Entering text

When we open Word 2010, a new document is automatically displayed on our screen, and the cursor blinks on the first line of the document.

When you start entering a small amount of text, and press the Enter key on your keyboard, the cursor will go to the next line. Word considers this text as a paragraph (1).

This is an important piece of information to bear in mind, when you start creating paragraphs.

If you have a large amount of typed text, Word will automatically continue on the next line when you’ve reached the end of a line (2).

This is called automatic return.

 

“Save and Save As”

Once we have entered data in our document, we need to save it.

To save a document, click the “File” tab at the top left corner of the application window.

In the backstage window that appears, we have two options: “Save” and “Save As”

The “Save” option allows us to save a previously saved document in which changes have been made

The option “Save as …” allows us to give our document an appropriate name when we save it. It also allows us to save a previously saved document under a new name.

When we select the “Save as …” option and click on the “Word document” item, a dialog box opens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

By default, Microsoft Word will save your document in the “My Documents” folder.

You can navigate to any other folder on your computer and save the file.

 

Word saves your file with the extension .docx (1).

docx is the new extension from Word 2007, and earlier versions of Word had the extension .doc

Tip!
If you work along with several people on a document, and some people still are using an older version than Word 2007, you need to save the file (also) as “Word 97 -2003 document”.

Give the file a suitable name, and click the “Save” button.

This saves the file in the folder that you’ve selected, under the name that you’ve entered.

The name of your document will be displayed in the title bar.

If you change data in your document, later, click the “Save” button in the “Quick Access” toolbar. This will save the document under the same name in the same folder.

 

If you want the older version of the document to be retained, click the “Save As” button, in the backstage, and give the document a different name.

 

Recover unsaved documents

Suppose you have, for some reason, a document which has been closed, without the changes being saved. This is, obviously, unwise, but you don’t need to panic, because this can be recovered.

In Lesson 7 of this course, I already told you that Word 2010 will automatically save your document using the “Auto Recovery” option.

Now I will tell you how to re-open this unsaved document.

The first thing you need to do is to open a modified, but unsaved, document.
Click the “File” (1) tab in the ribbon, and in the backstage view select the “Info” (2) category.
As you can see in the “Versions” (3) tab, the unsaved document is(s) listed here.

Double-click the document to reopen it.  When we open the unsaved document, at the top we find a warning stating that the document isn’t saved. Logically, there are two other buttons, “Compare” and “Restore”, that are displayed.

Clicking the “Restore” button will open a dialog in which you can save the document again.

In the next lesson we’ll see what happens when we click the “Compare” button.

Featured Courses

• Downloading iPad Apps
• Lesson 1: Introduction to Publisher
• Lesson 65: File Formats