Cover | Table of Contents | Colophon

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Basic Word Processing

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Go ahead and skip these next few chapters. You don't need them. After all, everyone knows how to use Word to type a letter to Mom, tap out a report on the Komodo dragon, or clack out a recipe. But you can also use it to chart the Sweet Sixteen as they struggle through March Madness, snap off a To Do list that's as attractive as it is helpful, or put together a company newsletter that gets you noticed. Word offers the basic features of a desktop publisher, graphics utility, Dictaphone, and about a hundred other programs rolled into one convenient—if somewhat large—package.

The next few chapters teach you how to unwrap that package and put it to good use. From typing your first word to formatting complex layouts and creating templates for mass-producing your own favorite documents, these chapters will teach you everything that you've ever wanted to know about Word…and perhaps more. So, on second thought, you better not skip these chapters after all.

There are at least four ways to create a new document from scratch. They are as follows:

• Choose File → Project Gallery and click the Word Document icon, as described on the next page.
• Choose File → New Blank Document.
• Press ⌘-N.
• Click the New Blank Document button (the very first icon) on the Standard toolbar that appears just beneath your menu bar.

However you do it, the result is a pristine, empty document, willing and able to become your next note to self, pithy sermon, or environmental impact report.

In fact, this new document isn't really empty at all. Behind the scenes, it's already loaded up with such settings as an automatic font, margin settings, style sheets, and so on. It inherits these starter settings from a special document called the Normal template.

You can read much more about Templates on . For now, though, it's enough to know that you can modify the Normal template so that each new document you open automatically has your own favorite settings.

The first thing you see when you launch Word is the Project Gallery (see ), where you choose the kind of document you'd like to create.

Figure :

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Creating and Opening Documents

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

There are at least four ways to create a new document from scratch. They are as follows:

• Choose File → Project Gallery and click the Word Document icon, as described on the next page.
• Choose File → New Blank Document.
• Press ⌘-N.
• Click the New Blank Document button (the very first icon) on the Standard toolbar that appears just beneath your menu bar.

However you do it, the result is a pristine, empty document, willing and able to become your next note to self, pithy sermon, or environmental impact report.

In fact, this new document isn't really empty at all. Behind the scenes, it's already loaded up with such settings as an automatic font, margin settings, style sheets, and so on. It inherits these starter settings from a special document called the Normal template.

You can read much more about Templates on . For now, though, it's enough to know that you can modify the Normal template so that each new document you open automatically has your own favorite settings.

The first thing you see when you launch Word is the Project Gallery (see ), where you choose the kind of document you'd like to create.

Figure : The Project Gallery opens automatically when you first launch Word. When you wish to open another new document, just open the Project Gallery again by choosing File → Project Gallery or pressing Shift-⌘-P. Use the three buttons in the upper-left corner to switch between icon view, list view, and list view with preview.

The Project Gallery is your entry point to the many types of documents Office 2008 (not just Word) is equipped to handle. Your choices include brochures, spreadsheets, and even email messages. (For more detail, see .)

When the Project Gallery opens, the Word Document icon is highlighted, as shown in . If you click Open (or press Return or Enter) now, a new blank Word document opens, just as if you'd chosen File → New Blank Document (or pressed ⌘-N).

Opening any kind of document in the Project Gallery works the same way: Click the list items in the Category list on the left until you see the desired template or document type on the right. Then double-click the document icon to open it.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Word Processing Basics

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Once a document is onscreen, your administrative efforts are complete, and the creative phase can begin. While odds are good that you've processed words before, covers the nuts and bolts of editing in detail.

As a reminder, here are the very, very basics of word processing:

• Don't hit Return at the end of a line. Word automatically wraps the text to the next line when you reach the edge of the window.
• Don't type hyphens to break end-of-line words, either. To divide words at the end of lines, use Word's hyphenation feature, as described on .
• Press Return at the end of a paragraph. To create a blank line between paragraphs, don't press Return twice; that can cause awkward problems, such as an extra space at the top of a page. Instead, change the paragraph's style to leave more space after each paragraph, as described on . Using this more advanced and graceful method also lets you edit, add, and subtract paragraphs at will. As you do so, the spacing between the paragraphs remains consistent.
• For similar reasons, don't press Tab to indent the first line of a paragraph. If, instead, you set a first line indent using the Formatting Palette, as described on , Word automatically creates the indents each time you start a paragraph. Indents created this way remain consistent as you edit the document. In addition, the amount of indentation you choose isn't dependent upon the positions of your tab stops.
• Don't press Return at the end of a page. Word automatically wraps the text to the next page. If you want your next thought to start at the top of a new page, choose Insert → Break → Page Break instead. Now, no matter how much you edit before or after the section break, your new section always starts at the top of a new page.
• Press the Space bar only once—not twice—after punctuation such as periods, colons, and semicolons. Double-spacing after punctuation is a holdover from the days of the typewriter, when you had to manually add extra space after punctuation for an attractive, readable result. Word automatically places the correct amount of space after each period or other punctuation mark. Adding an extra space is superfluous, clutters your file with extra characters, and cramps your thumbs.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

A Window into Word

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

The tools you use most often—those for navigating your document and for basic formatting—are clustered around the main text window, as shown in .

Word 2008's title bar does all the usual Mac things—sends the window to the Dock when double-clicked, moves it when dragged, and so on—but it has a few unheralded powers, too. It also performs like a Mac OS X folder window in two key respects:

• To find out which folder your document is nested in, ⌘-click the document's title. As shown in , a shortcut menu appears, identifying your document's location on the hard drive. Click any folder or drive on the list to open it in a new Finder window.
  

  Figure : A Word window is surrounded by controls, gizmos, and levers. Almost anything you click, drag, or double-click produces some change to your document or Word's own settings.
• See the small Word icon next to the document's name in the title bar? That's your document proxy icon, which works just like the folder proxy icon in every Finder window title bar. As shown at right in , you can drag that icon just as you would any icon in the Finder. You might do so to move the current document to a different folder, to copy it to a different disk, or even to drag it directly to the Trash. In true Mac OS X fashion, you see a translucent ghost of the icon as you move it. (You have to hold the cursor down on this icon for about one second, making it turn dark, before you can drag it in this way. If you drag it too quickly, Word thinks you're simply trying to move the window on the screen.)

The document proxy icon appears faded out (turned off) whenever you've edited your document without saving the changes—and you can't drag it to move, copy, or trash your document when you haven't saved changes. (Need another clue that your document has unsaved changes? Glance at the red close button in the upper-left corner of any document window. If there's a black dot in the center of the red button, you need to save.) Only when you choose File → Save (⌘-S) does the proxy icon spring to life, ready for dragging.

Figure :

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

The Views

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Word can display your document in any of five different views, including the just-introduced Publishing Layout view. Each offers different features for editing, reading, and scrolling through your work. Some people spend their entire lives—or at least their Mac lives—in only one of these views, while power users may switch regularly back and forth between them.

In any case, using the views feature doesn't change your actual document in any way unless you change to Notebook view or Publishing Layout View. If you're using Draft or Print Layout View, the document prints exactly the same way. Views are mostly for your benefit while preparing the document onscreen.

Here are the five Word views, as they appear in the View menu.

You can also switch views by clicking one of the four icons at the very lower-left corner of your document window. (Except Web Layout view, which you can only get to via the View menu.)

Formerly known as Normal View, Draft view presents the Standard toolbar, the Ruler, and all the window accessories described in the previous section (see ). In Draft view, your entire document scrolls by in a never-ending window, with only a thin blue line to indicate where one page ends and the next begins. Draft view is where you can focus on writing your document. Many page-layout elements, including headers and footers, drawing objects, and multiple columns, don't appear at all in Draft view. As a result, Draft view offers the fewest distractions and the fastest scrolling.

This view shows what your document will look like if you convert it to a Web page, as described in . (And if you'd never in a million years dream of using Microsoft Word as a Web-design program, then this is only the first of many discussions you can safely skip in this book.)

For example, in Web Layout view, you don't see any page breaks, even if a particular page requires 47 consecutive feet of scrolling. After all, unlike a printed document when a Web page is long, you don't turn pages, you just keep scrolling. The Ruler goes away, too, because Web pages don't offer true indents or tabs. (Your existing tabs and margins still work, but you can only change them by using the various commands in the Format menu.) Any backgrounds, drawings, and images you've added to your document are visible, and look as they would when your document is viewed in a Web browser.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Every Conceivable Variation on Saving

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

The first thing to do with a completed document—or even a document you've just started—is to save it onto your hard drive, preserving it in case of an unforeseen system crash or accidental surge-suppressor power-switch toe-press. However, if you're still not in the habit of pressing ⌘-S every few sentences, paragraphs, or minutes, Word's AutoRecovery feature may save your hide.

If you have more than one Word document open at a time, press the Shift key as you choose File → Save. The Save command becomes Save All, which saves the changes to all open documents one by one. When you press Shift, you'll also notice that Close becomes Close All.

At preset intervals, Word saves the current document into a separate AutoRecover file. If your Mac freezes, crashes, or blacks out in a power failure, the AutoRecover file opens automatically. Once you've recovered, if you're satisfied that the Recovered file is the most recent and the one you want to keep, save it under a new name and continue working. (The file under the old name is the document as it was when you last carried out a real Save.)

Although AutoRecover runs in the background as you work, it produces a momentary and detectable slowdown. In other words, you want Word to save often, but not too often. To set the AutoRecover interval, choose Word → Preferences, and then click the Save button. Under "Save options," turn on the Save AutoRecover checkbox and enter a preferred number of minutes in the adjoining box.

The first time you save a document, or anytime you choose File → Save As, you open the Save dialog box (see ). The first thing to do is choose a folder for storing your newly created document. Next, click in the Save As box (or press Tab so that it's highlighted) and then name your document. (You certainly can do better than Document1.) Use the Format pop-up menu below to save your document into a different word processing file format, if you like.

If you frequently save documents in the same format, you can change the preferred format setting so that you don't have to choose your document format every time the Save As box appears. Click the Options button in the Save As dialog box, which is a shortcut to the Word → Preferences → Save panel. There you'll find a pop-up menu called "Save Word files as," which lets you specify the format you prefer.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Printing

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Even with so many people relying on email and the Web for communicating information, you can't use Word for very long without printing something on paper. As with so much else in Word, printing can be as simple or as complicated as you care to make it.

Printing doesn't get any simpler. Click the printer icon on the Standard toolbar to print one copy of your document to the currently selected printer. No dialog box, no page ranges, no flexibility.

This method is still simple, but lets you be more specific. Choose File → Print (or press ⌘-P) to open the Print dialog box, where you can tell Word how many copies of which pages of your document to print (and which printer you want to use, if you have several).

The Print dialog box is comprised of a series of panels that you expose by choosing from the pop-up menu in the middle of the box. This remodeling was much more than cosmetic, however, as you can now do things from the Print window (such as add a border or create an Adobe Acrobat [PDF] document), which used to require opening a separate dialog box—or a separate program!

The features in the Print box vary depending upon which printer you choose, but here are a few of the classics.

Copies and Pages

This panel is the preselected pop-up menu choice when the Print dialog box opens. Often, these are the only settings you need.

• Copies. Enter the number of copies you need. Hit Return to print, or Tab to move on to more settings.
• Collated. Turning on this checkbox prints out each copy of your document in page order. For instance, if you print multiple copies of a three-page letter with collating turned off, you'll get all your copies of page one, followed by all page twos, and so on. With collating turned on, you'll get page one, page two, page three, followed by another complete set of pages one, two, and three, and so on.
• Pages. The All button is initially selected, but you can also hit Tab and enter page numbers for a page range. For more control over which pages to print, read on.
  If you don't see "Print odd/even pages only" or other common printing options, choose Microsoft Word from the pop-up menu, as described in .

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Chapter 2: Editing in Word

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Despite all the whiz-bang, 21st-century innovations in Word 2008, some things haven't changed, including…well, typing and clicking. The basics of adding, deleting, and moving text around work essentially the same way as they did in Word 1.0, which fit on a single floppy disk and had to be started up with a hand crank.

Most of the editing and formatting techniques in Word and the other Office programs require a two-step procedure: select, then do. That is, first select the thing (character, word, paragraph, sentence) that you intend to act upon, then use keystrokes or menu commands to tell the Mac what to do to it.

Dragging with the mouse is the way most people first learned to select text. In this time-honored method, you click at the start of where you want to select text, and while holding down the mouse button, drag until the text in question is highlighted.

Don't forget Word's multi-selection feature, which has been around since Word X. You can select bits of text far apart from each other simultaneously and then cut, copy, and paste them all at once. You can grab a single sentence from the first paragraph of a document and a couple sentences from the second—and scrap everything else (see ).

Assuming you mastered dragging a long time ago, here are some more streamlined ways to select text. (Some of these moves are second nature to power users.)

• Shift-arrow. If you undershoot or overshoot the mark when dragging manually, don't start over—just remember the Shift–arrow key trick. After you release the mouse button, don't click again or do anything else. Hold down the Shift key and then press the arrow keys to expand or shrink the size of the selection—one character or line at a time. Add the Option key to expand or shrink the selection one word at a time.
• Dragging with the mouse and Option key. When dragging with the mouse, you'll notice that Word highlights text in one-word chunks, under the assumption that you'll very rarely want to edit only the first syllable of a word. Even if you begin dragging in the center of a word, the program instantly highlights all the way from the beginning to the end of that word, including the space after it. Usually, this behavior is what you want, and lets you drag somewhat sloppily.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

The Many Ways to Select Text

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Dragging with the mouse is the way most people first learned to select text. In this time-honored method, you click at the start of where you want to select text, and while holding down the mouse button, drag until the text in question is highlighted.

Don't forget Word's multi-selection feature, which has been around since Word X. You can select bits of text far apart from each other simultaneously and then cut, copy, and paste them all at once. You can grab a single sentence from the first paragraph of a document and a couple sentences from the second—and scrap everything else (see ).

Assuming you mastered dragging a long time ago, here are some more streamlined ways to select text. (Some of these moves are second nature to power users.)

• Shift-arrow. If you undershoot or overshoot the mark when dragging manually, don't start over—just remember the Shift–arrow key trick. After you release the mouse button, don't click again or do anything else. Hold down the Shift key and then press the arrow keys to expand or shrink the size of the selection—one character or line at a time. Add the Option key to expand or shrink the selection one word at a time.
• Dragging with the mouse and Option key. When dragging with the mouse, you'll notice that Word highlights text in one-word chunks, under the assumption that you'll very rarely want to edit only the first syllable of a word. Even if you begin dragging in the center of a word, the program instantly highlights all the way from the beginning to the end of that word, including the space after it. Usually, this behavior is what you want, and lets you drag somewhat sloppily.
  If you dislike the way Word automatically selects in one-word increments, you can turn it off by choosing Word → Preferences and clicking the Edit tab. The checkbox called "When selecting, automatically select entire word" is the on/off switch for this feature.
  Every now and then, however, you do want to edit only the first syllable of a word—perhaps to correct a typo. In those situations, Word's tendency to highlight the entire word can induce madness. On those occasions, press the Option key as you drag. Word responds by respecting the precise movements of your mouse.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Moving Text Around

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Three commands—Cut, Copy, and Paste—appear in every word processing program known to humankind, Word included. But Office 2008 has more powerful ways of manipulating text once you've selected it.

To copy text, highlight it as described above. Then choose Edit → Copy (or click the corresponding Standard toolbar button), click the mouse or use the arrow keys to transport the insertion point to your new location, and choose Edit → Paste. A copy of the original text appears in the new locale. To move text instead of copying it, use Edit → Cut and Edit → Paste; the selected text moves from one place to another, leaving no trace behind.

Alternatively, after selecting the text, you can also Control-click the selection (or click the right mouse button if you have one), and choose Copy or Cut from the shortcut menu. Similarly, when you arrive at the place where you want to paste, you can Control-click, then select Paste.

If this procedure sounds like a lot of work, you're right—especially if you're trying to choose these menu commands using a laptop trackpad. Cut/Copy and Paste is the sequence you'll probably use extremely often. By learning the keystroke equivalents, the time you save avoiding the mouse really adds up. For example:

Table : Copy, Cut, and Paste commands

Function	Command	Keystrokes
Copy	Edit → Copy	⌘-C or F3
Cut	Edit → Cut	⌘-X or F2
Paste	Edit → Paste	⌘-V or F4

Long, long ago, when keyboard commands were first handed out, Print got in line ahead of Paste and received the coveted ⌘-P keystroke assignment. But using ⌘-V for paste makes sense since V's right next to the C key, so all the editing keys—undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste—line up in a neat row on your keyboard. The V also looks like the caret mark proofreaders use to mean "insert." Or just think of V as standing for voilà, there it is!

The Paste Options smart button

No matter which Cut/Copy and Paste method you use, you'll notice a small, square button hovering over the surface of your document just by where you pasted. This is Word 2008's Paste Options smart button, shown in .

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Navigating Your Documents

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Word 2008 gives you a bunch of ways to navigate your document, some of which aren't as immediately obvious as the scroll bar.

Using the scroll bar has its own reward: As you drag the blue "elevator" scroll-box handle up and down, a pop-out screen tip balloon identifies the major headings in your document as you scroll by. By scanning this readout, you'll know exactly where you'll be when you stop scrolling.

It's by far one of the most frequently asked questions among new (and even some veteran) Mac fans: What on earth are all of those extra keys for on the standard Mac keyboard?

In many cases, the answer is "nothing." In most Mac programs (games excluded), such keys as the F-keys on the top row and the Num Lock key don't do anything at all. In Office, however, there's scarcely a single key that doesn't have a function. For example:

• Esc. Short for "Escape," this key provides a quick way of dismissing a dialog box without having to click the Close or Cancel button. It also closes a menu you've pulled down, once you decide not to use it.
• Home. This key moves the insertion point to the beginning of the line it's currently in. (You were expecting it to take your insertion point to the top of the document, weren't you? It's a trick; to do that, press ⌘-Home.)
• End. The End key, if you have one, takes you to the end of the current line. The ⌘-End combination takes you to the very end of the document.
• Ins. The Ins key (short for Insert), if you have one, is a very quick shortcut to the Paste command—even quicker than ⌘-V, and more intuitive than F4.
• Delete. The Delete key acts as a backspace key. It backs over and erases the last character you typed. In fact, ⌘-Delete comes set to delete the entire word before the cursor, which is often far more useful than deleting just one character—especially when you're in the middle of a writing frenzy.
• Forward Delete. This key deletes the character to the right of the insertion point—not a use most Mac fans are familiar with, but an extremely useful one once you know it. For example, when trying to correct a typo, you sometimes place the insertion point on the wrong side of the letter you want, especially when you're working with italics. In such cases, one tap on this key does just the trick.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Finding and Replacing

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

When editing a document, sometimes you know exactly what you want to revise, but just don't know where it is. For instance, you want to go back and reread the paragraph you wrote about mansions, but you don't remember what page it's on. Or suppose you've found out that you misspelled Sarah's name all the way through an article. Now you have to replace every occurrence of Sara with Sarah—but how do you make sure that you've got them all?

That's where "Find and Replace" comes in.

The Go Back command is unique to Microsoft Word, and it's fantastically useful. No matter where you are in a document, this command scrolls directly back to the last place you clicked (usually the last place you edited text)—even if it was in another open document.

You'll find this command useful in a number of circumstances: after splitting and unsplitting the window, and then finding yourself deposited in the wrong part of a document; when you've just opened up a document that you were editing yesterday and want to return to the spot where you stopped; when reconsidering an edit after scrolling to a new location; and so on.

Better yet, Word doesn't just remember the last place you clicked; it remembers the last three places. Each time you use the Go Back command, your insertion point jumps among these four places—the last three edits and your current position—even if that means bringing different document windows forward.

You can trigger the Go Back command by pressing Option-⌘-Z, or Shift-F5, or using the Navigator buttons described above. If you fall in love with this feature, as you might, consider changing the keystroke to something easier to remember. (See for instructions on changing a keystroke.)

If you just want to find a certain word (or even part of a word), choose Edit → Find (or press ⌘-F). The "Find and Replace" dialog box opens, as shown in . Type the word you're looking for, and then click Find Next (or press Return or ⌘-F).

If you turn on "Highlight all items found in Main Document," the Find Next button changes to say Find All. Now Word will select all occurrences of the search term simultaneously. At that point, you can bold them all, italicize them all, cut them all, or perform other kinds of neat global maneuvers.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Spelling and Grammar

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Whatever your document—term paper, resumé, or letter to the milkman—typos can hinder its effectiveness and sully your credibility. When you let mistakes remain in your document, your reader may doubt that you put any time or care into it at all. Word helps you achieve the perfect result by pointing out possible errors, leaving the final call up to you.

A spelling-related feature may have been benefiting you without you even noticing. When you incur a typo that even a Sominex-drugged reader would notice, such as wodnerful or thier, Word makes the correction automatically, instantly, and quietly. (Press ⌘-Z or F1 immediately afterward if you actually intended the misspelled version.) Technically, Word is using its spelling dictionaries as fodder for its AutoCorrect feature, as described on .

As a bonus, the spell checker is smart enough to recognize run-together words (such as intothe and giveme) and propose the split-apart versions as corrected spellings.

There are two basic modes to Word's spelling and grammar features:

Word's factory setting is to check spelling and grammar continuously, immediately flagging any error it detects as soon as you finish typing it. Each spelling error gets a red, squiggly underline; each grammatical error gets a green one. These squiggly underlines (which also appear in the other Office programs) are among the most noticeable hallmarks of Office documents, as shown in .

If you can spot the problem right away—an obvious spelling error, for example—simply edit it. The squiggly underline disappears as soon as your insertion point leaves the vicinity. It's often more fun, however, to Control-click (or right-click) each error (see ), which opens a shortcut menu to help you handle the correction process. Here are the commands you'll find in this shortcut menu:

• Help opens the Word Help system, as described in .
• The next segment of the shortcut menu lists spelling suggestions from Word's dictionary. It says "(no spelling suggestions)" if Word has none.
  If one of these suggestions is the word you were trying to spell, click it. Word instantly replaces the error in your document, thus evaporating the squiggly line.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Five Ways to Type Less

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

At first glance, the Word window looks much like any computer screen. You type, and letters appear, just as in that classic Mac word processor, TextEdit. But there's actually much more to it than that. While you're typing, Word is constantly thinking, reacting, doing things to save you precious keystrokes.

As noted earlier, for example, Word corrects obvious spelling errors as you go along. But it also lets you create your own typing shortcuts, and even tries to anticipate your next formatting move, sometimes to the frustration of people who don't understand what the program's doing. The more you know what Word is thinking (it means well, it really does), the more you can let Word do the work, saving those precious brain cells for more important stuff—like writing or remembering to get the kids to soccer practice.

In olden days, our screens gave us a continually blinking insertion point, located in the upper-left corner of the screen. That's where you typed, no questions asked or answers given. If you wanted to type in the middle of the page—for example, to create a title page of a report—you couldn't just click there and start typing.

Instead, you had to take the ludicrously counterintuitive step of moving the insertion point over and down by tapping the Space bar, Tab key, or Return key until it was where you wanted it.

But in Word 2008, "Click and Type" assists location-challenged typists the world over by letting them reach their desired insertion point just by double-clicking. Here's how it works:

1. Switch to Web Layout view or Print Layout view.
   These are the only views where "Click and Type" is available; choose from the View menu to change views.
2. Move the cursor around on the blank page, letting it hover for a second at the point where you'd like to place some text.
   In some cases, you'll see the cursor change to indicate that Word is about to provide some free formatting help. If your cursor is near the left or right margin, Word assumes that you want your text to be left- or right-aligned; you'll see tiny left- or right-justified lines appear next to the hovering insertion point (see ). When you hover in the middle of the page, the insertion-point icon changes to centered text. If your cursor is near the top or bottom of the page, the cursor changes shape again to show that you're about to edit the document's

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Chapter 3: Formatting in Word

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Formatting is a way to inject your style into the documents you create. Whether it's a newsletter for your college football fan club, or a white paper for your Fortune 500 business, formatting lets you transform that boring 12-point Times into something bold (pun intended) and exciting.

Word has independent formatting controls for each of four entities: characters (individual letters and words), paragraphs (anything you've typed that's followed by a press of the Return key), sections (similar to chapters, as described on "Inserting and Removing Section Breaks), and the entire document. Attributes like bold and italic are character formatting; line spacing and centering are paragraph attributes; page numbering is done on a section-by-section basis; and margin settings are considered document settings. Understanding these distinctions will help you know where to look to achieve a certain desired effect.

The Toolbox, which is the envy of Windows fan the world over, puts Word's most commonly used tools and essential formatting commands within easy reach, including the popular Formatting Palette (). If it's been hidden, reveal it by choosing View → Formatting Palette or click the Toolbox button on the Standard toolbar and click its Formatting Palette button. Both methods alternately hide and show the Toolbox.

The options on the Formatting Palette change depending on what you're doing. When you click a photo or drawing, for example, the palette changes to show the tools you need to work with graphics. Most of the time, however, the Formatting Palette displays the commands you most frequently need to work with fonts, paragraph formatting, and other elements of text.

Figure : In Word 2008, almost every conceivable formatting control resides in a single convenient window, a jam-packed command center called the Toolbox. Its row of navigation buttons open the Formatting palette, the Object Palette, Citations, Scrapbook, Reference Tools, Compatibility Report, and the Project Palette. The essential Formatting Palette is further subdivided into panes, including the Font panel, which lists the quickest ways to restyle your text. Clicking the close button sends the Toolbox genie back into its toolbar button.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

The Formatting Palette

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

The Toolbox, which is the envy of Windows fan the world over, puts Word's most commonly used tools and essential formatting commands within easy reach, including the popular Formatting Palette (). If it's been hidden, reveal it by choosing View → Formatting Palette or click the Toolbox button on the Standard toolbar and click its Formatting Palette button. Both methods alternately hide and show the Toolbox.

The options on the Formatting Palette change depending on what you're doing. When you click a photo or drawing, for example, the palette changes to show the tools you need to work with graphics. Most of the time, however, the Formatting Palette displays the commands you most frequently need to work with fonts, paragraph formatting, and other elements of text.

Figure : In Word 2008, almost every conceivable formatting control resides in a single convenient window, a jam-packed command center called the Toolbox. Its row of navigation buttons open the Formatting palette, the Object Palette, Citations, Scrapbook, Reference Tools, Compatibility Report, and the Project Palette. The essential Formatting Palette is further subdivided into panes, including the Font panel, which lists the quickest ways to restyle your text. Clicking the close button sends the Toolbox genie back into its toolbar button.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Character Formatting

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

The Font panel of the Formatting Palette—the uppermost pane of the palette—deals mostly with the appearance of your letters, numbers, and other characters. You can also access most of these functions via the Formatting toolbar (choose View → Toolbars → Formatting if you don't see it).

Installing Office 2008 adds 126 fonts to your Library → Fonts folder—an unannounced gift from Microsoft.

To change the font of the text you've already typed, select the text first, using any of the methods described on . If, instead, you choose a new font in the middle of a sentence or even the middle of a word, the new font will take effect with the next letter you type.

Now, open the Font menu or click the Name pop-up menu in the Formatting Palette's Font pane to reveal your Mac's typeface names in their own typefaces (). This what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) font menu feature has a few interesting features, such as:

• If you have a very long list of fonts, you don't have to scroll all the way down to, say, Zapf Chancery. Once the menu (or Formatting Palette pop-up list) is open, you can type the first letter or two of the target font. The menu shifts instantly to that alphabetical position in the font list.
  You can open the font list marginally faster if you don't use the WYSIWYG fonts feature. Pressing Shift when opening the Font menu or Fonts list in the Formatting Palette lets you see all the fonts listed in plain type. Honestly, though, unless you've got a really slow computer, the difference is negligible. But this Shift-key trick is a helpful solution when you're trying to figure out the name of a font that's showing up as symbols. (You can turn off the WYSIWYG feature for good by choosing Word → Preferences → General panel and turning off "WYSIWYG font and style menus," then clicking OK.)
  

  Figure : Whether you pick from the Font menu or the Formatting Palette, you get to see what each font looks like. Fonts you've used most recently are conveniently grouped together at the top.
• Once you've turned off WYSIWYG font menus, you can still summon the WYSIWYG font when you

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Formatting

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

If you're in the business world, or even the business of organizing your thoughts, you can't go far without using numbered or bulleted lists.

Bulleted lists are an attractive way of presenting nuggets of information. Here's a great example:

• Each paragraph is indented from the left margin (like this one) and is preceded by a bullet (the round dot shown at left).
• Word comes with two automatic list-formatting features turned on to help create this kind of list: "Automatic bulleted lists" and "Automatic numbered lists." However, since many people can't figure out how to control this automatic behavior, it's one of the first things they turn off—once they figure out where the preferences are. They're at Word → Preferences → Auto Correct → AutoFormat as You Type, as discussed on .
• You can always create a numbered list by typing a number at the beginning of each line, but it won't be nicely indented.
• You may know how to create a bullet (•) at the beginning of every line by using the keyboard shortcut Option-8. But again, that won't produce the clean left margin on your bulleted paragraphs.
• Furthermore, creating lists manually can get messy. For example, inserting an item between two existing ones in a numbered list requires some serious renumbering. And if you want your list indented, you'll have to fiddle with the indent controls quite a bit.

Word has partially automated the process. A quick way to start a numbered or bulleted list is from the Formatting Palette. Open the "Bullets and Numbering" panel by clicking anywhere on the "Bullets and Numbering" title bar, and then click one of the list icons (next to where it says Type, as shown in ). Word changes the paragraph style to ListParagraph (see ), promptly indents the paragraph containing the insertion point, and adds a bullet (or the number 1). Even the indenting is perfect: The second and following lines of a list item start under the first letter, not all the way back to the left margin. To start a new list item, just hit Return. When you're finished building the list, press Return twice.

Figure : Click the "Bullets and Numbering" title bar to expand the panel. The panel provides a bucketful of listing options. For example, you may choose a type of list (numbered or not), its indent, and even the number to begin your numbered lists with. Or if you aren't in a bulleted state of mind, choose "none" to remove a bullet.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Paragraph Formatting

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Beneath the Font and Styles panes of the Formatting Palette, you'll find "Alignment and Spacing", "Bullets and Numbering", and "Borders and Shading"—settings that affect entire paragraphs. Just as the Formatting Palette's top section provides the most useful controls of the Format → Font dialog box, its third section gives a subset of the Format → Paragraph dialog box (, left).

And just as character formatting applies either to highlighted text or to text you're about to type, paragraph formatting applies to only a selected paragraph, several selected paragraphs, or the paragraph you're typing in (the one containing the blinking insertion point).

Figure : Left: Format → Paragraph (or Option-⌘-M) summons the Paragraph dialog box, showing all the controls that apply to the selected paragraphs.
Right: The expanded Formatting Palette reveals the most useful controls. For example, the controls at the bottom of this panel are a quick way to change indents.

When you click the "Alignment and Spacing" title bar, the Formatting Palette expands to reveal all the commands that control how your text lies on the page (, right).

Horizontal

These icons illustrate how your paragraph will be aligned with the left and right page or column margins: left aligned, centered, right aligned, or fully justified. (Justified refers to straight margins on both sides. Word automatically adjusts the spacing between letters and words to make the right margin come out even, exactly like a newspaper. Justification works best if you turn on hyphenation, too, as described on .)

You may find yourself changing alignment frequently when writing something like a newsletter, where it's common to go from a centered headline to a left-aligned article to a justified column of classified ads. Fortunately, alignment is fully equipped with keyboard shortcuts: ⌘-R right-aligns the current paragraph, ⌘-L is for left alignment, ⌘-E centers the current line or paragraph, and ⌘-J justifies the current paragraph.

Line spacing

The amount of space between lines of text is called line spacing, or, in homage to the typewriter, single-, double-, or triple spacing. Since Word isn't constrained by the clicks of a typewriter's

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Document Formatting

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

When you start with a blank document, Word provides a one-inch margin at the top and bottom of the page, and a stately one-and-a-quarter inch margin at each side.

Most people never change these settings. In fact, in its own, almost accidental way, Microsoft has dictated the standard margin formatting for the world's business correspondence. But if you learn how to work with margins—as well as paragraphs and indentation—you can give your document a distinctive look, not to mention fit much more text on a page.

You can adjust the margins of a Word document in either of two ways: by entering exact measurements (in the Formatting Palette or the Document dialog box), or by dragging the margins directly on the ruler.

To use the numeric option, choose Format → Document → Margins tab, or click the Document Margins title bar on the Formatting Palette. There you'll find individual boxes that let you specify, in inches, the size of the left, right, top, and bottom margins.

To set your margins by dragging, which produces immediate visible feedback, you need to be in Print Layout view (View → Print Layout) or Publishing Layout view (View → Publishing Layout).

• Left, Right, Top, Bottom. To set margins by dragging, point to the line where the ruler changes from white to blue, without clicking. (The blue area is outside the limits of the margin.) When the cursor changes to a box with double arrows, drag the margin line to any point on the ruler you wish (see ). Now you can change the margins on both the horizontal and vertical rulers.
  You may find it extremely hard to adjust the left margin, since the trio of indent markers () lies directly on top of the blue/white boundary. Move the cursor slowly from one indent marker to the other until the Left Margin screen tip appears and the cursor shape changes as shown in . However, you may find it much easier to just move the first-line indent handle out of the way while you adjust the margin.
  

  Figure : The house-shaped controls in the top ruler set indents (). This example shows a first-line indent. Drag the blue/white boundaries in either ruler to adjust the margins.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Section Formatting

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

The Formatting Palette doesn't say anything about section formatting. In fact, most people have never even heard of it.

Still, section formatting is important in a few special circumstances, such as these:

• Sections allow you to divide a document into chapters, each with its own headers or footers.
• Sections let you change from, say, a one-column format for your opening paragraph to a three-column format for the body of the article. They also let you insert a landscape-orientation page or two into a paper that's primarily in portrait orientation.
• Sections give you flexibility in printing. You can print your title page on colored paper from a different paper tray on your printer, for example.
• You can set different margins for each section of your document. This might come in handy if your training manual includes multiple choice quizzes for which you could really use narrower page margins.

The bottom line: A section is a set of pages in your document that can have its own independent settings for page numbering, lines, footnotes, and endnotes. It can also have its own layout features, such as page borders, margins, columns, alignment, text orientation, and even page size. Finally, it can have its own printer settings, such as orientation and paper source.

To start a new section, choose Insert → Break, then choose one of the Section Break types—depending upon where you want the new section to begin (relative to the current page). For instance, to change the number of columns in the middle of a page, choose Section Break (Continuous); to start the next chapter on a new page, choose Section Break (Next Page). If you're self-publishing a novel, remember that new chapters usually begin on a right-hand page; choose Section Break (Odd Page).

You'll see the change reflected right away. In Normal view, a section break shows up as two finely dotted lines labeled "Section Break (Next Page)" or whatever kind you inserted (see ). In Page Layout view, you see only the effect of the page break; if you chose the "Next Page" type, your text abruptly stops in the middle of one page and picks up again on the next. But if you click the Show (¶) button on the Standard toolbar, the breaks appear as double lines, just as in Draft view.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Chapter 4: Styles, Page Layout, and Tables

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

After you've polished the content of your document, it's time to work on the packaging, and Word 2008 includes the wrapping paper, ribbon, and bows that can take you beyond simple word processing deep into the realm of page design and layout.

For example, an endless block of text running across the page is fine, but columns of text are more professional looking, easier to read—and much less boring. Or perhaps you'd like to add some well-placed borders, but you've never been sure how to work with them.

This chapter builds on 's formatting lessons and teaches finishing touches that give your document polish and flair. Yet to come, however, is Word 2008's new Publishing Layout view which takes Word's page-layout abilities to a whole other level. Its features make it more like a separate page-layout program than another document view, and you'll find it discussed in depth in .

Creating Word documents usually requires a small assortment of formatting styles, which you'll use repeatedly. In a short piece, reformatting your chapter titles (for example) is no big deal; just highlight each and then use the Formatting Palette to make it look the way you like.

But what about long documents? What if your document has 49 chapter headings, plus 294 (or even 394?) sidebar boxes, captions, long quotations, and other heavily formatted elements? In such documents—this book, for example—manually reformatting each heading, subhead, sidebar, and caption would drive you crazy. Word's styles feature can alleviate the pain.

A style is a prepackaged collection of formatting attributes that you can apply and reapply with a click of the mouse. You can create as many styles as you need: chapter headings, sidebar styles, whatever. The result is a collection of custom-tailored styles for each of the repeating elements of your document. makes all of this clear.

Figure : Suppose you want to call special attention to a paragraph. This before-and-after shot shows the beauty of a style: With a single click in the Style pop-up menu on the Formatting Palette (top), you can apply a special font, style, and paragraph border all at once (bottom). Better yet, you don't have to remember how you formatted a similar paragraph earlier.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Styles

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Creating Word documents usually requires a small assortment of formatting styles, which you'll use repeatedly. In a short piece, reformatting your chapter titles (for example) is no big deal; just highlight each and then use the Formatting Palette to make it look the way you like.

But what about long documents? What if your document has 49 chapter headings, plus 294 (or even 394?) sidebar boxes, captions, long quotations, and other heavily formatted elements? In such documents—this book, for example—manually reformatting each heading, subhead, sidebar, and caption would drive you crazy. Word's styles feature can alleviate the pain.

A style is a prepackaged collection of formatting attributes that you can apply and reapply with a click of the mouse. You can create as many styles as you need: chapter headings, sidebar styles, whatever. The result is a collection of custom-tailored styles for each of the repeating elements of your document. makes all of this clear.

Figure : Suppose you want to call special attention to a paragraph. This before-and-after shot shows the beauty of a style: With a single click in the Style pop-up menu on the Formatting Palette (top), you can apply a special font, style, and paragraph border all at once (bottom). Better yet, you don't have to remember how you formatted a similar paragraph earlier.

After creating your styles, just apply them as needed; they stay consistent throughout the document. During the editing process, if you notice an accidentally styled, say, headline using the Subhead style, you can fix the problem by simply applying the correct style.

You'll appreciate styles even more when it comes time to change the formatting of a particular style. If you change a style's description, Word changes every occurrence of that style in your document.

Styles aren't one of Microsoft's ease-of-understanding masterpieces, but they're getting better. Grasping how they work, where they're stored, and when they change explains many of Word's idiosyncrasies, and pays off handsomely in the long run.

Every document has a collection of ready-to-use, built-in styles, whether you're aware of it or not. (To be more precise, every document is based on a

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Print Layout

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|