This is the beginner's guide to using Microsoft Word and specifically using it
to create documents like reports, essays, handouts, flyers, things like that. And so
I'm just gonna go down here and click on Microsoft Word. If you don't have Word
down here on the taskbar, you can just click here on Search Windows and do a
search for Microsoft Word to see if it's on your computer. If that doesn't turn up
anything, then it's not installed on your computer, but like I said, I'm gonna go
ahead and click on that to start it up and Microsoft Word opens right up and it
gives me right away a bunch of templates that I can choose from to help me get
started creating documents using Microsoft Word. And you can see that
there's all sorts of great documents. They have trifold brochures they have
event menus. They have blog posts, all sorts of different templates that you
can use. Also across the top, notice that you can filter them by category, so I
could just show Business templates. I could show Event templates, labels and so
on. And notice that there is an Education category. You can also search for online
templates here. So templates can be a great time-saver. You can just select one
of these templates to open it up and then edit it and use it for your own
purposes. But, in this tutorial, we're going to focus just on creating starting
from scratch. And so I'm gonna click here where it says Blank document and it
opens up the Microsoft Word layout and a blank document. Now there is so much to
Word. Most people don't really use Word to its full capabilities but in this
tutorial I'm really going to focus on the basics, on those essentials that you need
to know to start using Microsoft Word effectively. And one of the first things
I'm going to do is just close this panel here at the left that says Navigation.
It's a nice panel, but I'm going to get rid of that and close that out. Next, I want
to give you a quick tour of what you're seeing here in the layout. You'll notice
that, across the top, we have tabs. We have the Home tab, insert tab, design tab. and
This is very similar to Excel Microsoft Excel and also Microsoft PowerPoint.
If you've watched my other tutorials, you already know about this Microsoft office
layout, but for those who maybe haven't watched those other tutorials just a
quick intro each of these tabs. When you click on it will give you a different
ribbon and that's what they call this this is the ribbon.
And the ribbon changes based on the tab that you click. Ok, so if I want to change
something about the layout, I click on layout and then I look at the layout
ribbon and see what I can do. Now each ribbon is divided up into groups, so this
is the Page Setup group. This is the Paragraph group and the Arrange group.
Now, what if I want to insert something, maybe a picture or a photo, I would go to
the Insert tab and click and I get the insert ribbon with lots and lots of
different groups. Now, one thing about groups that you need to be aware of is
some groups will have a little launch button in the corner. So here's an
example of a launch button. The paragraph group has a launch button but the
arrange group doesn'tm at least for me it doesn't. The page setup group has a
launch button. So what are these lunch buttons and why do you need to know
about them? Well basically, whenever you see a launch
button, what that means is that there are more tools but that they couldn't fit
them in the space provided in the group. So if I don't see one of the font
options that I would like to have, I look through these to see if it's there and
if it's not I can just click here on the launch button and then I'll get even
more options. Another example over here in the Styles
group, There's a few styles but if I click here then I get many many more
styles to choose from and some options that I don't see just by looking at the
group itself. So watch out for that launch button. Ok, now down here I have
the page of my document. This is my Word document and it's completely blank. At
this time a couple of things that I want you to know about before you get started
making a document: First of all, I don't know about you, but I like to be able to
see the document - at least its width - and so I'm gonna go down here in the lower
right corner and change the zoom level. So it was at 200% and that was a little
bit too big for me. Maybe 150 maybe to 125. You know something like that that
will be a little bit easier to fit on the screen. So I think I'll just go with
this 100%. Now, in this tutorial I'm using Microsoft Word 2016 for Windows, but if
you're using an older version of Microsoft Word, or even a future version
of Microsoft Word or Word for Mac, most of what I'm showing you will still be
applicable, but one of the things that I kind of miss from an older version
Microsoft Word is I miss the rulers. I'm used to having a ruler across the top
and also down the left side to help me know the size of the pages that I'm
working with. So I'm gonna go here and look and see where might there be an
option to show the ruler and I would think it would be maybe here in the
layout options. But the reason I'm bringing this up is because if you're
having trouble finding an option, like I am right now, you don't need to really
hunt and search for it very much if it's not quickly showing up. All you need to
do is go here to the top where it says "Tell me what you want to do" and do a
search. So I'll do a search for "Rulers" and, look, right there at the top there's
an option that says "Show Ruler" and I can click on it and immediately the rulers
pop up. Okay, so I'm happy now with the look of Microsoft Word. Okay, now I'm
ready to start creating a wonderful document and let's say this document is
going to be a handout or a worksheet for my students. I can just go in and start
creating. So I'll just provide a space there for the name of the student, the
class period, and I'm just typing and hitting Return or Enter on the keyboard.
And I would like this to be the title of my document. Now this is pretty typical,
but what I would do here is highlight the text and immediately I get a pop-up
here with some options that I have. But I can also go here to the Home tab home
ribbon. That's where you'll find the most commonly needed options in Microsoft
Word. And so, look, there is Center and that's what I was hoping for.
I can also underline if I want to. I can make it bold and there's all sorts of
options that you have there. I could make the text bigger but more often than not,
instead of making all of these fine tuned adjustments, what I often do is I
use these styles. And so to show that, I'm going to click the Undo button several
times to go back to just the text. So with just the text selected, I'm going to go
here where it says Styles and I'll go to Heading number 1 and you can see what
it does. It changes the color, it makes it bigger, changes the font a little bit.
There's also Heading number 2, and several other options. Title would be a
good one as well. And I'm gonna go with Title. Now, regardless of which one you
pick, if you want you can still adjust it, like I would still like that to be
centered. I still like it to be underlined, and I
think that looks really nice. So, now I hit Enter or Return and I can proceed to
create this worksheet. I can type in instructions for my students and
Microsoft Word handles most of the work. I'm just typing hitting Enter,
moving down. Now I can also click to move around using the mouse, but watch what
happens. I can only click so far. It's not letting
me go past the current line that I've typed. I can go to the right side of it,
but that's as far as it'll let me go. I can go back up though, by clicking and
make changes, make adjustments. Okay and I'm really ruining this document aren't
I? So I'll just undo a few times, but the point is that if you want to put in some
blank space and then type something below, you're gonna have to tap Enter a
few times to move the cursor down, and then you'll be able to type down below,
Now, when you get to the bottom of the page, you hit enter and, look, it just
takes you automatically to page number two. Now, a few other essential things to
know about Microsoft Word include how to insert pictures, because that's really
one of the powerful things about Microsoft Word. And you heard me say the
key word there, didn't you? It's "Insert". So I click on "Insert" and look at the
options that I have: four things to insert into this document, all sorts of
things, including Wikipedia articles, online videos, all sorts of neat things.
But in this case, I'm going to go to pictures, and that automatically accessed
my computer and now I can browse my computer to find pictures that I can
then pull in and use in my document. So I'll pull in this skeleton. Now, whenever
you put a photo or an image into Microsoft Word, it brings up some
difficulties. For example, that is not at all where I wanted that photo to be. I
wanted it to be here, in between the text up here and the text down below, and so
this is a problem. The other problem is the photo came in way too big. So let's
fix some of these issues. The first thing I'm going to do is click on the picture.
Now ,something subtle just happened when I clicked on that photo. Look what
happened. I got an additional tab and ribbon that appeared at the top of
Microsoft Word and this is going to be very important. Anytime you click on
something, especially something special like a photo or a video, it's going to
give you some extra options. In this case the format options. First
thing I want to do though is just resize this image. So with it selected, I can
just go to the corner - any corner - click and drag to shrink that photo down to
size a little bit. And that's a lot better. Now, I still I'm struggling. I'm
trying to drag it up to the place I want it to be but it's just not quite
cooperating with me. The reason why is because this photo has some specific
layout options that come pre-selected by default and so I need to change those
layout options. Now in this latest version of Microsoft Word, when you click
on a photo, you'll get this little button that pops up. You can then click on it to
change the layout options, but just like in older versions of Microsoft Word, you
also have the option to right-click and go to Wrap Text and that will give you
the same options. So here in Wrap Text, I'm going to go with In Front of Text or
Behind Text. Either one will work great. I guess I'll choose Behind Text, and now
you can see what happened. Now, it's moving much more freely. I was not able
to do this before. I was not able to click and drag and put the picture
wherever I wanted it to be, but just by changing the options to Behind Text or
in Front of Text, now it's unlocked that photo and I can put it literally
anywhere in this document that I want it to be. You could even be up here in the
header or in the footer. It really doesn't matter. So that's a nice little
trick that you'll want to know and be able to use in your own documents. I also
want you to know that you can insert online pictures, and this is a great
option. You can connect to the internet and do searches and find images, find
clipart, and things that are on the web and then just click and drag to drop
them into your project. So that's a really nice option to have. Now, before we
move away from the photo and move on to other topics, I want you to notice this
Format tab that I mentioned earlier. When you click on a photo and then the format
tab, it gives you some options to do some things that are really nice. You can
remove the background. In this case, it wasn't very successful in how I removed
the background. You can alter the color scheme in lots of ways. You can do some
corrections, and there's some artistic effects. And so there's some
pretty exciting things you could come up with, some creepy images here with this
skeleton. I'm going to undo that but these photo effects are really pretty nice. You
can compress the picture as well and do some other exciting things. There's also
some picture styles. For example, you can put a frame around Mr. Skeleton here and
there's all sorts of different frames. You can have a kind of a fuzzy border
around the skeleton. If you'd like, you can make it almost 3D with some of these
3D effects. So some really nice options. You can also crop, and you'll be
surprised how often this is helpful and necessary. So when I clicked on Crop, it
gave me some additional lines and edges and things like that.
So I can use that to crop out part of the photo - whoops - and I have to make sure
I get the exact line there, and then I can just click outside the box and it
makes that crop effective. So watch out for this format tab. It'll appear and
give you some wonderful options that you need to be aware of.
There are also all sorts of other great options, especially shapes are especially
good. You can put in arrows. You can put in call-outs. You can put in squares,
rectangles, circles, plus signs - all sorts of great shapes that are useful
especially for teachers and students. And I want you to know that you can also add
a text box. Now how is the text box special? How is it different from the
regular text that you're typing in? Basically a text box is additional text
that can float on top of your document. So I'm gonna go with the simple text box
and I'll type in a wonderful message here and then click away. This text box
now can be dragged wherever I want it to go. Now it is interacting with that text
and if I don't want that to happen, I can use this button here to make it be
behind the text, the other text, or in front of the text. I'm going to go with
behind, and so now I can drag it freely so similarly to how I fixed this photo
and made it so that I could drag it anywhere I wanted it to be. It's similar
with text that's in a text box. Okay, now here in the review tab, a few other
basics that you need to know about whenever you're writing a paper or a
report or even a worksheet like this. It's important to get the spelling right
and you can see here on the Review tab, you can click Spelling and Grammar and
it will check for spelling mistakes. It looks like it found one. I don't know how
I possibly misspelled this word but I did and, if it can, Microsoft Word will
suggest alternate spellings that are correct. In this case, I've got it stumped
a little bit so I'll close that out, but I just wanted to point that out the
spelling and grammar in Word is great and is really one of the basic
essentials that you need to know if you're gonna be using Microsoft Word.
There's also some great options, like Word Count if you're a student and the
teacher has said I want you to create a two-thousand word essay or report,
you can just click to get a word count and it'll tell you how many characters,
how many words, how many pages , etc. There's also a wonderful thesaurus to
help you use a variety of words instead of using the same word over and over.
That's very helpful. Okay, so let's say you're done with your document and it's
time to get ready to turn it in. If you're a student and you're finishing an
assignment, let's say or maybe you're a teacher and you've put together what you
want to print and give to the students, how do you go from there? Well, one of the
first things that you need to do is to consider if you have the right line
spacing and things like that. Especially for students, maybe the teacher has said
I want you to double space your paper. How do you do that? Well, here on the Home
tab - home ribbon - you can go to Paragraph group and, look right here this is the
line and paragraph spacing options. You can go in and say I want double-spaced. Now, for that to really be effective, you need to click and drag to highlight the
text that you want to effect. So now when I do line spacing, set it at 2, now my
paragraph has double-spaced text. I also want you to notice that you have font
color options and all sorts of typical font options that you're probably very
accustomed to on all sorts of tools. And on the internet there's different fonts
to choose from here as well. Okay, so I'm happy with this. I'm good.
Of course, I could change the margins at the left and right using this ruler tool,
but if I don't want to mess with that, I'll just leave it as is. Now, to finish
this off, I just go to File and I have a bunch of different options. First, I
really should save this. And I can click Save. I can save it just to this PC and I
could save it directly, let's say, to the desktop or to my
documents, but also notice that there's an option to save it to OneDrive, and if
you're not familiar with OneDrive, please watch my YouTube video on OneDrive. It's wonderful tool similar to Dropbox but extra good for Microsoft Office and
Microsoft Word, in this case. Now, to access that it would be helpful to sign
in to your Microsoft account and that way, like it says here, you can get to
your documents from anywhere because you'll be signed in to your Microsoft
Office account and basically OneDrive in this case, though I'll just save it to my
desktop. It opens up, and I just give it a name. So there's the name I want to use.
I click Save, and we're good to go. And, of course, I can also click there on File
and I could print it, now that I've saved. I could have printed it without saving,
but it's a good idea to save first, just so you don't forget. But I can now print
and there's all these print options. Now, in addition to Print and Save, notice
what else that there is. There's Export, and this is very powerful. I could create
a PDF out of this document. So I can click that, save it also to the desktop
in this case, and so now when I go to my desktop,
look there is a PDF document that I've created from inside Microsoft Word and
here's the original in Word format. So that's a nice powerful option, just built
right into Word. So I'm done, so I'm going to close out of
this document completely, go to my desktop. Let's say next week I need this
same document, I can just go back to Word, open it up and, look, because it was
recently created, it shows up here. So this is a list of recently created
documents on this computer and there it is at the top. Now, as I use this more and
more on this computer, I'm going to end up with 20, 3, 50, 100 documents. It might be
nice, if this is a document that I'm going to keep working on a lot over the
next few weeks, it might be a good idea to try to get it to stay at the top of
the list. Well, there is a way to do that. If you put your mouse on it, look there's
a little pin. And if you click that pin, it will pin this particular document to
the top of the list. Now, I know right now, I just have the one document, but imagine
500 documents. This document would remain at the top of the list because I pinned
it. So that's a little trick that I think is helpful to know.
So in this tutorial, we have gone over all of the basics that you need to
know, all of the essentials that you need to know to start using Microsoft Word,
whether you're a teacher, whether you're a student, a business-person, or you're
just using this on your own at home. Microsoft Word is very powerful. You can
use it to make all sorts of things, and what I've given you here today is just
the basics to help you get started, with a few little bonus tips and tricks in
there that are a little bit more than basic. So in the future, I'd like to make
an advanced Microsoft Word tutorial, so watch for that.
But thanks for watching and please consider connecting with me on my social
media websites, like Facebook, Twitter and, Pinterest, and definitely do subscribe to
my YouTube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students. and
Watch for a new video at least every Monday.