NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, January 2012
Word 2007 – A few useful tips
By Lynn Page, Editor, Crystal River Users Group, Florida February 2011 issue, CRUG newsletter
http://www.crug.com
newsletter (at) crug.com (click to email author)

The Ribbon
With Office 2007 Microsoft introduced a totally new interface that has carried forward into Office 2010. The new Ribbon interface provides access to program features organized into logical groups on tabs relating to a type of activity. Some tabs appear only when needed like the Picture Tools tab, shown when a picture is selected. When a tab is selected the Ribbon becomes a graphical presentation of the program commands in that group.

So commands are readily available and noticeable making it easy to see things you may not have known existed or were too much trouble to find.

Office Button
One problem with the Ribbon interface was finding the old File drop down menu commands. The Office Button replaced the File drop down menu and Options dialog box. Clicking the Office button at the top left of the application window opens a drop down menu. From the menu you can create a new document, open an existing document and save or print the current document. It also provides a list of recently accessed documents. The Word Options dialog box is also accessed from the menu.

Quick Preview
A really great feature is quick preview. It lets you see formatting changes before applying them. With the movement of the mouse over the proposed formatting, you see how the document looks with that formatting.

Mini Toolbar
When working within a Tab, the Commands available on others are not visible. However some formatting commands are so important they are available all the time through the Mini toolbar. With text selected point at the selection and the Mini toolbar appears near the selected text in a faded fashion. Pointing to the Mini toolbar makes it become solid. Click a formatting option on the toolbar to apply the format.

Quick Access Toolbar
The Mini toolbar is great for formatting options, but doesn’t offer other commands. For these the Quick Access Toolbar is a solution makes frequently used commands available for easy access, regardless of which tab of the Ribbon is active. It is the row of buttons next to the Microsoft Office Button above the Ribbon. By default, the Quick Access Toolbar contains buttons for Save, Undo, and Repeat (Redo). In addition, the toolbar can be customized to contain personal favorites.

Click the down arrow beside the toolbar to open the Customize Quick Access Toolbar drop down menu. In the drop down menu, click a command to select it for inclusion in the toolbar. For more versatility, add commands directly from the Ribbon. Find the command on the Ribbon, right click it and click Add to Quick Access Toolbar.

A Few Useful Commands
Paste Special
The Paste Special command controls the format of pasted text. This is good when copying text or a graphic from another document or a web page to paste into a Word document. The Paste Special dialog box gives options for the format of text or graphic being pasted. The “Unformatted text” option cleans up pasted text. It pastes bare, unformatted text only. All other formatting information is stripped out, including bold, underlining, italics, indents, bullets etc.

Character Spacing
Character spacing found on the font dialog box is useful in final editing to eliminate orphans and widows.

Change Case
Change Case is accessed from the Home Tab in the Font Group. It is not in the Font dialog box. Select the text and Click the Change Case icon in the Font group on the Home tab. Select Sentence case, lowercase, UPPERCASE, Capitalize Each Word and tOOGLE cASE in the drop down menu.

Text Wrapping Break
Text Wrapping breaks along with text wrapping control how text is placed with respect to graphics. Add a Text Wrapping Break to start the next line of text below the graphic. Any type of break is added from the Page Layout tab. In the Page Setup group click Breaks. From the drop down menu select the appropriate break. Page, Column and Text Wrapping breaks are in the Page Breaks section. The different types of Section breaks are available in the Section Breaks section. They include next Page, Continuous, Even Page and Odd Page.

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