Microsoft Office: First Steps

Course details

The Microsoft Office suite boasts a fleet of industry-leading software programs, including Word,
Excel, and PowerPoint. In this short course, get a general introduction to what Office has to offer.
Instructor Nick Brazzi goes over the different versions of Office, as well as how to tell which version
you're using. He provides a tour of the Office interface, shares keyboard shortcuts that work across
the Office suite, and offers guidance on when to use the web-based and mobile versions of Office
apps. Nick also points out helpful courses in the LinkedIn Learning library that can help you get up to
speed with Office, regardless of your experience level.

Getting to know Microsoft Office

- [Nick] Microsoft Office started out as a small collection of tools, including Word, Excel, and
PowerPoint, but it has evolved over the years. And now, there are different versions of the Office
collection. There's the Microsoft 365 subscription and there are the standalone applications that you
can buy separately. Sometimes it can be hard to figure out which version of Office you have or which
version you want to buy, and that can make it difficult to find the right training courses for the
applications you have. So I decided to do a short course, an overview of Microsoft Office, so you can
identify your learning opportunities. This course will help you identify which version of Office you
have and will help you understand which applications and services are included in the different
versions. Then, we will explore some basic software interface elements and some helpful shortcuts
that are common to many of the Office applications. I think this will be a great launching pad for
people just getting started with Office. After this course, you'll be in a much better position to find
the training courses you need for the applications you're using.

Understand the different versions of Microsoft Office

- Hi, I'm Nick, a staff instructor here at LinkedIn Learning. If you're looking for courses for Microsoft
Office, you'll find that we have a lot of learning opportunities in our library, but sometimes it can be
hard to figure out the right course for the application that you're using. I want to help clarify this. To
start, there are two main versions Office. Microsoft 365 is a subscription service which includes the
Office applications like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, as well as many other applications and online tools.
This used to be known as Office 365, but the official name is now Microsoft 365. The applications
included in this subscription get constant feature and interface updates from Microsoft. Then there's
the stand-alone version of Office. That's the one with a year in the title like Office 2019 or Office
2016. The stand-alone version is a one-time purchase which does not get constant feature updates.
So you may hear about an exciting new feature that is being added to Microsoft 365, but if you have
Office 2016 or Office 2019, you won't see that new feature. And naturally, each of these main
versions split again into the Mac and Windows versions. If you're already using Office, but you're not
sure which version you're using, it's fairly easy to find that. Start by opening Word, PowerPoint or
Excel and make sure you have a document open. For Windows users, click the file button up near the
top left to go to the backstage view, then click account. Your version name should be visible here.
For Mac users, go to the application menu and choose about, then look at the license line. If it says
Microsoft 365, or if there is something about subscription, you have the Microsoft 365 version. If it
has the year listed in the name, or if it just does not specify either way, then you have the stand-
alone version. Once you know the version you have, choosing the right course gets easier. So if
you're working with Excel and you have Microsoft 365, look for Excel courses that either have 365 in
the title or no mention of the version at all. If you have one of the stand-alone versions of Office,
look for a course with the year in the title like 2019, 2016, 2013 and so on depending on what you
have. Now we do not publish version specific courses of every possible learning topic. You will find
essential training courses on each main version because our central training series is, well, an
essential core resource, but we also have plenty of intermediate and advanced courses focusing on
topics like Excel pivot tables or mail merge in Word. So naturally, I do recommend you start by
looking for the course design for the specific version that you're using, but if you just can't find a
course that specifically refers to your version, or if you use the Mac version, but the course you want
is only available on Windows, then I encourage you to just go ahead and check out the course for
that other version anyway. Let's face it, Word is Word, Excel is Excel. If you're aware and prepared to
work around a few small differences, then you open yourself up to more learning opportunities.
Now finally, I should mention that there are also different versions of some of your favorite Office
applications that you can use in a web browser and apps for mobile phones and tablets. Those are
separate products and we have specific learning courses available for those as well. And remember,
we are committed to updating our courses for major new features, but if you're watching a course
where the interface looks a little different from yours, don't let that throw you. It's a natural part of
using software that is constantly being updated.

Tools included in the Office suite

- [Narrator] You probably know that Microsoft Office is not one application, it's a collection of
several applications and online tools. Let's get an idea of what you should expect to have if you're
using Office. The main players, of course, are Word which is used for writing documents of all types,
Excel, which is used for making spreadsheets to organize data and PowerPoint which is used for
making slideshow presentations. These are included in every version of Office but most Office
collections also include Outlook which is used for working with email, a calendar and an address
book. Beyond that, there are a few Windows only applications that you could purchase separately.
Publisher is used for doing page layout, like if you're designing print advertisements or magazine
pages and Access is used for building databases. And at this point, it's important to remember that
there are two primary versions of Office, the Microsoft 365 subscription and the standalone versions
that you can buy without the subscription. And what we've seen so far are the only applications that
you can buy standalone. But if you have the Microsoft 365 subscription, you can download and
install the applications we've already seen as well as many other tools. This is the Microsoft 365
website and it's your general hub for accessing everything that comes with that subscription. You
can get to this by going to office.com and you can sign into your account from here. Once you've
signed into this website, you could click this button near the top right to install the applications that
we've already talked about on your computer or you could click this button near the top left which
looks like a grid, this is called the app chooser and you can see the other tools that come with your
account. Some of these are services that only work on the website but some of them also have
desktop applications that you can install on your computer. For example, Outlook. We saw that as an
application on my computer but if you prefer, you can use Outlook in your web browser. and there
are many other examples of this, like Word. You can actually use Word in a web browser without
installing the application on your computer. It doesn't have all of the same features but it's good for
some occasional work. Okay, let's look at a few of the others starting with OneDrive. This is a cloud
storage tool which gives you space on Microsoft servers where you can store documents and other
files. From there, you can access those files from multiple computers and devices. You can share files
with other people and you can easily open documents from OneDrive in many other Office
applications. Back in the app chooser, there are lots of other applications and tools that you might
have. This list is different depending on what type of subscription you have, so you may not see the
same options I have here. Teams is a hub for sending messages and having conversations with other
people, usually your coworkers at your company. You can have one-on-one or group chats, video
meetings or open conversations accessible to large groups of people, you can also share files inside
of Teams. Going to the app chooser again. OneNote is a notebook tool, you can use it to organize
and share complex notebooks. SharePoint is a tool for building custom websites with resources
specifically for people in your organization. It can even store files similar to OneDrive but files on
SharePoint are accessible to your coworkers who are members of that work group. Now, if we go
back to the app chooser, you can click where it says Office 365 to go back to that main page or you
can click all apps to see a much longer list. This includes things like Forms for creating online forms
so that you can collect information from people online or Planner for organizing and assigning tasks
to team members or Yammer, a social media site for you and your coworkers. There are lots of
options and this gives you a general idea of which of those tools are available to you. If you need to
work with some of them or if any of them just look interesting, I encourage you to find the training
course for those applications and start learning.

A quick tour of the Office interface

- [Instructor] The different Office applications, as much as possible, have interfaces with the same
basic design. So if you learn the interface in Word, then you pretty much already know the interface
in Excel and PowerPoint. And other applications maintain some of those interface rules as much as
possible, making it easier to learn a new Office application if you're already familiar with another. I'll
start by launching Microsoft Word. And when you launch the application, the first thing you see is
the welcome screen. Here you could create a new blank document, you could open a document that
you have on your storage drive, or you could go to the recent list and open a document you've
edited recently. I'll use that to open this document. Now, the main part of the window is obviously
different from one application to the next, and it depends on what document you're working on. But
probably the most important thing that we see in a lot of Office applications is the ribbon. That's this
row of buttons and controls across the top. Lots of buttons, lots of controls. Now you see we've got
these options labeled Home, Insert, Draw, Design, and so on. I'm currently in the Home ribbon, I can
see that one is selected. But if I click Insert, that switches me to the Insert ribbon, which has a
different set of controls. As you learn these applications, you'll start to learn what a lot of these
controls do, and you'll remember the ones you need. Some people call these tabs, which is a fine
word for them, but the official name is ribbons. And I'm going to go back to the Home ribbon. That's
usually where you'll find the controls you use most often. The next thing is the backstage view,
which is the major difference between the Mac and Windows versions of the Office applications.
Here on Windows, there is a File button in the far left corner. And if I click on that, that takes us to
the backstage view, which is obviously really similar to the welcome screen, but you get more
options. You could open a document or create a new document, but you can also get information
about the document you currently have open. You can save changes to the document you're
working on. You can print it or close the document when you're finished. The Mac version of the
Office applications do not have the backstage view, and there is no File button on the left side of the
ribbon. Instead, all of the controls we just saw are in the File menu on the Mac. Just click the File
menu at the top of the screen just like most applications on the Mac, and here you have the options
to create new documents, save, print, and so on. Back here in Windows, when you're finished with
the backstage view, you can go back to your document by clicking this arrow up in the top left. And
now up in the top left corner, we can see what is called the quick access toolbar. This gives you
shortcuts to important controls to save your time. You could save your document from here, there's
an undo button, and there's also this menu where you can add your other favorite controls to the
quick access toolbar. At the bottom right is the zoom slider, which you can use to change the size of
your document on the screen. So those are the core interface elements. And if we go to another
Office application like Excel or PowerPoint, you'll see that everything looks pretty much the same.
Now, not all of them the Office applications are the same, but these interface elements do show up
in varying degrees in other applications. For example, if I launch Outlook, it does not start with the
welcome screen. And then there is no document editing workspace. Instead, you have an interface
specifically designed for working with your email and your calendar. But there is still a ribbon, there
is still a quick access toolbar at the top, and we can still click on File to go to the backstage view.
Other Office applications will have some of these interface elements, but don't always expect to see
all of them. Usually there are enough similarities to what we've seen here that it makes it easier to
start working with the next application that you want to learn.

Use web-based applications

- [Instructor] In addition to the standard desktop applications you can also use certain Office
applications like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel online in a web browser or integrated inside of other
applications. You can start on the Microsoft 365 website if you have that subscription, but you could
also sign into a free Microsoft account. In another window I'm signed into my free outlook.com
email account, and just like the Microsoft 365 subscription, there is an app chooser up in the top left
where I could use Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. I even have a free OneDrive storage space here too.
So you can use many of these tools for free keeping in mind that they do not have all of the features
offered by the full desktop applications. But I'm going to switch back to my Microsoft 365 account.
I'll go to the app chooser and let's open up Word from there. So we have a welcome screen, similar
to the desktop version. You can make a new blank document, you can start from a template, and
there's a button here for even more templates, or you can scroll down and open a document that
you've edited recently. You can not directly open files stored on your computer. You can only open
files that are stored on one of Microsoft's online storage tools like OneDrive or SharePoint. Now
there is a button here to upload a file from your computer to your OneDrive, but understand that
we'll give you a separate copy on your OneDrive that you can work with from there. And if you
create a new document it will be stored on your OneDrive. I'm going to create a new blank
document, and we've got an interface that's similar to the desktop application on Windows. Not all
of the same features are here but you do have the essential core editing tools. We have the ribbons
up at the top, and we can flip between the different ribbons for other controls. If you click file, you
get a light version of the backstage view. But back in the document, you should probably start by
going to this menu up at the top and give the document a name that you want for it. And then you
can see which folder on your OneDrive that file is going to be stored in. And you could click here and
choose a different folder on your OneDrive if you want. So you can make a document and it will be
saved on your OneDrive or you could start in your OneDrive. I'll go to the app chooser, and I'll open
up OneDrive. This is my storage tool in my Microsoft account. You can see, I already have lots of files
and folders stored here. I could go into a folder on my OneDrive. There's a menu up at the top where
I can create a new document in this folder. Or if there is an existing Word, Excel, or PowerPoint
document in that folder, you can click on it, and edit it right here. This web based interface also gives
you an easy way to edit a document from within other Office applications like SharePoint or Teams.
So for example, I'll go over to Teams, and in Teams you can have conversations and you can also
share files with your teammates. If somebody shares a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document, or a
OneNote in Teams like this, you can click on it and you can edit that document right here in the
Teams interface. This is the same web based interface, but contained in the Teams window. And it
can do everything the web version can do. You can also click this button near the top right with three
dots on it to open this menu. And you could open this document in a web browser if you need it in a
separate window. Or when you're finished, you can click close to close this document and go back to
the normal Teams' interface. So you can think of this as a light version of the Office applications that
you can use on the web, or you can think of it as a way of editing documents directly inside of
another Office application. Naturally, there are training courses on LinkedIn Learning specifically for
these web based tools if you want to learn more.

Use Office apps for smartphones and tablets

- [Instructor] Many of the Office applications are available as mobile apps for smartphones and
tablets. I've already installed some of these apps on my iPhone, and these work basically the same
on Android phones. I'm going to launch the Word app. And when you first launch these mobile apps,
you will be prompted to sign in. For Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, you could skip the sign in process,
but then you will only be able to view documents, not edit them. You could also set up a free
account which will give you limited features, but I'm going to sign into my Microsoft 365 account
which will open everything. So I'll tap sign in, and sign into that account. Once you've signed in, you
can use the buttons at the bottom to see different options. You can make a new document, open a
document you've edited recently, or open a specific file from a specific location. You can open files
you have stored on OneDrive or SharePoint, if you use that. You can also open files that are stored
directly on your phone or tablet's internal storage. But storing files directly on your device is not so
popular. You could also tap add storage account, and you could link other cloud storage tools like
Box, Dropbox, or maybe an additional OneDrive account. For now, I'm just going to cancel that. I'll go
back to that recents list and open a document I worked on recently. Clearly, the interface is going to
be a bit different on such a small screen, but many of the familiar tools are here. You can tap on a
document to make changes to it. When you're finished, you can tap this button to hide the
keyboard. It doesn't look like it at first, but you can use the ribbons. There's a button up at the top.
And if you tap on that, it opens what is called the vertical ribbon. And if I open this menu here, you
can see that I am in the home ribbon, but I could switch to one of the other ribbons and you can see
the controls that you would have in that ribbon. I'll go back to the home ribbon where we have the
controls that I use most often. And when you're finished, you can tap this down-pointing arrow to
hide the ribbon. The button with three dots in the top-right will take you to a light version of the
backstage view where you can see information about the document, save a copy and even print it to
a wifi-based printer. I'll tap done here. And if you tap the back button up in the top-left, it closes the
document and takes you back to the welcome screen. Now not every Office application is the same,
of course. Let's go to the Microsoft Teams app. And here, you get an equally downsized version of
Teams. But I do want you to see if you're working in the Teams app and somebody has shared a
Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document, you can tap on it to open it here in the app. Now this is a
view only mode, but if you also have the Word, Excel, or PowerPoint apps on your phone, you can
tap this edit button in the top-right corner. And it will open that file in the associated app. So I could
make my changes here and it would save those changes to the file that is stored in Teams. Of course,
these apps are available for tablets as well, but with the bigger screen, the interface is much more
similar to the desktop or web-based versions. On the welcome screen, those buttons are on the left
for your recent list or opening an existing document. But I'll start here by making a blank document.
And the big difference is that you do have the ribbons which are much more similar to the ribbons in
the desktop application. And I can flip through those here. In the top-right is the button with three
dots which gives you those saving and printing options. And the back button in the top-left closes the
document and takes you back to the welcome screen. Naturally, there are some limitations to these
apps, but if you're going to be away from your computer and you're traveling light, these mobile
apps are a great option to access and edit your files.

Common Office shortcuts

- [Instructor] Let's introduce a few useful shortcuts that work in many of the Office applications.
First, if you ever do something that you immediately undo like if I delete this line of text and I realize
that was a mistake, then you can undo. In some Office applications there is an undo button in the
quick access toolbar at the top or you can use the keyboard shortcut. On Windows that is Control + Z
and on Mac it's Command + Z. You can even hit undo multiple times to take several steps back. Next
let's look at copy and paste. Let's say, I want to paste this piece of text somewhere else in my
document. Of course I can select it and then I could copy it. So I could use the keyboard shortcut
which is Control + C on Windows or Command + C on the Mac. Or if you prefer, there is a copy
button in the home ribbon. When you click on that, the computer is remembering it so you can paste
it somewhere else later. Okay, so I'm going to place my cursor here and this is where I want to paste
that text. I could use the keyboard shortcut Control + V or Command + V or I could click the pace
button here in the home ribbon. And you see it paste that text right there. But you might want to
consider something else. In applications like Word, when you paste like this it maintains the format
of the text that you copied. And in this case it's much bigger and it's styled differently from all of the
text around it. So I'll click the undo button in the quick access toolbar to undo that and we're going
to paste it differently. I still have my cursor where I want to paste it. And this time, instead of clicking
the paste button I'm going to click this arrow below the pace button which opens up a menu with
more options. And if you're using the Windows version you can point at these options without
clicking on them and it gives you a preview of what it'll look like if you use those options. The first
option which is keep source formatting is the default view that we just saw. Merge formatting makes
the pasted text match the format of the paragraph it's being pasted into. Paste as picture converts
whatever you copied into a picture and keep text only strips out all formatting. It also strips out any
pictures, tables or other non-text elements that you may have copied. Once you find the option that
you want you can click on it and you can see I've pasted that text. Let's look at a few other important
shortcuts. Sometimes you need to find a specific word or phrase in your document. You may have a
Find button in the home ribbon or you could use the keyboard shortcut which is Control + F on
Windows or Command + F on a Mac. So from here, I could type in a word that I want to find in my
document, hit the return key and it highlights all examples of those words. And when you're finished
you can click this X to close that panel. Or you might want to replace all instances of a specific word
with something else. To do that you can use find and replace. And the keyboard shortcut for that is
the same on both Mac and Windows, it's Control + H. So I can type in the word that I want to find.
It's actually got the one I was just searching for. And then I can type in the word or words that I want
to replace it with. Then you could replace one at a time or you can click replace all. And now it's
replaced all instances of the word employee with the phrase team member. So I'll close this and as I
scroll through my document I can see it's replaced all of those. Finally, the ribbon might be taking up
too much space on your screen. And if that's the case, you can hide it. If you're using the Windows
version you can click this arrow in the bottom right corner of the ribbon and the ribbon shrinks
down. To open the ribbon again, you can just click on the ribbon header that you want. So if I click
home, it opens up the home ribbon. But the next time you click anywhere outside of the ribbon it
will close again. So if you want the ribbon to stay open again just double click on the header, and
now it will stay open even when you click outside of it. If you're working on the Mac this works a
little differently. On the Mac you can go to the view menu where you can hide the ribbon and you
can go back to the view menu later to show it again. There are so many more shortcuts and lots of
different ways to find them. If you check out some of our other Office courses, you're sure to
discover more.