From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

Launching Word and touring the interface - Microsoft Word Tutorial

From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

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Launching Word and touring the interface

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Before we can dive into the many powerful features and functions of Word 2013, we first need to launch the program, and get comfortable in our environment, so let's explore the user interface by first launching Word 2013. If you're in Windows 8, and logged in already, that will give you a nice head start. If you are in Windows 7, you can launch Word 2013 from there as well. Now, what you see at the very beginning here is different from previous versions of Word 2013. This is our start screen, and down on the left-hand side, you will see a color-coded area, a panel on the left; for Word it's blue, Excel it's green, Power Point is orange, and so on. And you'll see a list of your recently worked on files, so you have quick access to them if you want to go back. You also have a link to open other documents, allowing you to browse your computer and online. To the right, we have a number of templates, including the default template, which is our blank document. If you're looking for a template that does not show up here on this initial screen, you can search for templates online, and there are thousands to search through. There are also some suggested searches to help you get started as well. If you are logged in already to your Microsoft account, you'll see that information here in the top right corner. You can switch to another account if you have another account, or perhaps you share this computer with others, and they'll want to switch to their own accounts. Also, in the top right corner, you'll see a button for getting help -- F1 is still the keyboard shortcut -- a minimize button, maximize, and a close button to close Word 2013 altogether. Now, the default template is a blank document. So, let's go there and just simply click once. Now, this launches Word to the initial user interface that you will see once you get past that start screen. Over here on the left-hand side is our Navigation pane. So, if your document has Headings, you want to go through Pages, or Results, you can search quickly using this Navigation pane. It can also be closed up using the Close button, and you can view it at any time from the View tab on the ribbon. Let's move up to the top of the screen. We still have the quick access toolbar. You will see some buttons there by default, like the Save, Undo, and you'll also see a little repeat option here as well, and then the dropdown where you can pick and choose what's going to show up on your Quick Access Toolbar. Anything with a checkmark is already showing. You can remove them by clicking them, or you can add items as well. We'll go back to that in a later lesson. Right below that is our ribbon, of course, and you'll notice the very first tab, the File tab, is actually going to take us to our backstage view. So, let's go there now. This takes us to a different view with a list of options down the left-hand side, for opening, saving, creating new documents, printing, exporting, etcetera. We can also access our Word options down here at the very bottom. We can go back to recent documents, go to your SkyDrive account, and with your Windows account, you do get some free space there, and of course, you could purchase more if you needed to. But it's a great way to save your documents to the cloud, so you have anytime, anywhere access to them. You can also browse your computer to open files there; even add places, little shortcuts that will take you directly to other locations if you wanted to. There is also a Back button up here. So, we can click the Back button to go back where we started before we clicked the File tab. Next is the ribbon, and you'll see the Home tab is highlighted or selected by default. So, we're looking at various sections here; the Clipboard, Font Sections. Notice that many of these have a little arrow icon in the bottom right corner, so you can actually expand these, and get full dialog boxes that you might be used to from previous versions in Microsoft Word. You have quick access to Styles, but you can also go to the full Styles dialog by clicking the arrow in the bottom right corner of that section. Let's just quickly go through some of the tabs. If you need to insert objects into your document, go to the Insert tab. And again, it's broken up into categories; so Pages, Tables, Illustrations, etcetera. Under Design, we have a number of design options, and here's where you can get into various document formatting options, and color schemes, etcetera. Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review, and View at the very end; the View Tab is going to show you your default view, which is our Print Layout view. We'll be talking about the different views in an upcoming lesson, but for now, just notice that the Print Layout is the default view, and that's the default view you might be used to from previous versions of Microsoft Word as well. I will go back to the Home tab. Also, if you have long documents, you're going to see scrollbars over here on the right-hand side, so you can scroll through your pages. If your document is too wide, the scrollbar will appear across the bottom; a horizontal one. And then down at the very bottom, we have on the status bar some information. You can see we're at Page 1 of 1; 0 words so far, so there is a Word count that shows up there. And also, on the right-hand side, those View modes we just saw from the View tab are available to us here. So, we have Read Mode, the one that's selected, Print Layout, as well as Web Layout. And then, we have our Zoom slider. So, we can use the minus sign and the plus sign to zoom in and zoom out of our documents, or we can click and drag the slider, and we'll always see the number in a percent off to the right. To bring it right back to the middle, or 100%, we just drag the slider, or use the plus or minus signs to get there. So, that's a quick tour of our user interface here in Word 2013. Now that we are comfortable in our environment, it's time to do a little more exploring, and start getting into some of the features and functions available to us here in Word 2013.

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