Welcome to the Basic Word class from Williamsburg Regional Library. This course will get you started with Microsoft’s word processing software program, Word, particularlyversion 2010. It’s a versatile program for creating and editing documents of all kinds, even working with pictures and charts. Let’s get started!
OBJECTIVE 1: Learn to open Microsoft Word.
You’ll discover in this class that there are often several different ways to do the same thing on your computer, depending on how you prefer to use it. To open Microsoft Word, you can:
1)Click the Microsoft Word icon on your desktop or the taskbar at the bottom of your screen.
2)Click the Start button in the lower left corner of your screen. Roll over or click on Programsor All Programs then find the Microsoft Office option. Click or roll over that, and finally click Microsoft Office Word.
When you have Word open it looks something like this (in Microsoft Word 2010), although the buttons in the Ribbon may be placed differently on a wider screen:
Beneath what you see in this graphic, you’ll see the taskbar for Windows, with the Start button on the left and buttons for other open windows on the rest of the bar. If you have more than one Microsoft Word document open, there will be a button for each document.
Our class today focuses on the options available through the File and Home tabs on the Ribbon. For more on tools on the other tabs, come back and take our more advanced Word classes.
Basic options for starting, opening, saving, and print documents are located under the File tab. Be aware that if you have Microsoft Word 2007 or older, instead of a File tab, you’ll have a yellow “Open Office” button instead of a File tab, but the options are similar under each.
Click the File tab and the screen changes to something like the graphic to the right, although the left column will probably be white, not dark gray. The main options are down that left side. By default, the tab will show the “Info” option, which provides information about the document, but the center and right of the screen will change based on which option you select on the left. Let’s work down the list on the left.
OBJECTIVE 2: Name and save a document in the documents library. Understand the difference between “Save” and “Save As” and know how to make future saves with mouse or keyboard.
When starting a new document, it’s a good idea to save it immediately to avoid situations where your work can be lost. Let’s do that. Go to the Home Tab, type your name on the first line of the document, and then hit Enter on the keyboard to drop the cursor down a line.
To name and save the document, click the File Tab, and from the column on the left, click the Save option. When saving a new file for the first time, this popsup a Save As dialog box like the one shown to the right. Let’s look at the different parts of this box.
On the left, you see a list of locations on your computer where files can be saved. These will include basic “Libraries” and locations such as drives and the Desktop. By default, Word savesa new document to the last place a Word file was saved on the computer, usually the Documents library. To choose a different location, find it in the left column and click it. The line in the box at the top of the screen with the folder picture at the start shows the path to the location where you’re about to save.
By default, Word suggests a name for the document taken from the first line of text in the document. This is highlighted on the File Name: line. The line beneath that shows what kind of file type is being saved, by default a Word Document (.docx). To name the document something else, click in the File Name box, delete the default name, and type in the name of your choosing.
In our case, let’s accept the defaults and save the document with your name as the document name and in the Documents library. To do so, just click the Save button at the bottom of the dialog box. The dialog box will go away, and to show that the save took place, the document name will show on the title line at the top of the window and, if captions for buttons are turned on, on the button for the document window on the task bar at the bottom of the page.
Although Word usually makeautosaves every few minutes to protect your work, it’s still a good idea to continue to save the document after every twenty minutes of work or so. You can do this in three ways:
1)Click the File Tab, then click Save in the column on the left.
2)Click the Save icon, which looks like a little diskette on the Quick Access Toolbar.
3)Hold down the Control Key (Ctrl) in the lower left corner of the keyboard and then hit the S key.
Once a document is created, you might want to save additional versions of it, for instance saving an extra copy on a flash drive to carry with you or creating different drafts of the same document like a paper or a resume, each with different names. That’s when you’ll use the Save As option instead of Save. It’s located beneath Save on the File Tab. When you click Save As, a Save dialog box appears. Change the location where the new version of the document is saved, save it as a different file type, or rename the new document, or combine several of these options, and then click the “Save” button at the bottom of the dialog box.
After you Save As, any changes will be made to the new version of the document, while the old document, unchanged by any changes made after the Save As to create the new version, will still be on your computer in the same place where it was before under the old name.
OBJECTIVE 3: Learn to open an existing document.
Click on the File Tab on the right and scan down the list on the left until you see Recent. Click on this to see a list of Recent Documents opened with Word on the computer and Recent Places where documents have been saved. Most often, the document you want will be in that list. Just click on its name to open it.
If the document you want is not listed, go back up the list from Recent and choose Open instead. That will start an Open Dialogue Boxwhich can be used to find any Word document on the computer. Down the left side of this box, common locations where documents might be saved are listed. Under Favorites, the document might be on the Desktop. Under Libraries, most documents are by default saved in the Documents library. If the document is on an external drive such as a flash drive or diskette drive, that drive (if plugged in) will appear under Computer. In any of these locations, the document might be at the top level or further down in a subfolder. Navigate this hierarchy of locations until you see the document name on the right, thendouble click it to open the document. If you already have a document open, the new document will launch in a new window, with its own button on the taskbar.
OBJECTIVE 4: Start a new document.
By default, when you start Microsoft Word, it will open with a new blank document in place. But to start a second new document, or if you originally started Word by opening a previously existing document, go to the File Tab, and click New in the options down the left. That will make the screen look as it does in the graphic to the left.
The screen shows various templates for creating a new document. A sample of the selected template is shown to the right. The default choice (highlighted in yellow orange) is a Blank Document. Just click the Create button to the right to start that new blank document in a new window.
Note: The other templates are tempting, as they offer very fancy looking resumes, letters, newsletters, cards, agendas, memos, charts, and more. The idea is to start with a template, and just fill your particular content into the appropriate places in the document. This can be effective, but in practice may be more difficult than it seems. The background formatting in these templates can be so fancy that beginning Word users are unable to make any but the simplest changes to the template. Learn how to create a document from scratch first, and then with the skills you build, you’ll be able to use the advanced formatting in templates more effectively.
If you opened or started any documents beyond the one you initially opened and saved with your name, then close those documents now. We’ll stick with just one document to avoid confusion.
OBJECTIVE 5: Recognize the file extension for a Word document.
You can recognize Microsoft Word documents in a list of computer files because they have the blue W icon next to them and have names that end with the extension .docx(or in versions of Word 2003 or earlier .doc). Word can open a few other file types such as .rtf, .txt, or .dot files as well, although the formatting in these other file types is much simpler.
You may encounter word processing files or other documents that Word cannot open, such as .wps, .pdf, or .wp. You might be able to get converter software from Microsoft to open these files in Word.
If you are sending a file to someone who does not have Word, use the procedure for Save As. Save a copy of the document as one of two file types, .pdf if the recipient will read or print the document without changing it digitally, or .rtf if the recipient will be making digital changes to the file. In the case of .rtf, which stands for rich text format, a simple word processing format, you may lose some of the fancier features of the document, including anything that is not text.
We’ll come back to more option on the File tab at the end of class, but let’s start working on our document! Click the Home Tab to begin.
OBJECTIVE 6: Enter and delete text using the keyboard.
To learn the other functions of Microsoft Word, we’ve got to have text in our documents that we can format. So let’s type in some simple content. Hit Enter until your cursor (also called the insertion point) is a couple of lines beneath your name. When you start typing, the text will go wherever that cursor is located. Type the following:
1)Beneath your name at the top of the document, type a short paragraph of three or four lines about what you want to be able to do with a computer. Note that when you reach the end of a line, you don’t have to hit Enter to start a new line. The text automatically drops down to the next line when it reaches the right margin. If you are a slow typist, you can just type nonsense words to make your paragraph. At the end of the paragraph, hit Enter.
2)Type the name of a favorite book or magazine. Hit Enter twice to move the cursor down two lines.
3)Type the name of your favorite movie or television show. Hit Enter twice to move the cursor down two lines.
4)Type the name of your favorite color. Hit Enter twice to move the cursor down two lines.
5)Finally, type two lists, but don’t number the items in each list. For the first list, make a grocery list of five to six items, with one Enter after each item. At the end of that list, hit Enter twice.
6)In the second list, type the names of five or six of your favorite actors or writers.
Deleting Text in Microsoft Word
When you type on a keyboard, you’re going to make mistakes, but it’s easy to fix them as you go. There are several ways to do so:
1)Hit the Backspace key (in the upper right corner of the main part of the keyboard, often labeled ← instead of “Backspace”), which moves the cursor back one space left each time it is hit, deleting any typing in that space. Type the text in again correctly.
2)Hit the Delete key (just to the right of the main part of the keyboard), which removes one character or space immediately to the right of the cursor each time it is hit. If the cursor is at the end of the document, Delete will act as Backspace does, removing the character to the left of the cursor.
3)Highlight a larger block of text and hit Backspace to remove it all with one keystroke. We’ll show you how to highlight in just a minute.
OBJECTIVE 7: Navigate through a document using mouse, scrollbars, and keyboard.
As a document grows, possibly to many pages, you need to move around in it to make adjustments, fix mistakes, or to find the desired spot to add more. This can be done with mouse or keyboard, whichever you use most comfortably.
With the mouse:
1)Click the arrows on the scrollbar on the right side of your Word window to move up or down. Click the slider on the scrollbar, hold down, and drag up or down to move more quickly.
2)Click anywhere on the document to move the cursor or insertion point to the place where you click.
3)If your mouse has a scroll wheel between the two mouse buttons, push it forward to move up in the document and pull it toward you to move down in the document.
With the keyboard:
1)Use the arrow keys to move the cursor up, down, left or right without affecting the text. These keys are in the area between the letter keys and number pad on the keyboard.
2)Hit the Home key to move the cursor to the start of the current line. Hit End to move to the cursor to the end of the current line. Hold down the Ctrl key and hit Home to move the cursor to the start of the document. Hold down Ctrl and hit End to move the cursor to the end of the document.
3)Page Up and Page Down move the cursor up or down one page in the document.
OBJECTIVE 8: Learn how to “Undo” or “Redo” with keyboard or mouse.
A simple method of backing up to fix mistakes or return a document to an earlier state is built into Word (and all of the Microsoft Office software). It’s called the “Undo” function. Since we’re about to start learning skills with which it is easy for beginners to make mistakes, this would be a good time to learn to “Undo.” There are two ways to “Undo.”
1)Click the counterclockwise circling arrow on the Quick Navigation toolbar in the upper left corner of the Word window. This is the Undo button. It negates the last thing done in the document, whether that be a bit of typing, formatting, another command you issued, or some autoformatting of text performed by Word.
2)Even easier, hold down Ctrl in the lower left corner of the keyboard and then hit the Z key. This will also Undo.
Undo more than one step by continuing to clickthe Undobutton or repeating the Ctrl +Z hot key, theoretically until the document is completely blank. You can only undo a document, however, to the state it was in when last opened.
If you accidentally back up too many steps, you can Redowhat you just undid by clicking the Redo button next to Undo or using the hot key combination Ctrl +Y.
OBJECTIVE 9: Use mouse or keyboard to select or deselect text. Know what will happen if typing occurs when text is selected. Know how to “Select All.”
It’s possible tomake all kinds of changes to the appearance or placement of text with formatting, but to do this, the text must first be “highlighted” or “selected.” Again, this can be done with either mouse or keyboard, whichever you find most comfortable.
With the mouse:
Find the start of the section that you wish to select. Click and hold down the left mouse button, then drag to the end of the word, phrase, or section that you wish to select. Then let off the button. The selected text will show with black background and white text:
Hold down the left mouse button firmly when dragging over the top of text you wish to select. Accidentally sliding on and off the button while dragging may unintentionally move letters or words to other spots in the document.
You can also click at the end of the section you want to select and drag to the beginning. To select a single word, just double-click on it.To select a full paragraph, triple-click on it.
With the keyboard:
Place the cursor at one end of the word, phrase, or section that you wish to select by clicking there on the screen. Hold down the Shift key and then use the up, down, left, or right Arrow keys to arrow to the other end. Let go of the Shift key and the section you just arrowed over will be selected.