Welcome to this brief introduction to Microsoft word. You'll see I'm using a Mac today to demo this software, but the Windows version is very similar in functionality and as well as look and feel. So you'll see here, we're starting with a blank brand new document here and Microsoft word is used for word processing. So you can create research papers, letters, resumes, any number of documents that you would use either for personal or business use. And today I'll just show you a quick example of creating a simple letter and we'll use a template, which is a powerful feature in Microsoft word to do so. Which will also give us an opportunity to see some of the tools that are available in Microsoft word today. Couple of things to note before we get started. First of all, you can change the zoom level of your documents. So down in the bottom right hand corner, you'll see this slider here with the plus and minus, this is a resume and you can see that I'm currently at 100%. Personal preference for myself is to zoom this in a little bit, I typically like about 120 to 130%. Just gives you a little bit better view of the content on the screen. And this is a blank document in Microsoft word, which you can certainly start from and you can just begin typing right away. And you have formatting options in here, this area at the top here is called the ribbon. This is also where all of your menus are for manipulating the document, adding in images or adding in drawings, modifying the header and footer of the document. All of those options exist in these various menus in the ribbon. For this example, I am going to open a brand new document from a template. So here you can see on the new menu item, we can start with a blank document which is what we had. There's also a really good welcome to word tour that you can do in Microsoft word here. And you can see there are many, many templates available. There are many more available on the internet as well. And there's also a search box here in the top corner, I'll just simply search for the word letter and now I get a filter for many of the letter templates that are available in Microsoft word. So let's just select this basic business letter here, so I'll click on business letter. You can either double click on that or you can click on it at one time and hit create. And you'll see the Microsoft word now opens another new document, that's already prefilled as a template for this basic letter for us to create. Again, you can change the zoom level if you need to do so, we'll stick with 130%. And so now we get a little bit of direction here. What do I want the content of this letter to be? So here's a date so I can click on that and begin to type in a date, the date of this recording is May 12th, 2021. Recipient name, this could be, I'll just use Joe Smith as an example and the address here, 123 main street, Anytown, California. And then you would have a zip code here as well, all right. And then you get into the main body of your letter. And if you want this Joe Smith to not be so big and bold, blue, I can click on that to highlight it or I can drag my mouse cursor across it as well. You'll see that the formatting of this particular selection uses this salutation. Maybe I don't really need that, maybe that's not what I'm looking for. I want to change it to normal text, I can just click normal here and it will look like the rest of the document. I could also use a heading, I could expand this selection and see some of the other options here. So you do get some options there, if you don't want it to be blue, you can go to this section here which is your font color. So I can click on font color and it will make it the color that you see underlying there. Or you can click on the drop down arrow and you can select any number of colors as well as gradients and additional colors that are not standard or within a theme. If you set to automatic, typically it will go to a black color, however, that also depends on the theme that's selected. And then if I wanted to write content of this letter, I simply click anywhere in the content section of this template and I could then begin typing my letter. For this example, I'll just leave this content as it is and then I will sign it, what's my name? That's pretty easy options that we have now. Once we have this letter completed, we could save it which would save it either locally on my computer or I could save it to a cloud so Microsoft has a tool called One Drive. We could save it to one drive, we can print this letter if we wanted to print, sign it and mail it. We can also save as if you wanted to choose a specific location that you were going to save this letter to maybe you want to put on a flash drive or something like that. And speaking of those themes, we also have in the ribbon a design tab here where you can select various themes. The default is an office theme, but you can see there are various color themes here that you can select from as well as variations in the layout of the document. So if I want to move away from the office theme, let's pick something a little more drastic like Madison, you'll see our colors now change as far as the theme and goes. I've selected all black text here so you won't see that changed very much, but now you can see my theme colors are different here. So I may want Joe Smith's name to be in one of the theme colors. You also have the opportunity here to change that layout a little bit. So this is a pre formatted template letter, but you can see as I choose different options here. Some of the formatting changes along with that selection to get pretty quick customization to modify your custom letter here, your letter template. Obviously Microsoft word does a lot more things, but for the purposes of this course there should be plenty to get you started with formatting a basic document and doing some some document creation and editing.
