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50 free Microsoft Word trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Microsoft Word has been the default way to put words on a page for more than thirty years, yet most people use a fraction of it. It began in 1983 as a mouse-driven oddity on DOS, survived a bruising fight with WordPerfect, and now lives inside a subscription beside an AI helper. This quiz covers the whole story: the people who built it, the file types behind .doc and .docx, the keyboard shortcuts that save real time, reviewing tools, templates and bulk letters, plus a dedicated run of questions on Word 2013 and what that release changed. It suits office workers, students, IT trainers and anyone revising for a Word 2013 skills test. Every answer comes with an explanation and a source, so you learn something even when you miss.
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Q 01Which 1999 virus hid in a Word attachment called list.doc and mailed itself to the first 50 Outlook contacts?
Melissa
Melissa was a Word macro virus that the FBI called the fastest-spreading infection of its day, with an $80 million cleanup bill. On certain minutes it typed a Simpsons Scrabble line into the open document.
Q 02Which Lucas de Groot typeface became Word's default font in Office 2007, a post it held for seventeen years?
Calibri
Calibri ousted Times New Roman as Word's default and was only replaced in 2024. Word 2013 also made its Light weight the standard face for headings.
Q 03Which Word shortcut inserts a page break, sparing you from hammering the Return key to reach the next page?
Ctrl+Enter
Ctrl+Enter forces a page break, while Shift+Enter inserts a line break and Ctrl+Shift+Enter a column break. Microsoft lists all three on the same shortcut table.
Q 04Word's Show/Hide button displays a backwards-P mark after every paragraph; what is that ¶ symbol properly called?
Pilcrow
The pilcrow began as a scribal abbreviation for capitulum, Latin for chapter, and the name is a mangled form of the word paragraph. It is also the sixth symbol in the old asterisk-dagger footnote sequence.
Q 05Which CP/M-era word processor, Word's earliest big rival, does George R. R. Martin still use for his novels?
WordStar
WordStar 4.0 for MS-DOS remains Martin's writing tool, decades after the program went on sale in 1979 for $495 plus $40 for the manual. Its Ctrl-key cursor diamond still has devoted fans.
Q 06Word underlines a possible grammar slip in which colour today, after years of marking them in green?
Blue
Blue squiggles now flag grammar in Word, while spelling keeps its red squiggle; older Word releases drew grammar in green. Pressing F7 opens the full Editor pane for the same checks.
Q 07A Word .docx file is really a package of XML parts in which archive format, so renaming its extension unpacks it?
ZIP
Office Open XML, the standard behind .docx, is a ZIP bundle of XML files rather than a single binary blob. That is why a corrupt .docx can sometimes be rescued with an ordinary unzip tool.
Q 08Which AI assistant, unveiled by Microsoft in March 2023, drafts and rewrites text inside Word from a typed prompt?
Copilot
Copilot for Microsoft 365 was announced on March 16, 2023 as a work version of Bing Chat, and it can turn a Word draft into a PowerPoint deck. It draws on your files through the Microsoft Graph API to ground its answers.
Q 09Which comedian voiced Clippy in Microsoft's 2001 campaign that showed the Word paperclip losing his job?
Gilbert Gottfried
Gilbert Gottfried gave Clippy his squawk in web cartoons and a launch-event stunt where a costumed paperclip begged for his job and was dragged off by a giant magnet. The joke was that the new Office switched him off by default.
Q 10Word for Windows leapt from version 2.0 straight to which number in 1993, to match the DOS, Mac and WordPerfect lines?
6.0
Version 6.0 skipped 3, 4 and 5 entirely so the Windows edition would line up with its siblings, after Windows 3.0 had already made Word the PC market leader. It was also the last version of Word ever released for DOS.
Q 11WordPerfect, Word's great rival, began in 1979 as code for the city of Orem's minicomputer at which school?
Brigham Young University
Brigham Young University professor Alan Ashton and graduate student Bruce Bastian wrote it for a Data General machine owned by Orem, Utah, then kept the rights and sold it themselves. Their firm became WordPerfect Corporation in 1985.
Q 12Which WordPerfect feature, exposing hidden formatting tags for editing, do loyal users say Word never properly matched?
Reveal Codes
Reveal Codes has been in WordPerfect since its earliest versions, opening a second editing screen where every formatting code can be deleted or moved. Law firms and government offices stayed loyal to WordPerfect largely because of it.
Q 13Which company bought WordPerfect for $1.4 billion in 1994, then sued Microsoft in 2004 blaming Word for its collapse?
Q 21Word 2013 added the ability to open and edit which rival document format, converting a copy into an editable file?
PDF support in Office 2013 covers full read, write and edit of the ISO 32000 standard, though Word warns that lines and pages may break in different places after conversion. The original file is left untouched.
Q 22Office 2013, which carried Word 2013, reached general availability in which month of that year?
January
January 29, 2013 was the on-sale date, three and a half months after the suite was released to manufacturing on October 11, 2012. It required Windows 7 or later and was the last Office to run on Windows 7 RTM.
Q 23Word 2013 integrated which Microsoft cloud service, which a trademark ruling forced to rename itself OneDrive in 2014?
SkyDrive
Novell
Novell sold WordPerfect on at a big loss after less than two years, and its antitrust suit was dismissed in 2012 with the Tenth Circuit affirming. The complaint said Microsoft tied Word to Windows sales and pulled API support.
Q 14Which Xerox PARC editor of 1974, the first WYSIWYG program, was the direct ancestor of Microsoft Word?
Bravo
Bravo drew multi-font text on the Xerox Alto's bitmap display and became operational on September 14, 1974. Its successor BravoX was rewritten in a language called Butte, because a butte is a small Mesa.
Q 15Which programmer wrote Word's first version in under seven months, later penning the memetics book Virus of the Mind?
Richard Brodie
Richard Brodie also wrote Microsoft's first C compiler and the original Notepad before becoming Bill Gates's technical assistant in 1983. After leaving Microsoft he became a motivational speaker and a poker player.
Q 16Word reached which 16-bit home computer in the late 1980s as Microsoft Write, a port of the Mac version 1.05?
Atari ST
The Atari ST port came from a 1986 agreement between Atari and Microsoft and was never updated afterwards. In the same era Word also ran on OS/2, SCO Unix and the AT&T UNIX PC.
Q 17Office Open XML, the standard behind Word's .docx, was fast-tracked in 2008 into which ISO number after a bitter ballot?
ISO/IEC 29500
ISO/IEC 29500 was published in November 2008 after a fast-track vote so embittered that one national standards body imploded over it. Ecma had already issued the same text as ECMA-376 in 2006.
Q 18Which file extension marks a modern Word document that is allowed to carry macros, unlike a plain .docx?
.docm
.docm is the macro-enabled twin of .docx, while .dotx and .dotm are the template equivalents and .wbk was the old backup extension. Word keeps the distinction so a plain document can never run embedded code.
Q 19Every blank Word document inherits its styles from which template file, loaded each time Word starts?
Normal.dotm
Normal.dotm holds the default styles and customisations that determine the basic look of a document, which is why one stray font change can haunt every later file. Microsoft's own guide walks through editing it directly.
Q 20Which view, new in Word 2013, lays pages out as a horizontal sequence you flip through like a tablet book?
Read Mode
Read Mode hides the ribbon and reflows the text so you browse a document as a horizontal sequence of pages, reachable with Alt+W then F. Word 2003's reading layout view was its ancestor.
SkyDrive lost its name after Sky UK won a High Court ruling in June 2013, and the OneDrive switch landed on most platforms on February 19, 2014. Office 2013 also hooked into Skype and Yammer.
Q 24Which Track Changes display in Word shows only a red line in the margin where edits sit, hiding the inline clutter?
Simple Markup
Simple Markup keeps the page clean, while All Markup colours each reviewer's insertions and deletions inline and in balloons. Ctrl+Shift+E toggles the recording of changes on and off.
Q 25Which Review-tab option lets a Word author set a password so reviewers cannot switch Track Changes off?
Lock Tracking
Lock Tracking sits under Review > Track Changes, so every edit stays recorded until someone enters the password again. Editors handing drafts back to authors lean on it heavily.
Q 26Which placeholders show Word where each recipient's name goes when it batch-personalises a form letter?
Merge fields
Merge fields link a main document to a data source such as a list, spreadsheet or database, and Word then generates one personalised copy per row. Labels, envelopes and bulk email run on the same machinery.
Q 27Which Word shortcut cycles selected text between upper case, lower case and title case with each press?
Shift+F3
Shift+F3 rotates the case, so a shouting ALL-CAPS title can be tamed without retyping it. Ctrl+Shift+K, by contrast, applies small caps formatting.
Q 28Ctrl+K in Word opens a dialog to insert which element, since Ctrl+H was already taken by Find and Replace?
A hyperlink
A hyperlink goes in with Ctrl+K, while Ctrl+Alt+M drops in a comment and Ctrl+Alt+D an endnote. Ctrl+G, not Ctrl+H, summons the Go To dialog.
Q 29Ctrl+E in Word applies which paragraph alignment, with the obvious first letter already reserved for copying?
Center
Center alignment lives on Ctrl+E because Ctrl+C copies; Ctrl+J justifies, Ctrl+L aligns left and Ctrl+R aligns right. That makes E the one alignment key you simply have to memorise.
Q 30Which Word shortcut inserts a footnote, one key away from the combination that inserts an endnote?
Ctrl+Alt+F
Ctrl+Alt+F places a footnote, Ctrl+Alt+D handles the endnote and Alt+Shift+X marks an index entry. Word renumbers all of them automatically as more are added.