Hello again and welcome back to our course on Word 2013. We’re now going to take our
first look at Word and the first thing you need to do of course is to start it. Now I’m
not going to spend a lot of time explaining the options here, I’ll just quickly go through
them. I’m running this course using a Windows 8 PC and I have put a shortcut to Word in
the middle of the desktop here and anytime I want to start Word, I’m going to double
click on that with my mouse. If you’re using Windows 8 and you have Word 2013 installed,
it should appear as one of the tiles on you Start Screen and you could tap or click on
that. And if you’re running Windows 7, Word 2013, once it’s installed, will appear on
your Start Menu; probably in the Office 2013 group on the Start Menu. I suggest that you
give yourself a convenient and quick way of starting Word each time. Again, in Windows
8, I’ve got a shortcut for Word 2013 on my taskbar and I just click that anytime I
want to start Word 2013. Now when Word 2013 opens for the first time,
you should see a screen similar to this one. And this screen enables you to do what are
perceived to be the things you are most likely to want to do when you open Word. Now on the
left there is a list with a heading Recent. That may be completely empty. In fact, if
this the first time you’ve used Word, it will be completely empty. If you’ve upgraded
from an earlier version of Word, then you may well see a list of recently opened documents
here instead. In this case, there are no recently opened documents, so the list is empty. But
as we go ahead, we’ll see file names start to appear here. And opening a recently opened
copy of a document is something you’ll do quite often with Word. So if I work on a particular
document, say a letter to a business colleague, if I then close Word, go away, do something
else, come back, I’ll see that letter in the list of recents here and that’s a very
convenient way of accessing documents that you’ve worked on recently. We’ll come
back to open other documents a little bit later on.
In the top right hand corner of the display here is my user name, and in this case details
of the Microsoft account that I use in relation to Windows 8 on this device. And then in the
middle, we have the main area we’re going to concentrate on at first. If you look at
these thumbnails, that one has a caption Blank Document; that one has a caption Welcome to
Word; and the others correspond to what are called Templates. Now we’re going to look
at templates in some detail later on, but let’s assume that the first thing I want
to do is to create a document in Word, which is what we’re going to do in this section.
And actually in this section, we’re going to start with a blank document. But as we’ll
see in a little while if you wanted to start with a document where a lot of the layout,
a lot of the style is already established for you, you can use one of the provided Word
2013 templates. Now if you look at these thumbnails, you’ll see that there’s quite a reasonable
list of these templates here. There are quite a few. There’s some Christmas related ones
there, various ones celebrating different events, and so on. But in fact there are many,
many more than this and the section at the top enables us to search for online templates.
So for instance if I wanted a template to use for a fax, I could type Fax in here and
then do a search online for a fax related template.
But more of that later, let’s concentrate here on blank documents. So click on Blank
Document and what Word does is to create a blank document. So what we have here is the
Word 2013 workspace. And the main feature of the workspace in many ways is the document
itself. Now the document we’re working on, remember we asked for a blank document, is
indeed a blank document. And within the blank document there is a flashing cursor just here,
a vertical line. And the flashing cursor indicates where text would go if I started typing. So
I’m just going to type on my keyboard “Hello World” and that now becomes the content
of my document. Think of this area as a big white sheet of paper. We’ve just typed “Hello
World” on to that big white sheet of paper. Now I appreciate that those of you who are
using touch devices may be using an on-screen keyboard here. I’m going to come back to
that later on. But basically when you’ve opened and started this first document, whichever
method you’re using just put some text in there and you have now started work on your
first Word document. Now the document already has a name. Every
document in Word will have a name and by default when you open a new document it’s called
Document 1. And the name you can see at the top on what’s called the title bar up here.
So it says Document 1, Word. And if I wanted to give that a more meaningful name, I can
do that in a moment. I’ll come back to that in just a moment.
Now basically what’s going to happen is that when you work on a document, you’re
going to put words, text, tables, you may be reviewing somebody else’s document, you
may be putting all sorts of multimedia elements into this document. But when you finished
working on it you will normally want to save a document. And you’ll normally want to
save it with a name that suits you are a name that you’ve been told to give it. And you’ll
need to save it somewhere that you can find it. So the next thing we’re going to do
is take this first document and just save it.
Now many aspects of saving I’m going to explain in more detail a little bit later
on, but let’s just do a straightforward save at the moment. To save a document, we
go into something called Backstage View. So we click on the File Tab here, up here on
the left, the dark blue in this case. Depending on your color scheme, you may have a different
color showing. But it’ll normally be white text on a darker background, whereas the other
things along here are dark text on a light background. Click on File and that takes you
into something called Backstage View. Now within Backstage View, there are a number
of commands on the left. I’ll be spending a lot of time talking about these commands,
but the only one we need at the moment is Save As. Now you use Save As, the first time
that you’re going to save a document partly to save it and partly to give it the name
that you want to give it. First of all, the question of where to save it. I could save
it to my SkyDrive. So this is effectively saving it in the Cloud or Microsoft’s version
of saving it in the Cloud. I could save it on my computer or I could save it in another
place. Now I’m going to talk about other places later. I’m just going to go for my
computer. And if I want to find where I want to save it, I can either use a folder that
I’ve accessed recently or I can browse. I’m going to click Browse on this occasion
and that gives me a pretty standard Windows type browser. Now I mentioned earlier on that
you should have the example files that go with this course in a folder on your device.
And I suggest that you don’t save files like this one, these little sort of practice
files in the same folder. And I’ve setup a second folder just to use for these exercise
files. And as we go through you’ll see that as I save these you should have a pretty equivalent
set in a similar folder. Now the folder that I’ve got for the exercises, the practice
files using as we go along is on my desktop. So if I double click to desktop it’s got
there, I’ve called it 0080-exercise-files, double click on that, it’s currently empty.
So I’m going to put my files in there. And the first one, the file name, Word 2013 has
given it a name, Hello World.docx. Until you choose a name yourself,
Word 2013 will normally use the first piece of text in a document as the file name to
use. Now I’m going to stick with the name Hello World.docx here. So that’s okay and
I just click on the Save button. My document is now saved and if you look at the top of
the title bar, you’ll see now that was just Document 1 now says Hello World.docx. D-O-C-X
at the end indicates that it is a Word document. In fact, it indicates that it is a Word document
in a recent format, but more of that later on.
So that’s great. We’ve made our first document, saved it. What we’re going to
do now is to close the document. Having saved it, it’s still there. I could still do more
work on it if I wanted to, but I’m going to leave it like that for now and what I want
to do is to close it, to stop working on it. So I go back into Backstage View using the
File button and then a little bit further down than Save As is a button that says Close.
Click on Close and the document is closed. And now in my Word workspace, I have nothing
at all because I’m not working on a document anymore. So having finished working on that
document we may decide, well that’s it for now. I want to finish working with Word all
together. If you look to the right of the title bar, right at the top of the window
there, there’s a cross right at the end. And if I hover over that cross, you can see
what’s called its screen tip. It says Close. And if I click on that, it will close Word;
so click on Close and Word is closed as well. So in this section we’ve opened Word, created
a new document, put some text in it, saved it in a known location, closed that document,
and closed Word. So that’s a pretty good start. Join me in the next section about getting
started to find out a little bit more about the Word Workspace. I’ll see you then.