DEFINITIONS:

• Ribbon Bar: The bar at the top of Word that is a combination of the menu bar and toolbar. The HOME, INSERT, DESIGN, and LAYOUT tabs are all part of the ribbon bar.
• Stylized: Created with an emphasis of a particular style.

Let’s take a quick look at how to navigate around Word.

Starting Word, you’ll see this screen.

The left panel shows any recent documents, an easy way to get back to what you were working on.

You can OPEN OTHER DOCUMENTS by clicking here, or select a template as a starting point for your document.

We’ll cover templates in a later lecture.

For now, let’s create a blank document for our tour.

The tabs at the top give you access to various tools used in Word, and each tab displays these tools in what’s called the ribbon bar.

The tabs are FILE, HOME, INSERT, DESIGN, LAYOUT, REFERENCES, MAILINGS, REVIEW, and VIEW.

Clicking each tab shows the tools available for that category in the ribbon bar.

Don’t get overwhelmed by all the tools – as you use Word you’ll become quite familiar with each of them.

Especially helpful - when you hover over any of these icons, it explains what it does, many times with a small visual graphic.

The FILE tab is all about creating, opening and saving documents.

You’ll also go here to print, share, and set options you’d like for Word.

Press escape or the left arrow at the top to return to the blank document.

You’ll most likely spend most of your time in the HOME tab.

It contains tools such as copy and paste, formatting your text with different fonts and colors, aligning text, using pre-defined styles, and find and replace options.

The INSERT tab contains various tools used to create pages and tables, include illustrations, such as shapes, pictures, and charts, comments, headers and footers, stylizing text, and using special symbols.

The DESIGN tab includes THEMES, document formatting which will apply different styles to the entire document, and background tools, such as applying watermarks.

The LAYOUT tab contains tools to format your documents; such as controlling margins, columns and page breaks, paragraph spacing, and arranging how text wraps around any graphics you’ve included in your document.

The REFERENCES tab contains tools to automatically add a table of contents, footnotes, bibliographies, captions, such as those used under an inserted photo, indexes, and authorities, such as citing legal cases and regulations.

The MAILINGS tab is a quick way to create envelopes and labels, and do mail merge functions such as inserting a list of addresses on each letter to personalize your document.

The REVIEW tab allows you to proof your document with spelling and grammar tools, translate languages, and help with collaboration on documents using comments, and tracking who made what changes to the document, which can be accepted or rejected.

The VIEW tab is all about how you want to view and edit the document you are working on.

It contains different views, what to show, zooming controls, various window features, and macros, where you can record repetitive actions and have Word play those actions back.

TELL ME WHAT TO DO is new to 2016 and assists you in getting things done.

Click on it, or use the keyboard shortcut ALT-Q.

For example, start typing PRINT, and a number of suggestions show up such as PREVIEW AND PRINT, PRINT, PRINT LAYOUT and so on.

These are not just help explanations like other programs, they are commands that do something for you.

Click on PREVIEW AND PRINT, and it executes that command, taking you to the print and preview screen, so you can review your settings and print your worksheet.

We’ll cover PRINTING in a later lecture, so for now, click the BACK button, or press ESCAPE to return to your document.

Below the tabs and their ribbon bars, is the document, where you’ll enter text and format it to your liking.

Adding text works like any other text editing or word processing program you’ve used.

At the bottom left, the STATUS BAR shows you what page you are on, the total number of pages, and how many words are currently in the document.

Finally, the bottom right of the window allows you to zoom in and out while working on your document.

Slide the zoom bar right or left, or click the “+” or “-” icon.

Clicking the PERCENT indicator displays the ZOOM window, where you can set the zoom to a specified amount.

Note that many things in Word are duplicated for your convenience, such as this ZOOM control.

If you click the VIEW tab at the top, you’ll notice the ribbon tools also include these ZOOM controls.

By now, you should be feeling comfortable with Word, so it’s time to start crafting our first document.