Information Technology D01D 10

Learning Outcome 2 – Microsoft Word

Word is a user-friendly word processing package. Used by millions of people around the world, it allows you to type up reports, essays, letters, stories and thousands of other documents. Word processing packages like Word replaced typewriters in the 1980s and 90s as businesses and home users realised that they were easier to use – if you make a mistake, you just go back and delete it. You can cut sentences out of your text and ‘paste’ them somewhere else, making it easy to edit your work and make changes – you don’t have to start again if you’re not happy with your work. And of course, your work is always stored electronically so you can go back to it again and again.

Getting into Word

Go to the Start menu and choose All Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Word. If you get a message about macros, just click OK.

You should now see a blank page in front of you. Along the top are your drop down menus (File, Edit, View etc) and underneath them, your toolbar.

Getting started

The first thing to do is to save your document and give it a name. Go to file > save as.

You should see a box like the one above. Choose your space on the student server (this will start with your student ID number). Type ‘word processing 1’ into the ‘file name’ box and click ‘save’.

Entering text

You are now ready to start typing. You should see a flashing vertical line at the top left of the page – this is the cursor, and shows you where the text is going to go.

Type in your name. The cursor moves to the right as you type. You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard – or the mouse – to move the cursor back to the start of your name. Try this now.

To highlight text, click and hold with the left mouse button at the start of the text and drag the mouse across the text. The text should go black. Alternatively, double click on the text to highlight one word, or triple click to highlight a paragraph. Use one of these techniques to highlight your name.

Changing the format (the ‘look’) of text

We can use a word processing package to change the way that the text looks – we can use different fonts, make the text really big or really small. We can also make text bold, underlined or italicised.

You can do all of these things using the toolbar at the top of the page. Just now, it probably says ‘Times New Roman’, and in the box next to that, ‘12’.

Highlight your name and change Times New Roman to Bauhaus 93. Now change the font size to 20. You can do this by clicking on the down button to the right of the box, and then choosing the option you want (you may need to scroll down to find some options). Next to these boxes, you should see the buttons B, I and U. These stand for bold, italics and underline – try using these now.

Exercise 1

Type in a paragraph of text, explaining why you came to college and what you have learned so far. You should type at least 30 words (you can check your exact word count by going to tools > word count).

Highlight the paragraph and make the text Century Gothic, 18 point. Save your work (go to file > save, or hold down control and press ‘s’).

Aligning text

Look further along the toolbar, and you should see three more buttons:

The button on the left aligns the text on the left of the page, the button on the right aligns it to the right, and the button in the centre… you can work it out. Highlight your paragraph about college and try changing the alignment.

Exercise 2

Your friend works for a local charity and has asked you to make a sign for their jumble sale. The text is as follows:

Jumble Sale in aid of Cardonald Aged Cats Society

Saturday 15 April, 11am – 2pm

Cardonald Scout Hut, Lammermoor Rd

All Welcome

Please phone Mary on 0141 824 7355 if you would like to make a donation.

Your friend would like the text to fill the page, and would like the first line to be bold and bigger than the rest of the text. She would like all the words to be as big as possible so that the notice is easy to read in shop windows. She would like a ‘fancy’ font for the first line and then a plain font for the rest of the text, and would like you to choose one.

Hint: to see the whole page at once, go to View > Zoom and choose ‘whole page’.