INTERVENTION CORNER

Create Your First Word Document

In this section, you’ll learn how to create your first document in Word. You’ll find out how to type where you want to on a page, fix spelling errors, make a list, change page margins, add emphasis to some words, quickly add some style, and save your work.

OBJECTIVES

At the end of the lesson you are expected to:

Create and save a new document.
Fix spelling and grammar as you type.
Add formatting to your text.
Change page margins.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW?

A. The First Time You Open Word

1 The ribbon, which sits above the document, and includes a set of buttons and commands that you use to do things in and with your document (like print it).

2 A blank document, which looks like a white sheet of paper and takes up most of the window.

B. Start Typing

When you start typing, the text you type pushes the cursor to the right. If you get to the end of a line, just continue to type. The text and the insertion point will move on to the next line for you.

Let's Define!
The cursor – a blinking vertical line in the upper-left corner of the page

Once you’ve finished typing your first paragraph, press the ENTER key to go to the next paragraph. If you want more space between the two paragraphs (or any two paragraphs), press ENTER again and then start typing your second paragraph.

If you make a mistake while typing, just press the BACKSPACE key to “erase” the incorrect characters or words.

C. Format Text

There are many ways to emphasize text including bold, italic, and underlined formatting.

Let’s make the text bold. Remember the ribbon we mentioned at the beginning of the lesson? Now is when you’ll see how it’s used.

As you can see in the picture above, there are several tabs across the top. Each represents an activity area. The second tab, the Home tab, should be selected (if not, you click it to select it).

Each tab has several groups of commands that show related items together.

On the Home tab, look for the Font group, where you’ll see buttons and commands that perform a specific action on your document. For example, the Bold button makes the text bold. Or you can change the font color and size of text with the Font Color and Font Size buttons.

D. Add Some Style

You can make most changes to text from the Font group, but formatting text this way is handy when you want to change the format of just a few characters or words.

However, there’s a way to make all the changes we just did with just one command, by using styles.

The styles are on the Home tab, in the Styles group. You just choose the style you want, and the text size, font, attributes, and paragraph formatting are changed for you automatically.

The Paragraph and Styles groups, on the Home tab.

Change Margins

Page margins are the blank spaces around the edges of the page. There is a 1-inch (2.54 cm) page margin at the top, bottom, left, and right sides of the page.

This is the most common margin width, which you might use for most of your documents. But if you want different margins, you should know how to change them, which you can at any time.

You also use the ribbon to change margins, except you work from the Page Layout tab. First you click it to select it, and then, in the Page Setup group, you click Margins. You’ll see different margin sizes, shown in little pictures (icons), along with the measurements for each of the margins.

The first margin in the list is Normal, the current margin. To get narrower margins, you would click Narrow. If you want the left and right margins to be much wider, click Wide. When you click the margin type that you want, your entire document automatically changes to the margin type you selected.

When you choose a margin, the icon for the margin you chose gets a different color background. If you click the Margins button again, that background color tells you which margin size has been set for your document.

Save, Print and Close Your Document

At some point you may have a finely tuned sentence or several paragraphs of ideas, facts, or figures that you would regret losing if your cat jumped on your keyboard, or if a power failure shut your computer off.

To keep your work, you have to save it, and it’s never too early to do that.

On the ribbon, you click the first tab, the File tab. This opens a large window called the Backstage, a place where you take care of a lot of things, such as saving you document, and printing it.
In the left column, you click Save. A smaller window, called a dialog box, opens. You use this box to tell Word where you want to store the document on your computer, and what you want to call it.
After you save your document, and you continue to type, you should save your work as you go.

Need to print?

When you’re ready to print, click again the File tab (the first tab). In the left column, you click the Print command. A large window opens, and you click the Print button. Of course, you’ll need to have a printer hooked up to your computer.
When you are through with the document and have saved your work, close the file. Click the File tab, and in the left column click Close.

GIVE IT A TRY!

Watch and Learn!

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED?

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