1 Work with package MS Office: MS Word
This hour readies you for Microsoft Word 2003. You will soon see why Microsoft Word is the most popular word processor on the market. With Word 2003, you can create documents of any kind with amazing ease. Word helps you painlessly create letters, proposals, Web pages, business plans, résumés, novels, and even graphics-based multicolumn publications, such as fliers and newsletters.
The highlights of this hour include the following:
Why Word is considered the most powerful word processor available today
How to enter text and navigate through your document
When to enable Word's Find and Replace operation
How Word's advanced AutoCorrection features help eliminate common editing tasks for you
Beginning Words About Word
Given that Word is probably the most advanced word processor ever produced for a computer, you might think that Word's interface would be complicated. Although some of Word's more advanced features can seem tricky at first, you'll be using Word's most popular and regular features quickly. Microsoft made a huge effort to streamline Word's (and all the Office 2003 products') interface so that you can get to the most common features without a fuss.
Figure 2.1 shows Word's typical screen during the editing of a document. Your screen might differ slightly depending on the options currently set on your installation.
Figure 2.1 Word's editing screen enables you to locate tools easily.
Note
Just rest your mouse pointer over any toolbar button, and a ScreenTip displays, identifying the button.
The most important area of Word's screen is the editing area. That's where the document you want to edit appears. If the document does not all fit on one screen, you can use the scrollbar to scroll down the page. Word offers several ways to view your document, but you'll almost always work inside Normal view (as shown in Figure 2.1) or Print Layout view. In Normal view—chosen from the View menu or by clicking the Normal view button in the lower-left part of the screen—more of your document's text fits on the screen than in any other view. In Print Layout view (selected also from the View menu or by clicking the Print Layout button), you gain a better perspective of how your document's text fits onto a printed page, in addition to seeing header and footer text such as page numbers if any appear.
Note
Word 2003 offers a new view called Reading Layout that presents documents that you want to read but not edit. Figure 2.2 shows the same letter that appears in Normal view in Figure 2.1. In Reading Layout view, Word attempts to display the letter in two readable columns, with no regard for how the letter is actually to appear when finally printed. This view is designed to display as much text on your screen as possible while still maintaining readable margins.
Figure 2.2 The new Reading Layout view displays as much text as possible from your document so you can read without clutter on the screen.
Note
If you download eBooks, that is, books online that you can download in a Word-compatible format, use Reading Layout view to read them. Just click the toolbar's Read button to convert to Reading Layout. Click Close to return to your previous view.
The task pane is an area to the right of Word's screen that you can display or hide. You can close the task pane by clicking its Close button (the X in the task pane's upper-right corner). The task pane keeps editing tools that you might need nearby during your editing session. You can always turn the task pane back on when you want to use it. (Subsequent sections in this and later chapters explore ways to take advantage of the task pane.)
The toolbar actually consists of two separate toolbars next to each other, the Standard toolbar and the Formatting toolbar. Some users prefer these to reside on two separate rows on the screen. You can change to the more common two-row setup by right-clicking the toolbar, selecting Customize, and checking the option marked Show Standard and Formatting toolbars on Two Rows. When you separate these toolbars, the top one is the Standard toolbar with typical file and editing commands, and the second toolbar is the Formatting toolbar in which common character, paragraph, and document formatting tools await your click.
Note
As with most Office features, you can do the same thing from different areas of the program. Use whatever way you prefer. As an example, you can save a mouse click by clicking on either of the two small down arrows (one appears in the middle and one at the right of the single-line toolbar as Figure 2.1 pointed out) and selecting Show Buttons on Two Rows. These arrows are calledtoolbar options arrows. The View, Toolbars, Customize menu option also provides the same option.
Working with the Word and other Office menus is simple. Either press Alt followed by an underlined menu key or point and click with your mouse to open any of the pull-down menus. Office 2003 features personalized menus that, over time, change as you use Word and the other Office products. The often-used menu commands appear, and those you don't use much or at all do not show up when you first display a menu. If you double-click a menu name, keep a menu open for a few moments, or click the arrow at the bottom of a drop-down menu, all of that menu's options appear.
By keeping the most-used commands on the menu and hiding the others (for a short period), Word keeps your screen clutter down but sometimes makes locating a more obscure menu option harder. You can elect to keep the personalized menus on. You also can turn on all menu options at all times (the option set for this book's figures) by selecting Tools, Customize and checking the option labeled Always Show Full Menus.
Documents and Disks
You have a lot of ways to create new documents. Most of the time, however, you select File, New to display the New Document task pane. You then can click Blank Document to create an empty Word document or select from one of the templates Word offers, such as several legal, letter, and fax templates. A template is a predefined page, sometimes with accompanying artwork, such as a standard letter format or a fax cover sheet that gives your document a predefined look.
Note
If you click inside Templates on the Microsoft.com area of your task pane, you can search and select from hundreds of Word templates on Microsoft's Web site. The template you select determines how your document will look; once you select a template, just type the document's content.
Word typically hides the task pane after you make a selection from it to give you more editing room. As you work, a different task pane might appear to help you with a different feature.
When you are ready to save your document for the first time, select File, Save and specify a location and filename before clicking Save. After the first time you save a document, you only need to select File, Save (or press Ctrl+S) to update your changes. To save the document using a different name or location, select File, Save As and enter a new name.
Note
Word documents normally end with the .doc filename extension as in Proposal.doc. Filenames can have spaces in them. You don't have to type the extension when opening or saving documents; all Office products automatically attach the correct extension.
Once saved, you can load any document into memory to make further changes or to print the document by selecting File, Open (or pressing Ctrl+O) and selecting the file you want to edit.
Editing Multiple Documents
If you want to work on two documents at the same time, perhaps to cut and paste information from one into the other, use File, Open to open a second (or even a third, fourth, or more) document. Press Ctrl+F6 to switch between the documents. You can also switch between documents by clicking the appropriate Windows taskbar button.
With several documents open, the taskbar can get cluttered with Word icons. You can clean up the taskbar by selecting Tools, Options, View and unchecking the Windows in Taskbar option. Your Windows taskbar at the bottom of your screen then shows only one Word session even if you edit multiple documents at the same time in that session.
If you're new to Word or to word processing, master editing with a single document before you tackle multiple documents at once.
Entering and Editing Text
This section reviews fundamental Word editing skills and brings you up to speed even if you are new to word processing. In this section, you learn how to do the following:
Type text into a document and maneuver around the screen
Copy, cut, and paste text from one location to another
Locate and replace text
Entering Text
The blank editing area is where you type text to create a new document. Of course, Word supports more than just text because you can add graphics and even Web page elements to a Word document. The best way to become familiar with Word, however, is to start with straight text.
Two pointers appear in Word: the mouse's pointing arrow and the insertion point, which is the flashing vertical bar (also called thetext cursor) that shows where the next character will appear. As you type, remember these basic editing hints:
Don't press Enter at the end of each line. As you type close to the right edge of the screen, Word automatically wraps the text to the next line for you.
Only press Enter at the end of each paragraph. Each subsequent press of the Enter key adds an extra blank line before the next paragraph. (If you type a list of items, you press Enter at the end of each item.)
If you make a typing mistake, press the Backspace key to erase the last character you typed. You can also erase any text you've typed, not just the most recent character. If you press one of the arrow keys, you can move the insertion point (the text cursor) all around the document until you get to text you want to erase. At that point, you can press the Delete key to erase whatever character follows the insertion point.
Insert mode is Word's default editing mode. When you are using Insert mode, new text you type appears at the text pointer, pushing existing characters to the right (and down the page if needed). When in Overtype mode, new text replaces existing text.
The Word status bar shows the current insertion mode. If the letters OVR are visible, Word is in Overtype mode. If OVR is grayed out, Word is in Insert mode. You can switch between the two modes by pressing the Insert key.