Creating A Basic Word Document

What we are going to do now is have a look at how to create a basic Word document. Now, there's lots you can do in Word, but we are just going to look at some of the settings and some of the things you can adjust. So we have opened up Word here and we're just going to work with a blank document. We are not going to work with the template, we are just going to look at absolute blank documents. We just double click on the blank document and then just to make this easier I am just going to put this on the full screen. So here is the document itself. Now, all the text we write will go in this main body here. We can change the layout of the page, we can do all sorts of things, but the text we type, we just type some random stuff in here, all this will be just text that we can edit later on.

So before we do that, we just have a look at the menus that are surrounding this. Across the top, we have got the home button and this allows all these icons up here. And this might seem a bit daunting to see so many of them, but we will have to look at how each one of these work later on. Next we have got insert, so if we want to insert a page break so we have got a break between pages, we can do that here, we can insert tables, pictures, all sorts of things within the document, even media. Along the top we have got the draw so we can do actual drawing pictures, you get different colors and sizes and we can also use the eraser to rub out to actually add pictures in. The design side could be using some pre-done templates or create our own. We can make the coloring set different with it and loads of other design type things that we want to make with the document. The next one is the layout. Within here we can change the borders on the left and right-hand sides of the page, we can do all sorts of other settings and some of these are quite advanced, but maybe the margins could be something you would use quite regularly.

This next section here, it shows lots of settings. These are more advanced features on here, but if you are starting to create formal documents made for university and that, you can start doing tables of contents and all sorts of other things to add on should you need them. Mailings, this is where we are interacting with mail merge type programs, where we are sending out emails and things like that. The review page, again, lots and lots of other settings. And it's always worth creating some things, just having a play with these. You're not going to break it. Suppose you have got a document, just have a go and see what you could use in these, you might find some useful. And again here, the view side, a little bit more advanced stuff again and then we go through to the final section here which is all about PDFs. So the main one you are going to be using is the home and the insert probably. They are probably the two key areas that you will be working with.

When you are working with a Word document, the same as when you are working with emails and things like that, a lot of what we are saying will look the same. So if you are creating an email, there is a few things you can do with that, which you probably already know, just to make sure we just review them now, we have copy, cut and paste. So if we type in a word here, so we are just going to write Keith, now, what we can do with that is we can copy it by highlighting over it and then we can right mouse click on it and a menu will pop up and it says copy, so we can copy that to wherever we want to. So we just say copy now and then we can put a couple line spaces in and then we can go on here, right mouse click and paste, it has added it on.

Rather than right mouse click you can do this on the keyboard, so you can push control C on a Windows keyboard or command C on an Apple, so we just push command C and go down somewhere else and then we can do command or control V to paste it. So if we want to cut a word out, so for example we have got this word Keith here and we want to move it somewhere else, we don't just want to copy it, we can cut it. For doing that, we can use command X or control X, so just highlight over it, push the button, move it to where you want and then you can paste it by using command or control V, then that will put it where it just came from. You could do a similar way by just highlighting it, right mouse click and then you use the cut symbol there and then you can put it where you want it, right mouse click and paste and it will pop back up there. So the third way you can do this is, if you wanted to just take this word here, you can go up to the very top and there is the edit button and from edit we can cut or copy. So what we are going to do here is cut it again. We are then going to go down where we want to put it, going to go back up to the top, edit, paste and it's on there.

So there are different ways, there are three different ways of pretty much doing the same thing, but as you find you are using computers, you will find that these are going to be easier for you to use. And the final command you can use is command or control A and what that will do is it will highlight the whole lot. So what we can do here is we have highlighted all of it, so what I am then going to do is I will just use the right mouse click, we are going to cut that so it is all gone and then what we can do then is paste it so if we wanted to move it to another page or somewhere else in the document, it is held on the clipboard, so we can just right mouse click, paste and it puts it all back again. If you wanted to do more than that, you can do, you can do multiple copies and things like that as well, so if you want to just copy a word and then paste it in and you can just keep pasting it if you want by just keep pushing the command or control V button.

So when you make a mistake, there is two ways you can do that as well and get out of the mistake. This would be command or control Z and it will go backwards. So here we have got my name put in, so if we just do that, see, it is going back and it is un-pasting those words. The other way of getting that is using this button at the top and this is the undo paste, so we can undo paste, see, it is going back to where there is nothing and then back where we did them all to start with. So we are right back to where we started. So they are simple easy techniques for cutting and pasting around Word. So that is the first part of these lessons on how to do basic Word processing, but what we are going to do in the next film is to take this on to the next level and edit a document.