Written by Jim Heynderickx 10/22/1
To turn on and off toolbars, to View at the top of the window and then down to Toolbars. There’s a list of toolbars you can then turn on and off and customize. This is good to know in case your toolbars get turned off.
On the far left of the toolbars, there’s a vertical line. If you click and hold on it, you can drag the toolbars around the screen to new locations (left vertical bar, floating palette, etc.). You can also move the bars back up to where they should be at the top of the screen. My favorite setting is to have three toolbars at top—the Pull Down Commands (File, Edit, etc.), the Standard Toolbar (new file, open save, etc.), and the Formatting Toolbar (Font Name Window, Font Size Window, etc.).
If all the buttons can’t be shown on a toolbar, you’ll see bold, double-arrows at the far right of the toolbar (or at the bottom of the toolbar or pull down menu). Clicking on the double arrows shows you more options or buttons you can use.
It is also fairly easy to add and remove buttons from the toolbars, following the options shown.
On the Formatting Toolbar at the top of the screen (sometimes the third toolbar, sometimes halfway across the screen in the second toolbar, you can change the font and font size. The first option on the formatting bar is a white box (Font Name Window) with the name of font—often Times New Roman. To change fonts, block the best you want to change (highlight it by holding down the mouse key and dragging across it), and then click on the small upside-down triangle next to the Font Name window to see what other fonts are available on that computer (not all computers have the same fonts). Click on the font you want to try out.
If you don’t like the font, you can click on the triangle next to the Font Name Window again and set it back to the font it was. Word normally puts the most recently used fonts at the top of the list, so you don’t have to scroll down to find them all the time.
Changing the font size is the same procedure, except that you go to the Font Size Window to the right of the Font Name Window. You can click on the upside-down triangle to choose another font size. OR you can just block the number in the Font Size Window and change it to be the number (or size) you want. This is very useful when you are trying to get the right font size, but the default sizes in the pull-down window don’t fit.
To change the margins of the page, or the orientation of the page, you have to go to File on the top left side of the window, and go down to Page Setup. There you can change the size of the top, bottom, left, right and other margin settings. In Page Setup, you can also click on the Paper Size Tab to get to the place where you can change the size of the paper, such as to Legal size. This is also the place where you can change the layout of the paper from portrait (tall) to landscape (wide).
1. Select the paragraph in which you want to set a tab stop.
2. Click on the L shaped button at the far left of the horizontal ruler until it changes to the type of tab you want:
3. Click the horizontal ruler where you want to set a tab stop.
- To set precise measurements for tabs, click Tabs on the Format menu.
- After dropping the tab stop on the ruler, you can click on it and drag it left and right on the ruler to move it. You can also drag the tab stop off of the ruler to remove it.
Indents are marked by the gray triangles and box near the left side of the ruler. The top triangle is the first line indent setting (such as for the first line of a paragraph). The lower triangle is the Hanging Indent (inset indents, such as on bulleted lists, bibliographies, etc.). The bottom box is the left indent, such as for the following lines in the paragraph. You can change these by blocking the paragraph you want to change, and then dragging the indent markers left and right on the ruler. This can be useful when something has the wrong indent and you want to change it.
If you send a print job to the printer, and it doesn’t work, the first thing you should do is check the print queue. To do this, click on the Start button (lower left side of screen) and go to Settings and then Printers. The printer you sent the document to should be the one with the checkmark on it. Double click on that printer, and see if your job is in the print queue list. In that window, if you want to, you can go to File and then Cancel Print Job, if you want to stop and clear the job.
As you look at your printer in the printer settings window, look at the Status: info on the left side of the screen. If it says Ready in green, your printer should be fine. If is says Printer Jam in red, or Out of Paper in red, then you have some idea of what you need to do to get the printer going again.
If necessary, you can add another printer and try printing to it. To install another printer, got to Start, and then to Search, and then For Printers… Click on “Find Now,” and you should see a list of all the shared printers on campus. Double-click the one you want to use, and on a Windows 2000 machine it will installed automatically. On a Windows 98 machine you’ll have to answer a few questions, such as No to printing from DOS applications, etc. Afterwards, the printer drivers will be installed.
Now, to actually print to the printer you installed, you have to point your print jobs to it instead of your default printer that may still be having problems. After installing the new printer, your computer will still be pointing to your previous printer as the default, so you can’t just click on the “printer” button in Word because the print job will go to the old printer. To direct it to the new printer, you can go to File and then Print, and in the print window it will show the name of the default printer. To change to the new printer, click on the upside-down triangle next to the Printer Name Window.
To fully change your default printer to the new printer you just installed, you need to go to Start, Settings, Printer, and then double-click on the new printer to open it configuration window. Once there, go to the Printer pull down menu and select “Set as Default Printer.” As you exit out, you should notice that the black check mark should now be on the new printer, showing it as the default one. (Whew.)
To use Spell Check, you have several options. When you type a word that is misspelled or not in the dictionary (like Heynderickx), a red squiggly line will appear beneath it. My favorite way to use spell check is to simply right click on the red underlined word. This will reveal the Spell Checks best guesses at the correct spelling, allow you to add it to the dictionary, or to set the program to ignore it.
The exact same thing can be done with Grammar Check—except that grammar problems are denoted with a green squiggly line beneath the word or words. This is especially helpful with extra spaces between words and occasionally passive voice problems.
Alternatively, you can do all of this later on by clicking on the Spell Check button on the Standard Toolbar (the one with the ABC and checkmark), and then have the software go through the entire document, stopping at the all the misspellings, grammar problems and unknown words.
To count the words in a document, simply go to Tools at the top pull down menu and select Word Count, which should be the second option. Heck, it will even show you the number of characters in the document.
Learning how to cut, paste and copy text in Word can really save you time.
To begin, you need to block the text you want to cut or copy (highlight with the cursor by click and dragging over it with the left mouse key held down—my favorite way is from the end of the selection to the beginning.) Selecting more than a page of text can be hard, because the pages will jump up or down too quickly. This can sometimes be avoided by using the up and down arrows when you are blocking text, so that you only move one line at a time.
To Cut the text (remove it), click on the scissors button on the standard toolbar, OR go to Edit and then select Cut, OR use the Ctrl-x keyboard short cut. This will make the text disappear, but it will temporarily be held in memory.
To paste the text elsewhere, move the cursor to where you want the text to begin. Once you have it there, you can click on the Paste button (clipboard and paper button) on the standard toolbar, OR Edit and then paste, OR use the ctrl-v keyboard combination.
To Copy text, follow the same procedure, except block and then click on the Copy button (two sheets of paper button) on the Standard Toolbar, OR go to Edit and then Copy, OR use the ctrl-c keyboard combination.
Copying and pasting can be exceptionally useful when you are creating documents that have any degree of repetition in them. The same can be done with pictures, drawings and objects in Word.
On the Standard Toolbar to the far right, there is a white window with a percentage in it, like 100%. You can zoom into and out of a page by increasing the percentage in that window. You do this by highlighting the existing number and typing in a new one, OR clicking on the upside-down triangle next to the window and choosing a new percentage or view. My favorite is Page Width, which makes the whole page visible, but the text as large as possible (without increasing font size).
On the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, there are four small buttons for changing the “view” of the document. By default, you are normally in the third option or button, which is Print Layout View. This is the view that shows the separate pages and gives you some idea of what the document will look like when printed.
The first option is Normal view, which is sometimes better to work in because the text is shown without the page margins, page breaks, etc. You can click on the first view button to see this, and change back to Print Layout View by clicking on the third button to return to it.
The second button is Web Layout View, which gives you some idea of what the page would look like as a Web page.
The fourth button is Outline View, which goes into a special Outline formatting view, which is somewhat hard to use. People get confused when they accidentally go into this view and think their document is ruined, but in fact they just need to click back onto Normal or Print Layout View.
My favorite on a large monitor—Print Layout view. On a small monitor—Normal view.
On the Standard Toolbar, there are two buttons in the center: one that points backward and one that points forward. These are the Undo and Redo button.
In Word, if you make a mistake and accidentally erase a sentence or paragraph, simply click on the Undo button, and you move back a step and undo your last action. Often, you can go back many steps to undo changes made some time before.
If you change your mind, you can click on the redo button, which will move you forward one step at the time, redoing what you did.
I use the undo button all the time to fix mistakes in formatting.
One of the most irritating things about Word can be the Auto-Format and Auto-Correct features. Sometimes Word wants to indent your list or format your paragraph when you don’t want it to. Other times, you don’t want all email address or web URLs to be blue and underlined, but Word seems to insist that they are…
One way to avoid this on a case-by-case basis is to use the Undo command. If Word automatically does something you don’t like, click on the Undo command. This normally “undoes” what Word did automatically and keeps it from happening again, at least for that one point in the text.
In other cases, you can manually reset indents, for example, by blocking the text and using the indent settings as noted above.
In some documents, the harassment is so pervasive that you are best off to disable the auto-correct and auto-format features in part or entirely. To do this, click on the Tools pull-down menu at the top of the screen. To see the AutoCorrect option, you may need to click on the double-arrows at the bottom of the pull-down menu to expand the menu. Then click on the AutoCorrect button
This will open a window of options that you can turn off and off. Not that there are additional tabs within the window for changing other auto-features, such as Autotext, Autoformat as you type, etc. You may have to turn off several features to avoid problems.
We’ve all had the problem of being unable to share files with other people who don’t have Word on their computers. To avoid this problem, sometimes you have to save your files in a different format. To do this, go to the File pull down menu, and then to Save (if it is first time you are saving the document) or Save As (if you have already saved the document once). After you make your choice, a special Save window will appear.
In the Save Window, we’re all familiar with naming the file, checking where it is being saved (hopefully to your server folder, and NOT TO THE LOCAL HARD-DRIVE), and clicking the Save button. Beneath the document name window is another window labeled Save as Type. By default, what is in that window is Word Document. To save in a different file type, you need to click on the upside down triangle next to Word Document to choose a new file type. You can choose older versions of Word and WordPerfect, as well as plain MSDOS text, which is the most universal, but all of your formatting will be lost. Sometimes Rich Text Format is the best choice, because it is universal yet retains some formatting.
In the intermediate workshop, we’ll talk about saving Word documents as web pages.