2. Choose File/New to create a blank document. (Don’t use the wizards. They’re lame.)
3. Even if you have used Microsoft
Word before, spend a few minutes studying the various
buttons in the toolbar. If you hold the pointer over a
button for a few seconds, a note pops up that tells you
what the button does.
4. Now spend a few minutes studying the choices under each menu and thinking about what they mean before you start writing. This is the fastest way to learn a program’s features, and you’ll probably find something you didn’t know was there.
5. Start writing. Get the main ideas on the page and force yourself not to play with the formatting…do that last and you’ll save yourself an incredible amount of time.
6. Save your work. You wouldn’t want to type all that again if your friend kicks the power strip and turns off your computer (yes, this happens all the time!). Choose File/Save As… the first time you save (tell the program where to save and what to call the file) and afterwards, just choose File/Save or Command-S to update.
7a. OK, you’ve disregarded my earlier advice and want to put lots of pictures on the page RIGHT NOW and come back to the writing later. Here’s how to do it. To add pictures to your newsletter, choose Insert/Picture-Clip Art, and select from the list. Click the Insert button when you find one you like.
7b. Whoa! That image is huge! How do I make
it smaller? Just position the pointer over one of the little white
boxes around the edges of the graphic
and drag to resize.
7c. To reposition the image, move the
pointer to the center of the image until the pointer looks like
and then
drag.
7d. Click on the image, and then choose View/Toolbars/Picture and you’ll see this...
7e. Click on the word wrapping tool
and choose
"Square" or "Tight" to make the words wrap around
the image.
8. Don’t like the Clip Art? You can copy and paste just about any graphic from the Internet into Word just by holding the mouse button down over an image (on a Mac) or right-clicking (on a PC) in your web browser and then choosing "copy this image." Then jump back to Word and choose Edit/Paste. The Microsoft website also has additional clip art that you can download.
9. Formatting the text is something
most beginners try to do using tabs, spaces and returns.
This is a holdover from the days of typewriters, and it's
much better to use the ruler. Can't find the ruler?
Choose View/Ruler from the menus. There are three
paragraph formatting tools in the ruler. The upper
triangle controls the position of the first line in the
paragraph and the lower triangle controls the position of
the following lines. The bottom rectangle controls how
far from the left margin the paragraph starts. Highlight
some text and then experiment with these
tools.
10. Creating columns is easy. Just highlight some text and choose Format/Columns. Before you click OK, be sure that the change will be applied only to your "selected text" and not the "whole document".
11. The typeface is called a font, and each font can have many styles (Bold, Italic, Underline, etc.) and sizes. (12, 14, 20, 36, etc.) You can change the font and size from the toolbar and you can choose the most common styles from the toolbar as well. For more style choices, go to the menu Format/Font.
12. Check your spelling from the Tools/Spelling and Grammar menu.
13. Experiment with the drawing tools by choosing View/Toolbars/Drawing. See if you can add a colored box or arrow to your page.
14. Try inserting a table using the menu
Table/Insert Table. It will let you pick the number of rows
and columns, though you can also change this later. You can also
insert a spreadsheet by clicking on the Insert Spreadsheet tool.
|
15. Draw an outside border around
your text with this tool. |
Clicking on the triangle gives you more
options.16. Keep exploring...there's a lot more to Word than just typing...