An Introduction to Word Processing

1. An Introduction to Word Processing

2. What’s Word Processing? • The creation of new documents, and the amendment of existing ones. • Documents can include pictures and other illustrations as well as text. • We’ll be using Microsoft ‘Word’ (Office 2010 edition) for demonstration purposes.

3. Getting Started - Defaults • When you first open ‘Word’ you’ll be shown a blank page with something like this above it . . . • Note the automatic choice of ‘Normal’ as your ‘Style’. It’s recommended that you leave it this way – possibly with a bit of “tweaking”!

4. Getting Started – ‘Normal’ Style • Right-click on the Normal style and choose ‘Modify’ from the drop-down menu. • You will then be able to choose things like font, size, line-spacing, etc. to be used as your own ‘Normal’ style.

5. Let’s Get Started . . . • The document you now create will be formatted according to your chosen options in the ‘Normal’ style. • You have many means at your disposal to change part(s) of the text used in your document – e.g. font, size, colour, bold face, italics, underlining, etc. • Let’s have a look at some of these options . . .

6. Document Creation – Formatting Options • The diagram on the right shows the formatting portion of the ‘Home’ tab. • By highlighting the part of your document you wish to change you can then click on the option you want. • You can change: • Bold Face • Italicise • Underline • Background Colour • Text Colour

7. Document Creation – Formatting Options (cont.) • You can also decide whether you want your text to be: • Left justified • Centre justified • Right justified • Fully justified

8. Some Basic Keyboard Reminders • The ‘Shift’ key changes text from lower- to upper-case. • The ‘Enter’ key starts a new paragraph. • ‘Delete’ erases the character ahead of the cursor. • ‘Backspace’ deletes the character behind your cursor. • ‘End’ moves the cursor to the end of the line it’s on. • The ‘Arrow’ keys move the cursor – one space at a time – in the direction of the arrow without affecting the text. • Hitting ‘Ctrl’ and ‘Enter’ at the same time automatically takes your cursor to the beginning of a new page. • Don’t forget that if you highlight a block of text, whatever actions you specify will affect the whole of that block.

9. Let’s put it into practice • We’ll now create a document on our own computers and experiment with the features we’ve been talking about.