This is the beginner's guide to using Microsoft Word. And specifically using it to create documents like reports, essays, handouts, flyers, things like that. And so I'm just going to go down here and click on Microsoft Word. If you don't have word down here on the taskbar, you can just click here on search windows and search for Microsoft Word to see if it's on your computer. If that doesn't turn up anything, then it's not installed on your computer. But like I said, I'm gonna go ahead and click on that to start it up and Microsoft Word opens right up, and it gives me right away a bunch of templates that I can choose from to help me get started creating documents using Microsoft Word. And you can see that there are all sorts of great documents, they have trifold brochures, they have event menus, they have blog posts, all sorts of different templates that you can use. Also across the top, notice that you can filter them by category. So I could just show business templates, I could show event templates, labels, and so on. And notice that there is an education category, you can also search for online templates here. So templates can be a great time-saver, you can just select one of these templates to open it up and then edit it and use it for your own purposes. But in this tutorial, we're going to focus just on creating starting from scratch. And so I'm going to click here where it says blank document and it opens up the Microsoft Word layout and a blank document. Now there is so much to word, most people don't really use Word to its full capabilities. But in this tutorial, I'm really going to focus on the basics of those essentials that you need to know to start using Microsoft Word effectively. And one of the first things I'm going to do is just close this panel here at the left that says navigation. It's a nice panel, but I'm gonna get rid of that and close that out. Next, I want to give you a quick tour of what you're seeing here in the layout. You'll notice that across the top, we have tabs, we have the Home tab, insert tab design tab. And this is very similar to excel, Microsoft Excel, and also Microsoft PowerPoint. If you've watched my other tutorials you already know about this Microsoft Office layout. But for those who maybe haven't watched those other tutorials, just a quick intro, each of these tabs when you click on it will give you a different ribbon. And that's what they call this. This is the ribbon and the ribbon changes based on the tab that you click OK. So if I want to change something about the layout, I click on layout and then I look at the layout ribbon and see what I can do. Now each ribbon is divided up into groups. So this is the Page Setup group. This is the paragraph group and the arranging group. Now, what if I want to insert something maybe a picture or a photo, I would go to the Insert tab and click and I get the insert ribbon with lots and lots of different groups. Now one thing about groups that you need to be aware of is some groups will have a little Launch button in the corner. So here's an example of a Launch button. The paragraph group has a Launch button. But the arranging group doesn't at least for me, it doesn't. The Page Setup group has a Launch button. So what are these launch buttons? And why do you need to know about them? Well, basically, whenever you see a Launch button, what that means is that there are more tools, but then they couldn't fit them in the space provided in the group. So if I don't see one of the font options that I would like to have, I look through these to see if it's there. And if it's not, I can just click here on the Launch button, and then I'll get even more options. Another example over here in the Styles group, there are a few styles. But if I click here, then I get many, many more styles to choose from and some options that I don't see just by looking at the group itself. So watch out for that Launch button. Okay, now down here,
I have the page of my document. This is my Word document, and it's completely blank at this time, a couple of things that I want you to know about before you get started making a document. First of all, I don't know about you, but I like to be able to see the document at least its width. And so I'm going to go down here in the lower right corner and change the zoom level. So it was at 200%. And that was a little bit too big for me, maybe 150, maybe to 125 you know, something like that, that will be a little bit easier to fit on the screen. So I think I'll just go with this 100% now in this tutorial, I'm using Microsoft Word 2016 for Windows. But if you're using an older version of Microsoft Word, or even a future version of Microsoft Word or Word for Mac, most of what I'm showing you will still be applicable. But one of the things that I kind of miss from an older version of Microsoft Word is I miss the rulers, I'm used to having a ruler across the top and also down the left side to help me know the size of the page that I'm working with. So I'm going to go here and look and see where am I might there be an option to show the ruler and I would think it would be maybe here in the layout options. But the reason I'm bringing this up is that if you're having trouble finding an option like I am right now, you don't need to really hunt and search for it very much. If it's not quickly showing up all you need to do is go here to the top where it says Tell me what you want to do, and do a search. So I'll search rulers. And look right there at the top, there's an option that says show ruler and I can click on it, and immediately the rulers pop up. Okay, so I'm happy now with the look of Microsoft Word. Okay, now I'm ready to start creating a wonderful document. And let's say this document is going to be a handout or worksheet for my students, I can just go in and start creating. So I'll just provide a space there for the name of the student, the class period, and I'm just typing and hitting Return or Enter on the keyboard. And I would like this to be the title of my document. Now, this is pretty typical. But what I would do here is highlight the text and immediately I get a pop up here with some options that I have. But I can also go here to the Home tab, Home ribbon, that's where you'll find the most commonly needed options in Microsoft Word. And so look, there is center. And that's what I was hoping for, I can also underline if I want to, I can make it bold, and there are all sorts of options that you have there, I could make the text bigger. But more often than not, instead of making all of these fine-tuned adjustments, what I often do is I use these styles. And so to show that I'm going to click the undo button several times to go back to just the text. So with just the text selected, I'm going to go here where it says styles and I'll go to heading number one, and you can see what it does, it changes the colour, it makes it bigger changes the font a little bit, there's also heading number two and several other options title would be a good one as well. And I'm going to go with title. Now regardless of which one you pick, if you want, you can still adjust like I would still like that to be centered, I would still like it to be underlined. And I think that looks really nice. So now I hit Enter or Return and I can proceed to create this worksheet, I can type in instructions for my students, and Microsoft Word handles most of the work I'm just typing hitting Enter, moving down. Now I can also click to move around using the mouse. But watch what happens. I can only click so far, it's not letting me go past the current line that I've typed, I can go to the right side of it. But that's as far as it'll let me go. I can go back up though by clicking and make changes, make adjustments, okay, and I'm really ruining this document, aren't I. So I'll just undo a few times. But the point is that if you want to put in some blank space and then type something below, you're going to have to tap enter a few times to move the cursor down, and then you'll be able to type down below. Now when you get to the bottom of the page, you hit enter and look, it just takes you automatically to page number two. Now a few other essential things to know about Microsoft Word include how to insert pictures, because that's really one of the powerful things about Microsoft Word. And you heard me say the keyword there didn't Yeah, it's insert. So I click on insert and look at the options that I have for things to insert into this document all sorts of things, including Wikipedia articles, online videos, all sorts of neat things. But in this case, I'm going to go to pictures and then automatically accessed my computer. And now I can browse my computer to find pictures that I can then pull in and use in my document. So I'll pull in the skeleton. Now whenever you put a photo or an image into Microsoft Word, it brings up some difficulties, for example, that is not at all where I wanted that photo to be. I wanted it to be here in between the text up here and the text down below. And so this is a problem. The other problem is the photo came in way too big.