The Word application

For clarity, in this course, I have used Office Professional.

Microsoft Word is primarily a word processing application, but there’s more to it . We can also record standard letters, memos, faxes, envelopes, labels, and other types of documents.  You also have complete control over the formatting of your documents.
You can change the size, style, and monitor font color.  You can also change the layout of the document itself and also check the margins, tabs, and the grouping of the pages to change them. With Word, there is no limit to what you can do.

In Word, we also have the option to add charts, lists, and graphics creation. For example, you can import an Excel spreadsheet into your document, and then create a report with a chart to illustrate the data.  We can also use Word to create tables in which we store information or even calculations.

We open Word by double clicking the Word icon on our desktop, or by clicking the Windows Start button and selecting “All Programs” – “Microsoft Office” – “Microsoft Word 2010”.

The image below is the screen that you see when you open Word 2010.

 

The working environment

Those of us who have worked with the 2007 version of Word, would have probably noticed, that the “Office Button” has disappeared.
This has been replaced with the “File” button.
Clicking this button takes you to the “Backstage” view. I’ll discuss this, in greater detail, later.

 

We first take a look at what we see.

The Word window consists of two windows, the application window and the document window.

The document window opens in the application window.
The document window is where we create or modify documents.
We can access the document window without closing the application window.
This allows us to open and close different documents without us ever having to start the application again.
The document window is in the application window.

 

At the top of the application window we have the title bar.

In the middle of the title bar we find the name of our document, and the name of the application.

To the right of the title bar, we have the “Minimize” “Maximize” and “Close” buttons.

On the left of the title bar, we have the “Quick Access toolbar”.

Under the titlebar , we have the Ribbon.

In the ribbon, we find all the tasks that we can perform in Word.
A new feature in the 2010 version of Word is that we can customize the “Quick Access toolbar”.

 

Under the ribbon is the document which is displayed previously.

On the right side of our document, we have a vertical scroll bar.

 

At the bottom of the document, we have the different view buttons, and the scroll bar to zoom in and out of our document along with “Status bar”.

Now that we have had an overview of the key elements in our screen, we can take a closer look.

 

The title bar:

We find the title bar at the top of our window.

 

In the middle of the title bar, we find the name of our document. If this is a new, unsaved document, Word will show that it is still named “Document”, followed by a number. If you have saved the document under another name, this name will be displayed here.  In addition to the document name, we find the name of the application, which is Microsoft Word.

 

On the right side of the title bar, we find three buttons:
“Minimize”, “Maximize” / “Reduce” and “Close”.

 

Clicking on the “Minimize” button, places the application in the Windows taskbar.

Clicking the “Maximize” button, enlarges the application window to its full screen size.

The “Maximize” button is a “Toggle Button”. This means that when it is clicked, it will change to “Reduce”.

 

When we click the “Reduce” button, we can adjust the size of the window by clicking the edges and dragging the arrow until we are happy with the display.

Clicking the “Close” button, closes the application.

 

Remember that when you use these buttons, they all relate to this application.

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