MS WORD BASICS CHAPTER ONE SECTION ONE

How to Open Microsoft Word

If you're not sure how to open up Microsoft Word, then do the following.

Click your left mouse button once on the Start button in the bottom left of your screen. If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, the round Start button will look like this:

If you have Windows XP the start button looks like this:

On the Start menu that appears, click your left mouse button on the All Programs item. On the All programs menu, look for Microsoft Office. If you have Office 2007 (or 2010), you'll see this:

If you have an earlier version of Microsoft Word, you'll see something like this:

If you don't see Word 2007 or Word 2010, then you have an earlier version of the software. In which case, your course is here: Word 2000 to 2003 

When Microsoft Word opens, you should a screen something like this one (Word 2007):

In Word 2010, you won't see the round Office button in the top left. Instead, you'll have an extra item in the top left - the File tab.

The main area, all that white space, is the page you type on, just like a piece of paper. The area above the white space is called the Ribbon. The Ribbon contains all the toolbars (known as Tabs) that you can use to brighten up the plain white text on your page. The Tabs are called: Home, Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review and View. (Word 2010 will also have a File tab, which will be the first item.)
Click each of these in turn to see what items are on each tab. When you have finished exploring, click back on the Home tab. The Home tab contains the items you'll use the most, like font formatting, alignment, cut, copy and paste.

Finding your way around

Have a look at the bottom right of your screen and locate the following area:

If your screen is too small or too large, you can use the zoom slider to increase or decrease the size of your page. Hold down your left mouse button on the slider. Keep it held down and move it to the left to make your page smaller, and to the right to make it bigger. (You can also click the plus and minus buttons.) The default setting is 100%, and the slider is in the middle.

Just above the slider, you'll see some arrows. The two sets of double arrows allow you to move up or down one page at a time:

Clicking the round button between the two sets of double arrows opens up a shortcut toolbar. This one:

The items on the menu are shortcuts that allow you to browse through various areas of your document. The double arrows then turn blue. So, for example, if you wanted to jump from image to image in your document, you would click the Graphic item on the toolbar, which is the second from the right on the top row in the image above. After the double arrows turn blue, you would click one to move to the next or previous image.

Another area worth exploring is just to the left of the zoom slider. This one:

These are various page views you can have. The first one, highlighted above, is called Print Layout, and is the default. Click the other four to see what they do. To get out of Full Screen, which is the second one, click the Close button in the top right.

Click back on the first icon, however, when you finished exploring. We'll make a start.