engagement that follows.
- Owner-Run Unlimited Growth ($17,000+) — full session for the operator-owner and the small team around you, scoped to the documents you actually send out.
- Team-Run Team Site ($7,500) — delivered to the editorial and administrative team alongside the WordPress training.
- Scaled Team Site / WordPress Website Development ($24,000+) — delivered to the communications and editorial team, tuned to the document workflows that feed the site.
- Newspaper Local Leader ($8,000) — tuned for newsroom administrative work: contracts, freelancer agreements, internal style guides.
- Newspaper Regional News ($20,000+) — delivered to the editorial and administrative team alongside the publishing workflow.
- Learning Senior Solution ($15,000+) — tuned for programme documents, learner letters, certificate runs, and reusable team templates.
- Learning Post-Secondary ($30,000+) — delivered to faculty and administrative staff, scoped to the documents the institution sends.
- Maintenance Active ($1,800/mo) — available as an add-on at relationship start when the team also produces documents alongside the website.
- Maintenance Concierge ($4,000/mo) — included in the half-day relationship-start workshop when document workflows are part of the operating surface.
- WordPress Migration ($1,375+) — compressed session for the admin team when the migration also covers the document workflows feeding the new site.
Looking to book the public cohort or a private team session directly, separate from a build engagement? The pricing and booking surface below covers that path.
Format, duration, and pricing
Word 101 runs as a single full-day class, six hours, in person across the Niagara region or online over Microsoft Teams. The two half-days across a week format works well for administrative teams who cannot block a full day at once; the half-day compressed format is a working introduction rather than a complete curriculum.
| Format | Investment (CAD) |
|---|---|
| Half-day (3 hours, focused) | $1,495 |
| Full-day (6 hours, comprehensive) | $2,495 |
| Two half-days (split across one week) | $2,795 |
| In-person delivery within Niagara / GTA: add $500/day. Teams larger than 12, custom curriculum, or multi-cohort rollouts — let’s scope it. | |
Currently booking through Q3 2026. One public cohort per quarter; private team engagements scheduled separately.
Product names referenced on this page — including Word, Microsoft, WordPress, and Teams — are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. Training offered here is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of these companies.
