Word 97 Basics

Basic Stuff You Need to Know

If you're new to word processing on a computer, you're in for a treat (and perhaps a little initial frustration!). Word processing requires skills that you never needed for that old IBM Selectric. But word processing on a PC lets you do things you never dreamed of doing on a typewriter!

Microsoft Word 97 contains many tools to help you learn, to simplify tasks, and to actually make it fun to do most of them. Word is a huge, powerful program capable of performing a wide range of sophisticated tasks. Obviously, no one can learn all of them at once.

If you spend a little time exploring the program, you'll find yourself getting some brilliant ideas about how you might use Word's features to simplify your life and make your work quicker, easier, and more creative.

Getting Help - The Office Assistant and Other Resources

MS Office, beginning with the 97 version, includes a new learning tool: the Office Assistant. The MS Office 97 version is shown on the right, and the Office 2000 Assistant is shown below. Notice that the Office 2000 version has gotten rid of the window, so the little guy just sits anywhere you put him, and takes up a lot less room. And he does some really weird stuff. Kinda' fun to have around. Helpful, too!

This feature allows you to type in a question in plain English: for example, "How do I change the margins?" or "How do I add a graphic to my document?" The Office Assistant then provides a list of Help articles, at least one of which should answer your question. There are several characters to choose from, and they're all animated and fun to have on your desktop.

To find out how to use all of Word's Help resources:

1. Select Contents from the Help menu.
    
2. Double click on Getting Help (Getting and Using Help in Office 2000).
    
3. Select Ways to get assistance while you work either by double clicking it, or by clicking once then clicking on the Display button.

The Help screen that you'll see (Office 97) is a graphic image that explains the learning aids that are available. Move the mouse pointer over each of the items. When the pointer changes to a hand, click once to pop up brief instructions on how to use that particular Help feature.

If you return to Contents, you can read the subtopic Getting Help through the Office Assistant:

1. Scroll down until you reach the end of the list of articles under Ways to get assistance while you work).
 
2. Double click on a topic.
 
3. Select an article, then click on Display to read it.

You can print Help topics if you want paper copies. Some of the articles are quite short - no more than a sentence or two. To save paper, click on Options and select Copy to make a copy of the open article. Paste the article into a Word document, combining several articles on one page.

For example, you might want to copy and paste several articles on keyboard shortcuts into the same Word document, then print out your own reference sheet. Have fun experimenting with the Office Assistant feature.

To select the Office Assistant that you like best, right click on the Office Assistant, select Options, then click on the Gallery tab. Click on Next until you see the critter you want to live on your desktop, then click OK.

NOTE: You may not be able to do this if the gallery wasn't installed on your computer and you don't have access to the CD.

Word Wrap

There was a time when you had to take your hand off the keyboard at the end of every line of type to manually shove the carriage back and advance the paper. Electric typewriters let you accomplish that by simply hitting the Return key at the end of a line. Then somebody invented word wrap: the printing element returned to the left margin and advanced the paper automatically when it reached the right margin.

Word processing on a computer doesn't use any paper at all until you're ready to print. When you reach the end of a line of text in a paragraph, the cursor automatically wraps to the next line, so you can continue typing without hitting the [Enter] key, except when you want to start a new paragraph.

cursor: in word processing, the mouse pointer normally displays as an I (called a carat). The cursor is the blinking vertical bar on your screen. When you type something, your text appears just to the left of the cursor, which moves to the right as you continue to type. You can place the cursor anywhere within the document* by positioning the I-pointer where you want to type, then clicking once with the left mouse button. The text you type will appear at the cursor location.

* "anywhere within the document": When you stuck a piece of paper into a typewriter, you could position the paper so that your first line of type and the first character you typed could be anywhere on the page. Word processing on a PC is very different in that respect (unless you've got Office 2000!).

First of all, it is paperless. When you create a new document, the 'page' that you see on the screen is there, of course, so that you can see what you're typing! Many of us are accustomed to creating documents on paper and being able to see what we're doing in a way that makes sense to us.

Word (and virtually all other Windows programs) provide a WYSIWYG (pronounced wis-ee-wig) environment - What You See Is What You Get: what you see on the screen is pretty much what your document will look like when you print it out (although printed fonts look a little different from screen fonts).

Note that the above all changed with Office 2000: now you can click anywhere at all on the page and the cursor will be inserted there. Word adds all of the space and you don't have to sit and press the [Enter] key 12 bazillion times!

A Page is Not Necessarily a Page

If you take a sheet of paper out of a typewriter without typing anything on it, you still have a blank sheet of paper. If you close a document in the computer without typing something in it, nothing remains. To place text halfway down the word processor page, you must - in effect - first create the page. One way to do that in pre-Office 2000 is to keep hitting the [Enter] key until the cursor is approximately half way down your virtual page. Each time you press [Enter], you create another line in the document. If you prefer, you can tell Word to center the text on the page for you (see Page Setup).

Click on Show/Hide on the tool bar to display non-printing characters - tabs, spaces, and paragraph marks - in your document. If you display the non-printing characters before you've typed anything on a new 'page', you'll see that the only things on the page, hidden or visible, are a single paragraph mark and the blinking cursor. That single paragraph mark indicates that you are at the end of the document (and, in this case, also at the beginning!).

At this point, it is still only a potential document. It simply doesn't exist until you type something in, insert a picture, create a table, etc., and then save and/or print it. Every time you press [Enter], the program inserts a new line, indicated by a paragraph mark, in your document.

Files

There are many different kinds of files in the computing environment. Some of them contain programs or information that programs need to work properly. The only files we're concerned with right now are document files, and those are nothing more than the work that you do in your word processor or spreadsheet program.

When you create and save a document - a letter or a memo, for example - it is recorded on magnetic media (usually a hard drive) much as sound is recorded on magnetic tape. You can open the file, revise it, and save the revisions - all without having to retype the entire thing.

Until you save a file, it exists only in the computer's temporary memory (RAM - Random Access Memory). This is the memory the computer uses while it is turned on and processing your work. If you turn the computer off, or if the power supply is interrupted, any work that has not been saved on the hard drive or on a floppy disk is lost forever. Be sure to read Saving Files to learn how to avoid losing your work. And if you'd like to know more about where to save your file, paths, directories, etc., be sure to read Help! The Computer Ate My File.

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