Creating files with word

Creating a New Blank Document

1. Choose Office button → New.

   The New Document dialog box appears.

2. In the upper-left corner of the large “Create a new Word document” panel, click “Blank document” (Figure 1-3).

   The New Document box presents a seemingly endless number of options, but don’t panic. The “Blank document” option you want is on the left side of the first line.

3. At the bottom of the New Document dialog box, click Create.

   The dialog box disappears, and you’re gazing at the blank page of a new Word document.

Figure 1-3. Open the New Document box (Office button → New, or Alt+F, N), and Word gives you several ways to create a new document. Click “Blank document” to open an empty document, similar to the one Word shows when you first start the program. Or you can click “New from existing” to open a document that you previously created under a new name.

Creating a New Document from an Existing Document

Note

The .docx extension on the end of the filename is Word 2007’s new version of .doc. The switch from three-letter to four-letter filename extensions indicates a change in the way Word stores documents. (If you need to share documents with folks using earlier versions of Word, choose Office button → Save As → Word 97-2003 document when you save the file. See the box in Section 1.2.3 for details.)

1. Choose Office button → New (Alt+F, N) to open the New Document window. Then click “New from existing…” (it sits directly below the “Blank document” button).

   The three dots at the end of the button’s title tell you that there’s another dialog box to come. And sure enough, when you click “New from existing…”, it opens another box, appropriately titled New from Existing Document (Figure 1-4). This box looks—and works—like a standard Windows Open File box. It lets you navigate to a specific folder and open a file.

2. On your computer, find the existing document you’re using for a model.

   You can use the bar on the left to change the folder view. Word starts you in your My Documents folder, but you can switch to your desktop or your My Computer icon by clicking the icons on the left. Double-click folder icons in the large window to open them and see their contents.

3. Click to select the file, and then click Create New (in the lower-right corner). (Alternatively, just double-click the file’s icon to open it. This trick works in all Open File boxes.)

   Instead of the usual Open button at the bottom of the box, the button in the New from Existing Document box reads Create New—your clue that this box behaves differently in one important respect: Instead of opening an existing file, you’re making a copy of an existing file. Once open, the file’s name is something like Document2.docx instead of the original name. This way, when you save the file, you don’t overwrite the original document. (Still, it’s best to save it with a new descriptive name right away.)

Figure 1-4. Use the New from Existing Document box to find an existing Word document that you’d like to open as a model for your new document. When you click Create New at bottom-right, Word opens a new copy of the document, leaving the original untouched. You can modify the copy to your heart’s content and save it under a different file name.

Tip

Windows’ Open File boxes, like New from Existing Document, let you do a lot more than just find files. In fact, they let you do just about anything you can do in Windows Explorer. Using keyboard shortcuts, you can cut (Ctrl+X), copy (Ctrl+C), and paste (Ctrl+V) files. A right-click displays a shortcut menu with even more commands, letting you rename files, view Properties dialog boxes, and much more. You can even drag and drop to move files and folders.

Creating a New Document from a Template

Note

The subject of Word templates is a lengthy one, especially when it comes to creating your own, so there’s a whole chapter devoted to that topic—Chapter 20.

1. Choose Office button → New (Alt+F, N) to open the New Document window.

   On the left of the New Document box is a Template Categories list. The top entry on this list is Installed Templates—the ones Word has installed on your computer.

   You could use any of these, but you also have a world of choice waiting for you online. On its Web site, Microsoft offers hundreds of templates for all sorts of documents, and you can access them right from the New Document box. If you have a fast Internet connection, then it’s just as quick and easy to use an online template as it is using the ones stored on your computer. In fact, you’ll use an online template for this example.

   Note

   If you can’t connect to the Internet right now, then simply choose one of the installed templates instead. Click Create, and then skip to step 4.

2. Scroll down the Template Categories list to the Microsoft Office Online heading. Under this heading, select Minutes.

   In the center pane, you’ll see all different types of minutes templates, from PTA minutes to Annual shareholder’s meeting minutes (Figure 1-5). When you click a template’s icon, a preview appears in the pane on the right.

   

   Figure 1-5. The New Document box lists prebuilt templates that live at Microsoft Office Online in categories like Agendas, Brochures, Calendars, and Minutes. Below the thumbnail you see an estimate of how long it takes to download the template from the Microsoft Office Online Web site. A rating, from 0 to 5 stars, tells you what other people think of the template (the rating system is kind of like the one at Amazon.com).

3. When you’re done perusing the various styles, click the Formal Meeting Minutes icon. (After all, CEOSA is a very formal organization.) Then click Download.

   Word downloads and opens the document.

4. Start writing up the minutes for the CEO Surfers.

   To follow the template’s structure, replace all the words in square brackets ([ ]) with text relevant to CEOSA.

Tip

If you’d rather not download the Formal Meeting Minutes template every time you use it, then you can save the file on your computer as a Word template. The steps for saving files are just around the corner in Section 1.5.

Document Views: Five Ways to Look at Your Manuscript

Figure 1-8. On the left side of the View tab, you find the five basic document views: Print Layout, Full Screen Reading, Web Layout, Outline, and Draft. You can edit your document in any of the views, although they come with different tools for different purposes. For example, Outline view provides a menu that lets you show or hide headings at different outline levels.

Note

Changing your view in no way affects the document itself—you’re just looking at the same document from a different perspective.

• Print Layout (Alt+W, P). The most frequently used view in Word, Print Layout, is the one you see when you first start the program or create a new blank document. In this view, the page you see on your computer screen looks much as it does when you print it. This view’s handy for letters, reports, and most documents headed for the printer.

• 
  Full Screen Reading (Alt+W, F). If you’d like to get rid of the clutter of menus, ribbons, and all the rest of the word-processing gadgetry, then use Full Screen Reading view. As the name implies, this view’s designed primarily for reading documents. It includes options you don’t find in the other views, like a command that temporarily decreases or increases the text size. In the upper-right corner you see some document-proofing tools (like a text highlighter and an insert comment command), but when you want to change or edit your document, you must first use the View Options → Allow Typing command. For more details on using Word for reviewing and proofing, see Chapter 16.

• 
  Web Layout (Alt+W, L). This view shows your document as if it were a single Web page loaded in a browser. You don’t see any page breaks in this view. Along with your text, you see any photos or videos that you’ve placed in the document—just like a Web page. Section 13.2 has more details on creating Web pages with Word.

• 
  Outline (Alt+W, U). For lots of writers, an outline is the first step in creating a manuscript. Once they’ve created a framework of chapters and headings, they dive in and fill out the document with text. If you like to work this way, then you’ll love Outline view. It’s easy to jump back and forth between Outline view and Print Layout view or Draft view, so you can bounce back and forth between a macro and a micro view of your epic. (For more details on using Word’s Outline view, see Section 8.1.)

• 
  Draft (Alt+W, V). Here’s the no-nonsense, roll-up-your-sleeves view of your work (Figure 1-9). You see most formatting as it appears on the printed page, except for headers and footers. Page breaks are indicated by a thin dotted line. In this view, it’s as if your document is on one single roll of paper that scrolls through your computer screen. This view’s a good choice for longer documents and those moments when you want to focus on the words without being distracted by page breaks and other formatting niceties.

Show and Hide Window Tools

• Ruler. Use the ruler to adjust margins, set tabs, and position items on your page. For more detail on formatting text and paragraphs, see Chapter 4.

• Gridlines. When you click the Gridlines box, it looks like you created your document on a piece of graph paper. This effect isn’t too helpful for an all-text document, but it sure comes in handy if you’re trying to line up photos on a page.

  

  Figure 1-9. In Draft view, you see most text and paragraph formatting, but headers, footers, and other distracting page formatting features are hidden. Your text appears as a continuous scroll, with the margins hidden. Page breaks appear as dotted lines.

• 
  Message Bar. The Message Bar resides directly under the ribbon, and it’s where you see alerts about a document’s behavior. For example, when a document is trying to run a macro and your Word settings prohibit macros, an alert appears in the Message Bar. Click the checkbox to show or hide the Message Bar.

• 
  Document Map. If you work with long documents, you’ll like the Document Map. This useful tool appears to the left of your text (you can see it in Figure 1-10), showing the document’s headings at various levels. Click the little + and–buttons next to a heading to expand or collapse the outline. Click a heading, and you jump to that location in your document.

• 
  Thumbnails. Select the Thumbnails option, and you see little icons of your document’s pages in the bar on the left. Click a thumbnail to go to that page. In general, thumbnails are more useful for shorter documents and for pages that are visually distinctive. For longer documents, you’ll find the Document Map easier to use for navigation.

Zooming Your View In and Out

Figure 1-10. Use the Show/Hide group on the View tab to display or conceal Word tools. The Ruler gives you a quick and easy way to set tabs and margins. The Document Map is particularly helpful when you work with longer documents because it displays headings in the bar on the left of the screen. In the left pane, you can see that Mr. Dickens wrote more than his fair share of chapters.

Figure 1-11. The Zoom group of options lets you view your document close up or at a distance. The big magnifying glass opens the Zoom dialog box with more controls for fine-tuning your zoom level. For quick changes, click one of the three buttons on the right: One Page, Two Pages, or Page Width.

Note

Even though the text appears to get bigger and smaller when you zoom, you’re not actually changing the document in any way. Zoom is similar to bringing a page closer so you can read the fine print. If you want to actually change the font size, then use the formatting options on the Home tab (Alt+H, FS).

Figure 1-12. The Zoom dialog box lets you choose from a variety of views. Just click one of the option buttons, and then click OK. The monitor and text sample at the bottom of the Zoom box provide visual clues as you change the settings.

In the box’s upper-left corner, you find controls to zoom in and out of your document by percentage. The view varies depending on your computer screen and settings, but in general, 100% is a respectable, middle-of-the-road view of your document. The higher the percentage, the more zoomed in you are, and the bigger everything looks—vice versa with a lower percentage.

The three radio buttons (200%, 100%, and 75%) give you quick access to some standard settings. For in-between percentages (like 145%), type a number in the box below the buttons, or use the up-down arrows to change the value. For a quick way to zoom in and out without opening a dialog box, use the Zoom slider (Figure 1-13) in the lower-right corner of your window. Drag the slider to the right to zoom in on your document, and drag it to the left to zoom out. The percentage changes as you drag.

Not everyone’s a number person. (That’s especially true of writers.) So you may prefer to zoom without worrying about percentage figures. The Zoom dialog box (on the View tab, click the magnifying-glass icon) gives you four radio buttons with plain-English zoom settings:

Page width. Click this button, and the page resizes to fill the screen from one side to the other. It’s the fastest way to zoom to a text size that most people find comfortable to read. (You may have to scroll, though, to read the page from top to bottom.)

Text width. This button zooms in even farther, because it ignores the margins of your page. Use this one if you have a high-resolution monitor (or you’ve misplaced your reading glasses).

Whole page. When you want to see an entire page from top to bottom and left to right, click this button. It’s great for getting an overview of how your headings and paragraphs look on the page.

Many pages. This view is the equivalent of spreading your document out on the floor, and then viewing it from the top of a ladder. You can use it to see how close you are to finishing that five-page paper, or to inspect the layout of a multi-page newsletter.

The ribbon offers radio buttons for three popular page views. (You can see them back in Figure 1-11, to the Zoom tool’s right.) They’re a quick and dirty way to change the number of pages you see onscreen without fiddling with zoom controls.

The Window Group: Doing the Splits

Figure 1-14. In the Window group, the three commands on the left—New Window, Arrange All, and Split—let you open and view your work from multiple vantage points. The commands in the middle—View Side by Side, Synchronous Scrolling, and Reset Window Position—are helpful when reviewing and comparing documents. The big Switch Windows button lets you hop from one document to another.

• 
  New Window (Alt+W, N). When you’re working on a long document, sometimes you want to see two different parts of the document at the same time, as if they were two separate documents. You may want to keep referring to what you said in the Introduction while you’re working in Chapter 5. Or perhaps you want to keep an Outline view open while editing in Draft view. That’s where the New Window command comes in. When you click this button (or hit this keystroke), you’ve got your document open in two windows that you can scroll independently. Make a change to one window, and it immediately appears in the other.

• 
  Arrange All (Alt+W, A). Great—now you’ve got documents open in two or more windows, but it takes a heck of a lot of mousing around and window resizing to get them lined up on your screen at the same time. Click Arrange All and, like magic, your open Word document windows are sharing the screen, making it easy to work on one and then the other. Word takes an egalitarian approach to screen real estate, giving all windows an equal amount of property (Figure 1-15).

• Split (Alt+W, S). The Split button divides a single window so you can see two different parts of the same document—particularly handy if you’re copying text from one part of a document to another. The other advantage of the Split command is that it gives you more room to work than using Arrange All for multiple windows because it doesn’t duplicate the ribbon, ruler, and other Word tools (Figure 1-16).

Figure 1-15. One downside of Office 2007’s ribbon: It takes up more space on your computer’s screen than menus or even the older button bars. When you open a couple of windows, you’re not left with much space to do your work, especially when you’re working on an ultra-portable laptop or a computer with a small screen. You can double-click the active tab to hide the ribbon, but in most cases, you’re better off working with a split screen, as shown in Figure 1-16.

Figure 1-16. When you’re viewing two different parts of a single document, use the Split command; it leaves you more room to work than two separate windows, as shown in Figure 1-15. Each section of the split window has a scroll bar, so you can independently control different parts of your document. If you want to fine-tune your split, just drag the middle bar exactly where you want it. When you’re done, click Remove Split to return to a single screen view.

One common reason for wanting to see two documents or more on your screen at once is so you can make line-by-line comparisons. Imagine you have two Word documents that are almost identical, but you have to find the spots where there are differences. A great way to make those differences jump out is to put both versions on your screen side by side and scroll through them. As you scroll, you can see differences in the paragraph lengths and the line lengths. Here are the commands to help you with the process:

The Many Ways to Save Documents

When you save a new document or save a document with a new name (Save As), you’ve got three things to consider: a filename, a file location, and a file format.

Here are the steps for saving a file, complete with a new name: