Word for Beginners: Word Essentials, #1

Also by M.L. Humphrey

Listing of all books by M.L. Humphrey

Word Essentials

Word for Beginners

Intermediate Word

Excel Essentials

Excel for Beginners

Intermediate Excel

50 Useful Excel Functions

50 More Excel Functions

Access Essentials

Access for Beginners

Intermediate Access

PowerPoint Essentials

PowerPoint for Beginners

Intermediate PowerPoint

Word for Beginners

Word Essentials Book 1

M.L. Humphrey

Contents

Introduction

Basic Terminology

Absolute Basics

Basic Tasks

Text Formatting

Paragraph Formatting

Other Functions

Page Formatting

Printing

Customized Settings

Conclusion

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

The purpose of this guide is to introduce you to the basics of using Microsoft Word. While there are a number of other word processing programs out there, Word is still the gold-standard go-to program in use in large portions of the corporate world, so if you’re going to be involved in a white collar job (and even some blue collar jobs), being familiar with Word will be a significant advantage for you. And essential for many jobs. (The days of having an assistant who could do those things for you are gone.)

It’s also the program I use for all of my writing. (This book isn’t going to be focused on self-publishing, but if you format a document the right way in Word you can publish directly to most of the major sales platforms without any additional effort.)

Word can be incredibly simple to use. At its most basic, you can open a new file, type in your text, save, and be done. But chances are that you’ll want more control over what you type and how it looks than that. Maybe you need to use a different font or font size. Maybe you want to indent your paragraphs. Maybe you want to include a bulleted or numbered list in your document.

That’s where this guide comes in. I’ll walk you through the absolute basics (open, save, delete), too, but most of this guide will be focused on what to do with your text once it’s been typed into your document.

Having said that, we’re not going to cover everything you can do in Word. The goal of this guide is to get you up to speed and comfortable with what you’ll need for probably 98% of what you’ll use Word for on a daily basis.

The exceptions to that are if you’re working in an environment where you need to use track changes to work on a group document or one where you need to create tables or complex multilevel lists. Those are more advanced topics that are covered in Intermediate Word.

The goal here is to give you a solid foundation that you can work from, and I don’t want to distract from those core skills by getting into specialized topics that either won’t apply to most users or that require enough detail to understand that they’ll likely confuse a beginning user.

Another thing to note before we get started. All of the screenshots I’m going to show you are from Word 2013. If you have an earlier version of Word, especially a version prior to 2007, things may look different at the top of the screen. All of the shortcut keys, which I would recommend you use, will be the same, but navigation won’t be.

With Excel I recommend that people with older versions upgrade to a post-2007 version of the program. With Word, especially for the beginner level, that probably isn’t necessary. However, if you’re using a really old version of Word you’re going to have less help options. Right now the Microsoft website only has tutorials for Word 2010, 2013, and 2016, and most users won’t have access to your version of Word to be able to see what you’re seeing.

If you’re using Word 2016, nothing we’re going to cover here appears to have changed with the most recent version, so you should be fine.

Alright then. Ready? Let’s do this.

Basic Terminology

Before we get started, I want to make sure that we’re on the same page in terms of terminology.

Tab

I refer to the menu choices at the top of the screen (File, Home, Insert, Design, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review, View, Developer) as tabs. If you click on one you’ll see that the way it’s highlighted sort of looks like an old-time filing system.

Each tab you select will show you different options. For example, in the image above, I have the Home tab selected and you can do various tasks such as cut/copy/paste, format paint, change the font, change the formatting of a paragraph, apply a style to your text, find/replace words in your document, or select the text in your document. Other tabs give other options.

Click

If I tell you to click on something, that means to use your mouse (or trackpad) to move the arrow on the screen over to a specific location and left-click or right-click on the option. (See the next definition for the difference between left-click and right-click).

If you left-click, this selects the item. If you right-click, this generally creates a dropdown list of options to choose from. If I don't tell you which to do, left- or right-click, then left-click.

Left-click/Right-click

If you look at your mouse or your trackpad, you generally have two flat buttons to press. One is on the left side, one is on the right. If I say left-click that means to press down on the button on the left.