The Word program

Microsoft Word is primarily a word processing program, but even in this program we have some more features. We can make 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, font and color of your documents.
You can change the layout of the document by changing the margins, tabs, and the grouping of the pages.
With Word, the only limitation is your imagination.
In Word, we also have the ability to add charts, lists, and graphics.
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 and even calculations.

We open Word by double clicking the Word icon on our desktop, or clicking the Windows Start button and selecting “All Programs” – “Microsoft Word 2007”.

The image below is the screen that you see when you open Word 2007.

 

The working environment

If you already have worked on earlier versions of Word, you see immediately that the environment has completely changed in Word 2007.  In other words, whether it’s the first time you’re using Word, or you have already worked with earlier versions of Word, you will have to commit some time to get used to the new environment.

The Word window consists of two windows, you have the application window and you have the document window.
The document window opens in the application window.
The document window is where we create or modify documents.
We can close the document window without closing the application window.
This allows us to open and close different documents without ever having to start the application again.
The document window is in the application window.

Let me first quickly go over what we’ve see when we open Word 2007.
At the top left we find the Office Button.
When we click on this button, we have access to the most used features in Word such as “New”, “Open” and “Save” and “Print”. This pretty much replaces the “File” button in previous versions of Word.

To its right, in the title bar, we find the toolbar “Quick Access”.
By default, this toolbar has the buttons “Save”, “Undo” and “Redo”.
The toolbar “Quick Access” is the only toolbar where we can add or remove buttons.

In the middle of the titlebar we find the name of our document, and the name of the application.
To the right of the titlebar we have the buttons “Minimize” “Maximize” and “Close”.

Under the titlebar we have the Ribbon.
In the ribbon we find all tasks that we can perform in Word.
The Ribbon replaces the various tasks in the various toolbars, we had in the previous versions of Word.
We will discuss these different assignments when we use it in subsequent lessons.

Under the ribbon is the document which we displayed at that time.
On the right side of our paper we have a vertical scroll bar.
At the bottom of our document we find a horizontal scroll bar.
And below the horizontal scroll bar, we have the different view buttons and the slider to zoom in and out in our document.

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

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