Introduction to Microsoft Word

Computers have been in use in businesses, schools, hospitals, homes for many years now. Apart from being used to automate large systems and processes, they have made a big difference in office automation. Day-to-day office tasks such as creating documents, letters, memos, faxes, filing, storing, retrieving, mailing has become simpler and sophisticated with the use of computers. There are many software applications that help to create, edit, save and print documents, letters, mailing labels and reports. Same software can be used by students to create their project reports or assignments, at home to make a list of things to do or to buy and by anyone for any kind of document work. Software package that enables you to create, edit, print and save documents for Word Processor future retrieval and reference is known as a Word Processor. We will study about Word Processor, its features and how to use it in this unit.

OBJECTIVES

After going through this unit, you will be able to : 
  • learn what a Word Processor is and how to use it; 
  • create, edit, save, preview and print a document; 
  • format a document with different page layouts, borders, headers, footers and other settings;
  • manage and Manipulate text, font, colour, size, table and images; and 
  • use different features available in word processor to check spelling or grammar, use dictionary or create multiple letters. 

WHAT IS WORD PROCESSOR ?

A word processor is a software program capable of creating, storing, and printing documents. It helps you to create a document, format it, correct your mistakes, save, review and print it. 

Word processors vary considerably, but all word processors support the following basic features: 
  • Cut, copy and paste text
  • Insert or delete text 
  • Set page size and margins 
  • Search and replace 
  • Word wrap 
  • Print
Word Processors that support only above features (and may be few more) are called Text Editors. Most word processors, however, are quite advanced and support many additional features as listed below: 
  • Allows to create, delete, move, copy, rename and search for files.
  • Allows to specify font, size, colour, header, footer, page numbering, footnote, cross-reference, bullets and numbering, table, images, graphics, table of contents and indexes.
  • Allows to specify page layout, page orientation and margins.
  • Allows use of spell checker, thesaurus, macros, merges.
  • Allows to open and edit multiple documents at the same time in separate windows.
The word processors that support above features are called full featured word processors. There are many word processors available in the market. We will consider MS Word 2007 for our study. We will understand what the above feature are and how we can use them.

WORD BASICS

In this section we will cover how to start, open, create, save and close a word document and what do different parts in a Word window stand for. The editing and formatting of the created document will be covered in the next section.

Starting Word

You can start MS Word by either of the following two ways:

  • Click on Start--All Programs--Microsoft Office--Microsoft Office Word 2007. 
  • Double click on the MS Word icon on the desktop (if you have one)

When word opens, a new document with default name as Document1 is opened. For each additional document you open, the number increases by one. Please note that you can open more than one document at a time.

You may also start Word by clicking on a document saved on your hard drive. Word will open automatically and the document will be displayed in the document area.

When you open word from the menu or desktop icon, the screen will look like in Figure 2.1

Figure 2.1: Microsoft Word Window