Welcome back to our course on Word 2013. As I mentioned earlier one of the major features
of Office 2013 is the extended support for touch screen devices. And during this course,
I’m going to try to make sure that I cover the needs of touch screen users as comprehensively
as I can. However, this does present a couple of issues. One of the issues is that I really
don’t want to have to go through every single thing in the course twice, because it’ll
take a very long time and the touch screen device people would get bored with having
to do everything with a keyboard and mouse and vice versa. So I’ll really generally
speaking I’m going to cover each topic once. However, particularly in the early stages,
I do need to point out what the equivalent actions are. So for example, generally speaking
when I say click during the course, I mean click with a mouse. Generally speaking that
would be the equivalent of tap with a touch screen device; having said that, click and
tap don’t always do exactly the same things as you will see.
Now just to give you some idea of what I mean by this, I’ve actually got a Word document
open here. You don’t need to worry about everything that you can see on the screen
particularly if you are new to Word. Just look at this shape in the middle. This is
a picture within a Word document. And if I were to click on that picture with the mouse,
what effectively happens is it selects that picture. If I tap with my finger, it not only
selects the picture but it comes up with a little toolbar. Now that toolbar that you
see there, you don’t get that with the mouse. However if I right click on the picture with
my mouse, you get a completely different menu. Now in the end what you can do using these
two approaches comes out to be the same. But sometimes what you see, if you like the route
towards what you want to do is different with the two approaches. Now as I said it would
take a very long time to go through everything twice and show you all of the options, all
of the things that might happen depending on which device you’re using. So I’m generally
speaking going to demonstrate things using keyboard and mouse because that’s still
the set of user interface tools that most people use. But particularly where it’s
very different or where it’s very significant, I’m also going to show you the touch screen
approach. And in the early stages I’ll tend to show you both, particularly when we cover
a new type of what we call gesture or we cover a new situation; for instance when we first
look at putting pictures into documents. Now in terms of getting started with touch,
there’s some help that you can get on Microsoft.com and there is help available both for Windows
7 users and for Windows 8 users. And there is also general information about using touch
in Office 2013. Now a lot of the information specifically related to Office 2013, we’re
going to be looking at a little bit later on when we start to look at Help. And a lot
of the specific and in some cases common or general equivalences between clicking and
tapping we’ll cover then. But in the meantime, if you’re new to Windows, you’ve a touch
device, you’re not really quite sure how to some of the basic things, perhaps finding
your way around Windows, then this particular page on Microsoft.com and bear in mind when
I’m showing you these pages. But by the time you do this course, the pages may have
been moved or replaced or whatever, but here’s a page related to Windows touch for Windows
7. You can also find equivalent material for Windows 8 and there’s also material related
to touch for Office 2013. Now in relation to Office 2013, we’ll be
looking at the Help on this a little bit later on, but there are some particularly useful
items on Office.com. And if you look on Office.com, here’s a particularly useful article, I
think, which particularly if you’re new to the use of a touch device, if you scroll
down the page here it actually gives you a lot of information about specifically things
like the Ribbon that we’re going to be looking at later and then how to use various user
interface items, how to position an object by dragging, how to select text and objects,
how to type, how to use the onscreen keyboard, and so on. So if you want a really useful,
good guide this is more explaining why things work the way that they do and giving a good
overview of the approach and then maybe you can look up specific details using the Help
later on. That’s a very useful article I found. It’s got things about the minibars
and so on. But as I’ve said already, whenever we do something new or different and whenever
the approach or the effect is different, I will try to cover the touch approach as well.
So that’s it for the moment on the use of touch.
Let’s get started on using Microsoft Word 2013.