Welcome to beyourownit.com’s free video series where we offer a variety of computer related tips, tricks, trouble shooting problems, and tutorials. The last category, tutorials, is going to be where we start today with a beginner’s guide to Microsoft Word. Probably, everyone out there has at least used it or seen it before. What I’m going to do is just spend a few minutes showing you a couple of the basic features of Word. We’ll start with creating a document. When you open Microsoft Word… Let’s open it from scratch. When you open it, you’re going to be faced with… You have the document window over here. Sometimes to close it, you just hit this little X right here and to change the view of what you’re looking at. I honestly, like the print layout but there’s a lot of different kinds. You can have the normal layout where you don’t have the margins showing. The web layout… None of this really matters. Just how you prefer to see how you type.

Here’s a zoom feature. Here we can change how far you need to zoom in. Let’s type. Here is a sentence. Now, up here, it shows you that I’m currently typing in Times New Roman and font size 12. In order to change that, if you’re just going to change one word or an entire sentence or the entire document, just click and hold the mouse and highlight what you need to change. Go to the drop down arrow, select your size. 12 is standard, Times New Roman is also standard. If you’re typing a paper for someone, I’d leave these set.

Now, if you’re having a hard time seeing what you’re writing, use the zoom feature here. Where it says 100 percent, maybe you want to go 200 percent and see everything gets a lot bigger. The font size is still 12 but it just zooms in. If you have a hard time seeing what’s on the screen, you can use the zoom feature to get a better look at things.

Some other features and I’ll show you the short cut. If you want to bold a word, you can just highlight it and use Control B on the keyboard. You can see it bolds it. Unbold it, do the same exact thing, gone. Across the top, toolbar here, they also have the black B. That is also a way of bolding it. You can do the same thing with italics. Highlight a word, hit Control I and you can undo it by hitting Control I again. Also, while highlighted, you can use the I shortcut. It may appear on your screen under this little menu I have depending on what screen resolution you have.

I’m going to jump around a little bit but I just want to mention to you that no matter what when you start typing something you should save it. Go to file, save as, name your document and just hit save. Save often as you type just in case something happens or your computer locks up. Somebody comes in the room, shuts off your computer, or closes your window without talking to you. There can be a lot of things that happen. I just always recommend saving.

Next thing I’m going to show you is the copy and paste. If you have something that you need duplicated many times. You need only highlight it. There’s a couple of ways to do this. You can right click on your highlighted area and you can copy it which just makes a copy of it. You can cut it if you need to move it. See how it disappears? Or you can paste it by right clicking, going to paste. Some other ways to do this is you highlight it and hit Control X on your keyboard. That cuts it. Control V paste it. Or if you want to copy it, Control C and if you want to do something over and over again, you can just keep hitting Control V over, and over, and over again and it’ll keep pasting whatever you’ve copied.

The next thing I want to show you a little bit is some more advanced stuff. It is going to be the find and replace. You go to edit and find. Now, if you’re just looking for a word in your document, you can use the find feature. Let’s say I’m typing “Jeremy” and I hit find. See it highlights the first one. I could find the next copy, the next copy, the next copy… all sorts of things. The replace, which is really neat. Let’s say you made a mistake in the whole document. Like you can see here I forgot to capitalize my name. I can replace it with my name capitalized. You can either chose replace one instance or replace them all. I’ll go replace all. Word will tell me there’s six times that it’s done it. As you can see, all of them are fixed.

Now, if you want to try something, let’s say I wanted to put my last name on there. You can still find Jeremy and replace it with this, add a last name on it. Replace all. Now, it’s gone. I mean, it added the last name. This is a really convenient feature for making wide‑scale changes to your document. If you need to do something like that with a name or replace a word or an abbreviation or something like that, find and replace is a great way to do it.

Now, let’s say I want to make this a bulleted list. I can just highlight it and we’ll go over to the icon. You can either make it a number list which is the little numbers. It will automatically number it for me or we can use bullets. Or we can turn bullets off the same way. Just click the button again. So, bullets on, bullets off. Left’s on, left’s off.

Now, another nice you can do with Word is in order… Formatting. Let’s say we are not all typing just a regular Word document. You can use the insert feature for a lot of different things: page numbers if you have a long document; a picture if you need to; text box; fields; all sorts of stuff like that.

Now if you want to make a table, which is probably something you use a lot in Word, we’ll just go to the table and you’ll want to insert. Hover over the insert and go to table. Let’s say I want it. A table looks like an Excel spreadsheet. Let’s make three columns by two rows. Hit OK. Now, we’ve inserted a table in the Word document. Now, if you want to make a quick table as part of your assignment or your document or whatever you want to do. You can do it that way.

You can also add rows in the table itself, things like that. You can insert another table. You can delete cells. Put cells. Just like any other Word document. You can merge cells, all sorts of stuff like that. Now, if you want to insert a graphic, go to insert tab, hover over picture. From file means you have the picture already on your hard drive. Clip art is you are going to choose from Microsoft Word’s library or Microsoft’s library. Let’s say I want a lion. Type it in, search. OK. I didn’t find any.

Let’s go to the Office collections. Here and just grab one of these guys. It’s a little ear here. You can copy it and then you can use the control V to paste it or right click and then paste. If you want to do other things with the insert like… I’m sorry, under the picture is Word Art, something that we get a lot of question on.

Basically, Word Art is you choosing a design for something. This comes great when you have to make a flyer or something like that. You choose a type. You type what you want. Then you can mess with the font and the size and this and that. But then you hit OK and look at that. It made my nice little logo. I can make it bigger. Do whatever I want.

Which brings me to another shortcut. If you want to send her something, like a picture. You can highlight it and it control Es in elephant. It will automatically center it. L for left align, R for right align. Now, if you want to use the shortcut buttons. Use the standard paragraph form, align left and I’ll move it. Let’s say we want to do align right, it will move it. Move it whenever you need. Same goes for your text.

You can do that sort of things with your text, which kind of brings me to most of your basic functions of Word. Under tools, you’ll find spell check, your word count, if people even use that kind of stuff anymore. Formatting. All your tool is up here so you can do your font, your bullets. This is kind of the basic look at of what you can do with Word. We can save it. Makes sure you save early and often as I always say.

I hope this helps you going with Microsoft Word. You can find more videos like this at www.beyourownit.com where we have additional videos, free tech support blog, articles, product reviews, tech support chat and much more. I hope you have a great day.