Lessons

Resources

Full Course Outline
Skills Test Quiz - Under Construction
Certificate of Completion
Post-Class Survey

Questions?

Please feel free to post your questions or comments below. If you have questions about a specific lesson, please specify the lesson number and the time index in the lesson where the issue occurs. Thank you!

Subscribe for Updates

If you would like to be notified whenever changes are made to this page, new lessons are posted, or comments are made, click on the subscribe button.

Subscribe to Word QuickStart
Get notifications when this page is updated

Intro

In this video, you will get a quick start with Microsoft Word as we walk through creating and formatting a business letter. We will cover editing and formatting text, working with the clipboard to cut, copy, and paste, using numbered and bulleted lists, inserting headers and footers, checking spelling and grammar, and adding basic images. I'll also show you how to save, open, and print documents, adjust margins and page setup, and insert dates with automatic updates. Throughout the tutorial, you'll learn practical tips for navigating Word's interface and using shortcut keys.

Transcript

Welcome, folks, to our Microsoft Word course. My name is Richard Rost and I will be your instructor today.

We are going to begin by talking a little bit about Microsoft Word and what it is. I am going to assume that you at least know how to get Word started and running on your screen.

What is Microsoft Word? Nowadays, it is also called a document processor. It helps you write letters and other kinds of correspondence. But it has lots of different uses as well. You can add pictures and graphics, email your documents, and do all kinds of things inside of Microsoft Word.

In today's class, we are going to focus on writing a business letter. We are going to learn how to edit text, format our documents to look professional, and I will show you how to save your documents. We are going to learn how to use the clipboard to cut, copy, and paste. We are going to look at how bold and numbered lists work. We are going to learn how to use headers and footers in our documents. We are going to check for spelling and grammar errors, and I will show you how to insert basic pictures and clipart into your document.

So let's get started. If you do not have Word already loaded, now would be a good time to do so.

Let's talk first about the parts of the screen when you have Word running. Across the very top of the screen, you will see it says Microsoft Word. It will say Document1. Document1 is the name of your file. We will eventually pick a file name when we save our documents. If I am writing a letter to Mike, we might call it Letter to Mike and save it on our hard disk. We will see how that looks a little bit later.

We have our menu bar: File, Edit, View, Insert, Format. Our menu bar has different pull-down menu options on it. Below that, we have our toolbars. We have our standard toolbars with print and save and we will learn a bunch of these today. And then our formatting toolbar, which we use to change the format of text. Now we have our font size and bold and italics and all the nifty stuff that we will learn today.

We have our ruler bar. We will see how this works in the next couple of classes. Then we have our big document area down here. This is where our document is going to go.

In the upper right-hand side of the window, we have our minimize, maximize, and close buttons. If you do not know how these work, watch our online Windows classes at nyolp.com. They are free. Check them out. We will teach you how to minimize, maximize, restore windows, and how to use our scroll bar to scroll up and down our document.

At the very bottom of the document window, we have a status bar. We will learn about some of these weird buttons later. Here we have our status bar.

That is the basic look and feel of Word. You will notice that if you are familiar with Excel or PowerPoint or any other Microsoft Office applications, it is pretty much standard. They all look pretty much the same.

Let's start off today by typing in a business letter. Most people use Word for that. We are going to write a letter to Arnold Schwarzenegger. We are going to pretend that we are agents and I am going to try to get Arnold to act in our movie.

The first thing that I am going to do is, I am kind of far out from the page. I am going to come over here and see this little box. Yours might say 73 or a different number. I am going to drop this box down and I am going to pick Text Width. That zooms me in and gets me closer into the page. I am going to zoom in a little bit here, just so I can get the whole window on the screen. When I am doing these online classes, I only have a small portion of the window to work with. There we go.

I am going to type in my letter to Mr. Schwarzenegger. Let's start off with Dear Mr. Schwarzenegger. Now, you might have noticed on your screen a little window pop up that might say Dear Mom and Dad. If you look in the book, if you have the printed book in front of you on page 11 of lesson 2.3, you will see an example of what I mean. It says Dear Mom and Dad.

Sometimes, Word will try to autofill what it thinks you are trying to type in, like Dear Mom and Dad or the date. I think I have that turned off here on my machine. I personally find it more annoying than helpful.

Now notice Schwarzenegger is underlined in red. That means that Word does not recognize that word. It thinks it is misspelled. What we can do is, we can right-click on it. If Word had a suggestion, if it maybe recognized part of that word, it would give you a list of words that you could select from to change it. But Word has no clue what that is, so it says No Spelling Suggestions.

Now I am going to click on Ignore All. What that means is that Word is not going to bother me anymore. It is telling me that word is misspelled. We will look more at how those spell check options work a little later.

So now that I have got Dear Mr. Schwarzenegger, and I hit Enter, you might also notice Clippy pop up, the annoying little talking paper clip. Now, I have got him uninstalled on my computer for good reason. But you might see him. He looks like a little paper clip. All you have to do is hit the X to close him and he will go away.

So that is where I have got my salutation and my Dear Mr. Schwarzenegger. I hit Enter a couple of times; that gave me a couple of blank lines. Now I will type in my sentence:

I am writing to you today to offer you the role in my new film. Oops, so...

And then I realize, oops, I goofed. I used the wrong instance of the word "role," did I not? That is a dinner roll, not the role I meant. So I need to fix that. There are a couple of ways I could fix it. I could use the Backspace key on my keyboard and back, back, back, back all the way back there. But that is not why we use Word.

I do not have to do that. So what I am going to do is, I am going to click right there after "role," or right before it, either one. I am going to try to get my cursor right after the L. There we go. My cursor is right after the L. The blinking vertical line, that is called the cursor, or sometimes called the insertion point, because that is where the text gets inserted.

Now, with my insertion point after the word "role," I am going to hit the Backspace key, and that will backspace me over that L. Now I can put an E in there.

Now, the first time that I did that, remember my cursor went in front of the L. That is okay too. If your cursor is in front of the letter that you want to delete, use the Delete key on the keyboard. The Delete key.

Take a minute now and find the Backspace and Delete keys. The Backspace key deletes to the left, deletes backwards. The Delete key deletes to the right or forwards. Okay, the Backspace and Delete keys.

Now, for those of you who may be taking an online course for the first time, I know there are several of you in this class. What I strongly suggest is that you just sit back and relax and watch the live session. If you have any questions, ask them in the chat room.

Afterwards, you can come back and watch the class again on the website in the archive section. Then you can watch it and pause. I will do an example, then you can pause it and then do the example yourself. You cannot exactly pause the live session, but you can ask questions if you do not quite get something.

So now I am going to take my mouse and I am going to click back here on the end of the line. That will move my cursor back to the end of the line and I will continue typing. In fact, I might do something real quick just to cheat. I want to make my text a little bit bigger so you guys can see it a little bit better on the screen. I am going to show you how to do that in a few minutes here.

Well, let's finish. Let's see. I know that you... What happened? My text wrapped around to the next line. Look at that. Let me backspace. Back, back, back, back, back. I know that's why... Oh, look at that. As soon as I typed in the O and U, my text moved down to the next line. That is called word wrap. It is supposed to do that.

Those of you who may be used to a typewriter or some of the older word processing programs may be used to hitting Enter at the end of each line. Do not do that. We no longer hit Enter at the end of the line. We just keep typing and Word will wrap around for you.

I know that you probably have an agent that you work with and that you charge 20 million per movie. But I am your third cousin twice removed.

Enter, enter. I am going to hit Enter twice to give me a new paragraph. You do not have to type in everything exactly the way I type it in, especially if you are not a very fast typist. I will tell you what you have to type in.

So that is word wrap. Let's see, in my movie, come on, you will play the role of Captain... Let's type it wrong, Captain Nesos. You will have to journey to the planet Spaceball and rescue the princess.

Did you notice what I just did now? As I was typing "rescue the princess," there is no substitute for a human spell-checker because "rescue" is a word, and Microsoft Word would have never caught that. I am going to get rid of that S. Click, delete.

Now, for those of you at home who do not really like using the mouse, I hate the mouse myself. There are a million shortcut keys you can use. I am going to hit the End key on the keyboard. That will move me to the end of the line. I hate having to stop and grab the mouse.

You will have to journey to the planet Spaceball, rescue the princess from the evil clutches of the Helmets.

Enter, enter.

Now, I have some misspellings here. Let's click on it. Here are some options. Let me move the window up so we can see the window pop up. It shows me four options here.

Captain - I want this one. I will click on this one and it corrects it for me.

Nesos - Right click on it. Now, it does give me some options, but this is a proper name. It is his name. So I have got a couple of options. I want to ignore this word, or I want to add it to my custom dictionary. Usually, if it is a proper noun you do not use that often, you click on Ignore. If it is a proper noun that you use constantly, or not necessarily a proper noun, it is an industry term that is not in the Word dictionary, in this case, I am going to hit Ignore.

Let's do the same with Spaceball. Right click. Ignore All. We will go with that.

We will go back down here. Well, you will then have to journey to the far reaches of the galaxy, to locate the alien homeworld and destroy them. Let's break that up into two paragraphs. In fact, let's break it up into two paragraphs right about here at the U.

How do I break a paragraph up into two paragraphs? Click where you want the break to be, and then hit Enter, Enter. I hit Enter twice. What does that do? If you look here, there is nothing fancy about the fact that there are line breaks here. Where there are extra lines, you can come up on your toolbar (I have to widen this window out so you can see it), see this little button? Show/Hide - the backwards P. Click on that.

Look what you have got. See how these little symbols pop up? That shows you where you actually hit Enter. You hit Enter here, you hit Enter here, over here. If you want to take two paragraphs and make one, all you have to do is backspace over those paragraph marks.

To take one paragraph and break it up into two, we just simply hit Enter and insert paragraph marks. That is it. You can also see the little spaces in there. It shows you all the non-printable characters, basically.

I am going to turn them back off by just clicking on that button again. There we go. I am going to shrink my window back down to size, just so you guys can see everything.

So that is how we break up a paragraph into two paragraphs. That is in the book also.

Let's finish our document here. Let's see, as a side note, I have been a fan of yours for many years. Among my favorite movies are: Conan, The Terminator, Predator, and how about The Running Man?

On the other hand, you have done some pretty bad movies too. Need I mention Jingle All The Way and The Last Action Hero? Did not care for those.

Cordially... Oh, there it is! See? See the little "cordially" popping up? If I hit Enter right now, it finishes it for me. That is that auto-completing I was talking about earlier.

Joe P. Agent.

So there is most of my letter.

Now, notice the green underlines. See the green underline right here? I will zoom in a bit so you can see it. See that? "Hero" is underlined. What does that mean? Green underlining means you have got a grammatical error. This one is not that obvious. No one in class usually gets this unless I give a couple of clues. Right click on it. And look at that: "hero?" I have got the question - isn't it, "Need I mention Jingle All The Way, The Last Action Hero?" Usually, you see more blatant errors like, "I is a college student." Right click. "am."

To be honest, I usually turn the grammar checker off. I will show you how to do that in class three if you want, because I find it annoying. I hate all these little green and red squiggles popping up. My philosophy is to get all the stuff out on paper and then go back afterwards and spell-check it. I know that if I am typing, especially if I am doing something creative, and I am typing and typing, and all of a sudden I see a red underline, I have to stop and go back and fix a spelling error. It just completely blows my train of thought. So, depending on what kind of writing you are doing, I personally do not like having to stop and go back and fix it as I am working.

So, that is how the grammar check on the fly works.

Now, we forgot our addresses, did we not? Let's go back up to the top of the document.

You can scroll up if you want, or you can hit Control-Home on your keyboard. Hold down the Control key and hit the Home key on your keyboard. Hit Enter, Enter. Control-Home again and it goes to the top.

Put our addresses in:

Joe P. Agent
101 Main Street
Buffalo, New York
14200

Enter, enter, enter.

Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Oh, look at that. Even though I spelled it wrong, it knows that this one was the one that I said to ignore. If you see I forgot to right-click on it so I do not get my spelling suggestions.

But I typed this one wrong: Shorzenegger. There we go. I typed it differently. I will teach you in a minute how we do not have to type it anymore.

We have:
100 Terminator Drive
Skynet, California
971--or whatever. I am just kind of guessing on the spelling. Skynet, Skanner, take your heart.

Now it looks good, but it is kind of bland, is it not? Let's make that Joe P. Agent stand out. Let's make it a little more colorful. Let's move it over here to the right hand side, change the font and change the colors, and play a little bit. Make it look a little more presentable.

Before you do anything to text in Word, you have to highlight it first. How do you highlight it? Take your mouse and, I am going to slide this over a little bit so you can see it better, take your mouse and move it right out in front of it, just like this, right in front of that J in Joe. Click, drag it across, and then down, just like that. That will highlight Joe P. Agent.

You might also, if you are over here in the left margin a little bit more, if you are out too far in front of it, you will get an arrow. See that? A backward pointing arrow. If you click here, you will get the whole line. You can click and drag down out here. That will work for you as well.

Personally, I find it easier to highlight backwards. I start out here and then I click and highlight it backwards. That is just my preference. There are like five different ways to do it.

Let's send it over to the right margin. There are three buttons right up here: Align Left, Center, and Align Right. You might even have a fourth one over there that is Justify. We will talk about that in a future class. Align Right. There it goes. We will resize our window so you can see. There we go. Align Right. Here is Centered. And Align Right. Looks good.

It is a little bland though. Let's jazz it up a little bit. Let's highlight it again and change our font. Let's drop the font box down. Here is your font. Let's click on the little down arrow. Here are all the fonts on the computer. Let's find Arial. Now, you can scroll up the list and find Arial, or just type "AR." That brings you right to Arial. There are a bunch that come with Windows. You have to just look and see what fonts are on your machine.

There we go. Joe P. Agent, still a little bland. Let's make it a little bigger. Here is the size. I am at 14 point right now. I am going to bring it up to 18 point. There we go.

Now, for those of you keyboard freaks who want a little advanced tip and trick: control and then left or right square bracket will make it bigger or smaller. See that? The left square bracket makes it smaller. The right square bracket makes it bigger, holding down the control key. The square brackets are the ones that are at right angles. These guys are the square brackets.

We got that bigger or smaller.

Also, a note: you will notice on here there are certain sizes for text: 24, 22, and so on. Here is 20, here is 22. What if you want 21? What if you want something that is between those two? You can come up here and type in 21 and then press Enter. I hit 11, did I not? 21, Enter. There we go. You can type in a number. I believe you can go all the way down to 4. I think you can actually even go smaller. Before, 4 point, you can even go to 2 point. Oh yeah, you can get really small. The smallest on the list is 8, but you can go smaller. You can even go to a fraction, like 6.5 if you want to. Likewise, you can go pretty big too. There is 72 point. I believe you can go bigger, like 80 point. I am not sure how big you can go, but you can go pretty big.

Let's go back to 18 point. That is big enough. Let's take Joe P. Agent and highlight Joe P. Agent and bold him. Let's take this address and make it a little bit smaller. There we go.

Let's add some color. Let's highlight Joe P. Agent again. Here are the color buttons right up here. I am going to slide the window a little bit. Here is the background color and the foreground color. Now, the background color looks kind of cheesy, I think. I do not really use the background color. I use the highlighter occasionally to highlight stuff to indicate changes. I will show you that in a second. Here is the foreground color though.

Here is how the foreground color works. Notice, first of all, the text is normally black on a white background. When I highlight stuff, it reverses the color. So that goes to white on a black background. Keep that in mind. The foreground color under the A there is blue. If I click on the button, my text turns blue. But notice that it is yellow. Why? Because it is highlighted, and so the colors are reversed. If I click over here somewhere in the left field, it de-highlights or deselects. Now, highlight it with the red preferred. Notice that the Joe P. Agent is now blue. If I were to select it again, you will see that it turns yellow, which is because the colors are reversed when it is highlighted.

If you do not want blue, you can drop down this little box, click on the little down arrow, and you get a color palette. Let's do a nice dark red. There it is. Click off the field, and you will see what it looks like.

Yes, there is a More Colors option. We will talk about that later. Down here in the bottom, you can click all kinds of different colors beyond what is on the palette.

The highlighter pen is kind of cheesy, I think. Aside from maybe if you want to make changes to something, like for example, let's say I am going to highlight this sentence here. Remember this?

Well, actually, here we go. Let's copy it. Control C, C is for copy. Copy. And then V for paste. V is just next to the other two on the keyboard, so it is easy to remember. Another one that is handy to remember is Z, Control Z, for undo. And Control S for save. Hit Control S often. Once you give your file a file name, all you have to do is hit Control S, and it saves it in like half a second. You do not have to do anything else.

So, I control S to save. Let's undo that and put that writing back. There we go. Undo.

Now, you can move paragraphs around without using cut and paste. Watch this. I am going to just make a blank space down here. There we go. I can highlight the paragraph like this, move my mouse over the middle of it, click and drag it down. Do that. I will do that again. Let me undo it. Okay, I made some blank space down here. Highlight the paragraph. Move your mouse over the middle. Click and drag it down. See the little line that is running around right there? That is where it is going to go, and you let go. Same thing with individual words. I will highlight "Captain," click, drag it down here, and that is where it went. So, you can highlight stuff and then click and drag it to move it around.

Personally, I like the cut and paste stuff myself. I do not usually drag stuff around like that.

What is next? Let's see here. That will take us through lesson five.

Saving and loading documents. Are you sure you know how to save your work? Let's save it again. How do you load it back up again? Let me close my document down. I am going to click on the X up here and close my document. There we go.

One way to get your documents back is to come in here and click on the Open button. Then you will see your My Documents folder and all the stuff in it. There is my letter to Arnold. Simply click on it and then hit Open. There it is.

Another way is to simply click on the Word File menu, and down here at the bottom of the file list, you will see the last three or four documents that you accessed. Personally, I have maybe five or six documents that I work on and that is about it, or variations of the same document. So usually the last couple of documents that I worked on are the ones that I am going to work on again, and they are listed right down there at the bottom. So just click on File and you will see them down there.

Another way to get at them is to use the My Documents icon on your desktop. The guy right here. I apologize - I cannot move the screen area that is being recorded. So I just hit the My Documents folder there so you can see it. Double-click on it there, and you will see all your documents in your My Documents folder. You can also use the Documents button on your Start menu as well - Start and Documents. Try that one too. Again, I cannot bring you down there, so I cannot show you, but it is really easy to figure out.

So that is how you save your document and open it back up again.

Let's open it back up. File, Letter to Arnold. There it is.

Now let's save a copy of this letter, because we also want to send a copy of this letter to, oh, let's say Bruce Willis, just in case Arnold turns us down. If we had gotten a reply and Arnold said no way, we can now just make some changes and save a copy of it.

Before you make your changes, come up here and click on File, Save As. That will let you specify a new file name. Do this before you make your changes, because what will happen is you will type in your changes, you will hit CTRL-S, or you will just hit the same floppy disk icon, and it is going to go - oops, I just overwrote my original.

So save your file as a different file name before you make your changes.

Now I can just come down here and change Arnold to Bruce. Now I just go through here and make my changes. I will just change this to Bruce Willis, change it to his address, or wherever he happens to live. Now I can copy "Willis." I can highlight "Willis," I can copy, I can Control C, I can paste it over "Schwarzenegger," and I can double-click to place it up there. My font sizes are all getting whacky here. Hang out one second, folks. I have two different font sizes going on. There we go. Copy "Willis," scroll down, find it down here, there is another "Schwarzenegger," paste it in there. We have to change his list of movies too, do we not? I will not bore you with all the details, but I will just highlight them and type right over: "Die Hard," "Die Hard 2," "Die Hard 3," "The Kid." We will take out the sentence with the bad movies.

Now we can save this. I just saved. Now we save this as Letter to Bruce Willis.

You know how it works. You have January's profit and loss or whatever you are doing up there. You have to make a copy of it for February. It is basically the same document with some different numbers, so you do not have to recreate the whole document. You just type in your changes and then you save it. You want to make sure you do not save over January's data, so just make a copy of it. Open up January's and go Save As. Save it with a new file name and you are all set.

Let's talk about printing documents real quick.

Now the Printer button on the toolbar up top is evil. Do not use it. It just takes your document and spits it on the printer. No options. It does not let you change anything. Just, here you go, waste your sheet of paper. So, I do not like it.

What I do like is clicking on File, and then Print. You get the nice little printer window. You can pick your printer. Here I have got my Lexmark up top, or I can drop it down to get any of my other printers. If you have Fax software like WinFax, it will show up in the printers. The Properties button over here lets you set properties for that printer.

What range of pages do you want to print? If you have two pages, you want to print them all. If you have 30 pages, and you want to print pages 1 to 15, you put that in Pages and type in 1-15. Or, if you want to print pages 1 and 15, you use a comma: 1,15. Like here is an example: 1,3,5,12. That will print pages 1, 3, 5, and 12.

Number of copies over here. How many copies do you want to print out? Do you want the printer to collate them or not? Having the printer not collate will print them faster, but you will have to hand collate them. If you have 100 copies of a three-page document, you might not mind collating them. If you have three copies of a 50-page document, you want the printer to collate them, although it takes longer.

You can change some of the options down here, like how many pages per sheet. If you are printing out a rough draft of a long document, you might want to change to two or even four pages per sheet. It will print them out so you get little quarter-sized pages, four on a page. But again, if it is just a rough draft for your proofreading purposes, then that will save you some paper and some ink.

When you are all set, simply hit OK. I am going to hit Cancel because I do not want to waste a sheet of paper, but you would hit OK and it will print out on your printer.

Any questions, drop them in the chat room.

Let's talk a minute about page setup. File, Page Setup is right here.

We can change your margins for the entire document: top and bottom margin, left and right margin. Let's say you want to go to a one-inch margin instead of a one and a quarter inch margin. You can either type in the number one here, or you can use the little up and down arrows. Now I am at one inch.

The gutter - everyone always asks me what a gutter is. A gutter is if you are binding it, printing two pages double-sided. You use it for the spine in the middle so that your odd pages will have an extra inch on the left, and your even pages will have an extra inch on the right. That is what a gutter is.

We will talk about headers and footers a little bit later.

Paper size - you can change from letter to legal. Portrait versus landscape. Paper source - this depends on your printer if it has multiple trays.

A lot of this stuff, you really just have to play with it and see what it does. I can only really show you what the software does. You have to practice and you have to explore. You have to basically waste some time and just play with it for a while and see what you can do.

Try to do something fun with Word. Try to do something that, like if you have a hobby, say, collecting coins or recipes. Start a little recipe file in a Word document with all your recipes in it. Just play with the different options and formatting, and try to get away from work with it. Try to find something that you have fun with, that you can do with Word.

I teach that in my database class, too. The first database I built was to track all my baseball cards when I was a kid. I actually built it a long time ago, and it taught me databases, and it was something that I enjoyed doing.

Let's go through some advanced tricks now.

How about inserting a date? We forgot to put a date at the top, did we not? Let's put a date in. Let's come right up here and let's play with this. Oh, did you see it right there? There is September popping up. If I hit Enter right now, it fills in "September." If I hit Space, it puts in a date, "September 30, 2002." Enter. There you go. See, it knew what the date was and filled it in.

Now, I will delete that. That is another way you can insert a date: Insert, Date and Time. This will insert the date. Click on a date format, like "September 30, 2002," and hit OK, and there it is. Let's put this back in for you.

Now, if you have certain documents that you like to open and print on a regular basis, like a collection letter, for example, you open it up and you want today's date to appear automatically. You open it up, put the person's name on it, and then send it.

Let's get rid of this. Check this out: Insert, Date and Time, same date format. Hit this "Update Automatically" button, and then hit OK.

Now, look what happens if I click on it, though. It is all gray. What does that mean? This is now a date field. It is a code that will automatically update itself every time you open the document. I open up this document tomorrow and it will say "October 1, 2002." So that works. That is the date code. You no longer have to change the date. Since I have saved my file as 93002, I know when I created it.

Thank you.

Quiz

Q1. What is the primary function of Microsoft Word as described in the video?
A. Creating spreadsheets for financial data
B. Managing large databases efficiently
C. Writing and formatting documents such as letters
D. Creating slide presentations for meetings

Q2. What is the purpose of the menu bar in Microsoft Word?
A. To manage desktop icons
B. To provide pull-down menu options for functions like File, Edit, and View
C. To display the document name
D. To save automatic backups

Q3. What is the "cursor" or "insertion point" in Microsoft Word?
A. The window where you select fonts
B. The blinking vertical line showing where new text will be inserted
C. A tool for highlighting text
D. A toolbar button for saving documents

Q4. What do the minimize, maximize, and close buttons in the upper right corner of the window do?
A. Navigate between different documents
B. Open the help menu
C. Control the size and visibility of the Word window
D. Save the document automatically

Q5. What does the "status bar" at the bottom of the Word window display?
A. The available printers
B. The current page and other relevant information
C. The font list
D. The spelling suggestions

Q6. What happens when you see a red underline beneath a word in Word?
A. The word is formatted in bold
B. There is a grammatical error
C. The word is not recognized or is misspelled
D. The word is a hyperlink

Q7. What is the function of the "AutoComplete" feature in Word?
A. It automatically closes your document when you stop typing
B. It suggests or completes words and phrases as you type
C. It checks for plagiarism
D. It formats your document title

Q8. What does the "Backspace" key do in Word?
A. Deletes the character to the right of the cursor
B. Deletes the character to the left of the cursor
C. Highlights the current word
D. Inserts a new paragraph

Q9. What does the "Delete" key do in Word?
A. Deletes the character to the left of the cursor
B. Deletes the selected document
C. Deletes the character to the right of the cursor
D. Highlights the line

Q10. What is "word wrap" in Microsoft Word?
A. Wrapping text around images automatically
B. Replacing words with synonyms
C. Automatically moving text to the next line when it reaches the end of the current line
D. Encrypting the document text

Q11. How do you typically break a paragraph into two paragraphs in Word?
A. Use the spacebar twice
B. Use the Tab key
C. Hit Enter at the desired break point
D. Type a slash (/) character

Q12. What does the backwards "P" button (Show/Hide) on the toolbar do?
A. Prints the document
B. Shows or hides non-printable characters (like paragraph marks and spaces)
C. Encrypts the document
D. Changes the page orientation

Q13. What is the first step before changing the formatting of text (such as centering, bolding, or coloring)?
A. Print the document
B. Save the document
C. Highlight or select the text you want to format
D. Close all other windows

Q14. Which toolbar button is used to align text to the right margin?
A. Align Left
B. Center
C. Align Right
D. Justify

Q15. How can you change the font size to a value not in the preset list?
A. Font size cannot be changed to custom values
B. Type the desired number directly into the font size box and press Enter
C. Change it in the file menu only
D. Use a macro for custom font sizes

Q16. What keyboard shortcut increases or decreases the font size using the square brackets?
A. Alt + Bracket
B. Shift + Bracket
C. Control + Left or Right Square Bracket
D. Control + Parenthesis

Q17. What does the "Foreground Color" button do in Word?
A. Changes the font style of the text
B. Changes the color of the highlighted text
C. Changes the background of the page
D. Changes the color of the selected text

Q18. What is the purpose of using Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, and Ctrl+Z in Word?
A. Cut, Print, and Close files
B. Copy, Paste, and Undo actions
C. Center, View, and Zoom
D. Create, Validate, and Zip documents

Q19. What is an alternative way to move text within a document without using cut and paste?
A. Typing the text twice
B. Printing and retyping the document
C. Highlighting the text and dragging it with the mouse
D. Using the mail merge feature

Q20. What should you do before making changes to a document you plan to save as a new file?
A. Print the document
B. Delete the original file
C. Use "Save As" to create a copy with a new file name
D. Close all other applications

Q21. Which method opens a recent document most quickly in Word?
A. Restart your computer
B. Use the "Open" button only
C. Select it from the "File" menu's recent documents list
D. Recreate the document from scratch

Q22. Why is the Print button on the toolbar described as "evil" in the video?
A. It deletes your current document
B. It prints without allowing you to choose options or change settings
C. It saves a backup
D. It sends the document by email

Q23. What is the "gutter" margin used for in Word's Page Setup?
A. To store backup files
B. For adding extra space when binding double-sided pages
C. For creating bullet points
D. For changing the color of text

Q24. How can you automatically insert today's date in a Word document so it updates each time the document is opened?
A. Type the date manually each time
B. Use Insert, Date and Time, and select "Update Automatically"
C. Only write the month and let Word figure out the rest
D. Use the grammar checker

Q25. What is recommended to get comfortable using Word, according to the instructor?
A. Only follow step-by-step instructions
B. Practice and experiment with personal or hobby projects
C. Only edit templates provided by Microsoft
D. Limit usage to business purposes

Answers: 1-C; 2-B; 3-B; 4-C; 5-B; 6-C; 7-B; 8-B; 9-C; 10-C; 11-C; 12-B; 13-C; 14-C; 15-B; 16-C; 17-D; 18-B; 19-C; 20-C; 21-C; 22-B; 23-B; 24-B; 25-B

DISCLAIMER: Quiz questions are AI generated. If you find any that are wrong, don't make sense, or aren't related to the video topic at hand, then please post a comment and let me know. Thanks.

Summary

Today's video from the Microsoft Word Learning Zone covers an introduction to Microsoft Word and the basics of using it to create professional documents. My name is Richard Rost and I'll be your instructor for this session.

To begin, let me give you a brief overview of Microsoft Word itself. Word is what we call a document processor. While most people use it for writing letters and various forms of correspondence, it can do much more than that. Word makes it easy to add images, graphics, and email your documents. There are a wide variety of tools available to help you format and customize your text as needed.

In today's class, we will focus specifically on writing a business letter. Topics we'll cover include editing text, formatting your document to look professional, saving your work, and using the clipboard to cut, copy, and paste. We'll also go over how to create bold and numbered lists, work with headers and footers, check for spelling and grammar errors, and insert basic images and clipart.

If Word isn't already open on your computer, now would be a good time to launch it.

Let me walk you through the basic parts of the Word interface. At the very top of the screen, you will see the title bar, which will say something like "Document1" until you save your file with a specific name. The menu bar sits underneath, with categories like File, Edit, View, Insert, and Format. Below the menus, you will find various toolbars. The standard toolbar has buttons for tasks like printing and saving, while the formatting toolbar lets you change things like font size, make text bold or italic, and other formatting options.

You'll notice a ruler bar, which we'll cover in more detail later. The large area below that is your main document space, where you type and design your document. In the upper right are the familiar minimize, maximize, and close buttons. If you're unclear about how these work, I recommend checking out my free Windows tutorials for guidance. The scroll bar on the right allows you to move up and down within your document. At the very bottom, you'll see the status bar, which has information and some special buttons we will talk about later. If you have used other Office programs like Excel or PowerPoint, the layout of Word should feel familiar.

Let's jump into our main task for today: writing a business letter. For our example, we are going to draft a letter to Arnold Schwarzenegger, pretending for a moment that we're his agent and hoping to enlist him for a movie.

When you first create a new document, you may want to adjust the zoom level so you can see the entire page clearly. There are several options to zoom in or out depending on what you're comfortable with.

Start with typing your salutation, such as "Dear Mr. Schwarzenegger." Sometimes, Word tries to help by offering suggestions for autocompleting phrases like "Dear Mom and Dad." You may have this turned on, or you might prefer having it disabled if you find it distracting.

If you see a red underline beneath someone's name, that means Word does not recognize the spelling. You can right-click on the word. If there is a suggested correction, you can pick from the list. If not, you can choose to ignore the spelling or add it to your custom dictionary.

As you continue your letter, if you make a mistake, such as using the word "role" when you meant the other meaning, you don't have to delete everything. Place your cursor (also called the insertion point) where you want to make the correction, and use the Backspace key to delete to the left or the Delete key to remove characters to the right. Make sure you know where these keys are on your keyboard.

If this is your first online course, my suggestion would be to watch the session live first and ask questions in the chat if you need clarification. Later, you can watch the recording and work along with the exercises at your own pace, pausing to try things out on your own machine.

As you type, notice that you do not need to press Enter at the end of each line. Microsoft Word automatically wraps text to the next line for you. Only use Enter when you want to start a new paragraph.

If you type a word incorrectly and Word does not catch it because it is still a valid word, like "rescue" instead of "rescues," you will need to proofread manually, as spell check won't catch changes in context or word usage. If you prefer using keyboard shortcuts rather than the mouse, the End key moves your cursor to the right edge of the line, which makes editing faster for many people.

For words or names that Word doesn't recognize but are correct, you can choose to ignore the spelling warning, especially if they are proper names or terms that aren't in Word's dictionary.

If you want to break a paragraph into two, simply put your cursor where you want the break and hit Enter twice. If you want to see where all your paragraph breaks and spaces are, use the Show/Hide feature, which displays non-printable characters like paragraph marks and spaces. This is helpful when editing or reformatting your document.

Let's now discuss how to use formatting to make parts of your letter stand out and look more professional. Before you format any text, you need to highlight or select it with your mouse. Once highlighted, you can use the toolbar buttons to align your text to the left, right, or center. You can also change the font style and size. Shortcuts, like holding down Control and using the left or right square bracket keys, let you quickly increase or decrease font size.

Word provides preset font sizes in its dropdown list, but you can type in custom sizes or use decimal values like 6.5, giving you a lot of flexibility. You can also apply color to the text using the font color button, and a wider palette is available if you need more choices.

If you need to highlight text for editing or emphasis, the highlighter feature is available, but it is often more useful for marking changes than for decorating text.

Moving text around in your document is simple. You can cut, copy, and paste using shortcuts like Control-C, Control-X, and Control-V. Dragging highlighted passages with the mouse also works for rearranging content, but most people prefer the keyboard shortcuts for efficiency. Use Control-Z to undo changes, and remember to save your work regularly with Control-S.

When you need to save a copy of your document, use "Save As" to avoid overwriting your original. This is handy when you want to send a similar letter to someone else. After saving a new copy, make your necessary changes throughout the document and save again.

Opening existing documents can be done through the Open button, the File menu, or directly through your My Documents folder or Documents menu on the Start menu.

To print your document, skip the toolbar Print button, as it sends the file straight to the printer with no options. Instead, use the Print option from the File menu to open the print dialog, where you can select your printer, choose which pages to print, set the number of copies, and select other options like page range and collation.

For adjusting page layout, visit the Page Setup dialog from the File menu. Here, you can modify margins, paper size, orientation, and other document settings. The gutter margin is used to provide extra space for binding on double-sided documents. Play around with these options to see what works best for your specific needs.

One useful tool is inserting the current date in your document. You can use the Insert menu to add the date manually, or set it to update automatically each time the document is opened by checking the "Update Automatically" box. This is especially useful for template letters or frequently used forms.

I encourage you to use Word for fun, as well as work, to get familiar with its many features. For instance, you might create a document for a hobby, like collecting coins or recipes. Experimenting will help you learn the software much more quickly.

For complete step-by-step instructions and to see everything demonstrated in detail, you can find the full video tutorial on my website at the link below.

Live long and prosper, my friends.

Topic List

What is Microsoft Word and its uses

Overview of the Word interface and screen layout

Identifying menu bars and toolbars

Working with the document area and ruler bar

Minimize, maximize, and close window controls

Status bar explanation

Typing and editing a business letter

Using zoom controls for document view

Autofill and autocomplete features

Spell check and correcting spelling errors

Using right-click for spelling suggestions

Understanding the cursor and insertion point

Backspace and Delete key usage

Word wrap and automatic line breaks

Paragraph breaks and using Enter to create new paragraphs

Using Show/Hide to view non-printing characters

Highlighting and selecting text

Aligning text left, center, and right

Changing fonts and font sizes

Keyboard shortcuts for resizing text

Applying text color and highlighting

Cut, copy, and paste basics

Dragging and dropping text to move it

Saving documents with Save and Save As

Opening existing documents

Locating recent documents

Using the My Documents folder and Start menu

Making document copies for reuse

Printing documents and print options

Selecting printer and printer settings

Specifying page ranges and number of copies

Understanding collation options when printing

Adjusting number of pages per sheet

Changing page setup and margins

Explaining gutter margin for binding

Setting paper size and orientation

Inserting dates manually and automatically

Insert Date and Time with update automatically

Date fields and automatic date updating

Practical suggestions for practicing Word skills