Microsoft Word
Use Word to create letters, reports, essays and even write books.
Create a document
Starting a new document is easy. Click File at the top and select New on the left. To start with a clean page, click the Blank document thumbnail (Fig 1). Now just start typing your letter, report, CV, book or whatever you want.
Choose a template
Although you can create any type of document starting with a blank sheet, you can save time and effort by using a template. Select > New and a few templates are displayed as thumbnails, but there are many more online. Enter a word or phrase into the search box at the top, such as ‘newsletter’ and lots of great template thumbnails are shown; click one to see a larger version (Fig 2) and click Create if you want to use it. A template contains text and sometimes images too. These are just to show you where elements on the page are placed. Click the heading and replace it with your own, click the body text and type in your own words, replace the photos with ones you have taken, delete items on the page that you do not need, and so on. Templates are so good that many people rarely use anything else and there a large number are available to suit a wide range of publications. Just search for them.
Format with styles
Word provides many shortcuts to creating great documents and one of these is styles. Click the Home tab (if it is not currently visible) and in the Style section you can click on Normal,
Heading 1, Title and other styles to format the text. Whatever text is selected is formatted with the font, colour, size, line spacing and other attributes that are defined in the style. It saves you having to manually format text.
Expand the styles
Only a few styles are initially shown in the ribbon. To view them all, click the Home tab, then the bottom arrow at the right side of the styles. When a template is selected for a document, it contains its own collection of styles. This is so that no matter where in the document you create a heading, it always has the same font, size, colour and so on. Different templates use different styles.
Using the formatting tools in the Home tab of the ribbon. As shown in the step-by-step guide, you can modify a style and change the font, size, colour and so on. Expand the styles palette and down at the bottom you’ll find ‘Create a style’. This enables you to save the modified style under a new name. You can then select this custom style in the palette whenever you need to apply it in the document. It saves time and effort and ensures that your document always uses the same styles.
To display styles in a handy window, simultaneously press Shift-Ctrl-Alt-S.
If you need to change the header for your document, right-click it and select Edit Header.
Insert a table
Tables are a useful way to present certain types of information and they enable you to enter text and numbers into rows and columns. Examples include names and telephone numbers, products and prices, to-do lists with dates and completion status, and so on.
The rows and columns of a table enable you to position text and numbers on the page, too. So you could create an invoice, for example, and have products and services on the left and prices on the right. All the prices in the right column would line up under one another, which would be difficult using any other method, such as by adding spaces on a line.
To insert a table into a document, first move the cursor to the place you want it. Go to the Insert tab of the ribbon and click the arrow under Table. There is a grid of boxes and as the mouse is moved over them, the table appears in the document. Click the mouse when the table is the size you need (Fig 3). Click in a .table cell and enter the text, then tab to the next cell. Pressing Tab in the last cell adds a new row to the table.
Headers and footers
With some documents, you might want to display certain information at the top and/or bottom of each page. A simple example of this is to put a page number at the foot of each page, or the title of the document at the top. Without page numbers, you would not know which order the pages were in.
Headers and footers are inserted in the same way and both are found on the Insert ribbon tab. Click either Header or Footer as required and select from one of the options that are listed. The header/ footer is added to the page and you can then edit it – for example, by entering your own text, or moving and positioning elements. When you have finished editing the header/footer, click Close Header and Footer at the right side of the ribbon bar to return to document editing.
Add images
Word is more than a simple word processor; it can handle images too. This makes it useful for a wide range of projects, such as newsletters, posters, cards and brochures. Some of the templates contain images; these are placeholders to show where they appear on the page. The idea is that you replace them with your own. The tutorial shows how this is achieved and it is a very easy task.
If you are creating your own document or if you want to add more images to a template, there is an Illustrations section on the Insert tab of the ribbon bar. The
Pictures button is used to select a photo or image file that is on the disk drive, and the Online Pictures button enables you to search Microsoft Office clip art, Bing or your pictures in OneDrive.
Enhance images
Word has some powerful features that enable you to format and enhance images that are in the text of documents. Normally you would need to use a separate photo editor to perform the sorts of tasks that Word can do on the page. An example of this is resizing and rotating images.
After using the Picture button on the Insert tab in the ribbon, the image appears
on the page. At each corner is a small box – a handle – and clicking and dragging them makes the image bigger or smaller. At the top centre of the image is a round arrow and clicking and dragging this left or right rotates the image and it enables them to be placed at an angle on the page.
Double-click an image in the document and the Picture Tools on the Format ribbon tab are displayed. There are lots of functions and in the Styles section you’ll find Picture Border, Picture Effects and Picture Layout. The Picture Effects are excellent and include bevel, glow, reflection, soft edges and many more effects. Within each of these are numerous variations.
In the Adjust section you can correct the brightness and contrast, apply colour filters to the image, or use special effects such as photocopy, light screen, chalk sketch, paint strokes and so on. Images can be cropped to shapes, too (Fig 4).