Microsoft Word, Part 1: New Documents, Views, and Breaks

This week, we will explore shortcuts and commands that can help you become a speedy user of
Word 2019. Everything in this module was put here so that you can get off work earlier and take
the slow, scenic route home. Starting here, you discover how to create and change your view of
documents. You find out how to select text, get from place to place, and mark your place in long
documents. You also explore how to insert one document into another, have Word read aloud to
you, and create data-entry forms to make entering information a little easier.

Learning Outcomes
 Use the different document views in Microsoft Word.
 Create documents with online or prebuilt templates.
 Utilize page and line breaks in Microsoft Word.

Explore
Introducing the Word Screen................................................................................................2
Creating a New Document....................................................................................................3
Choosing a Template............................................................................................................4
Getting a Better Look at Your Documents..............................................................................5
Welcome Back.................................................................................................................5
Changing Views...................................................................................................................5
Read Mode......................................................................................................................6
Outline view....................................................................................................................6
Draft view.......................................................................................................................6
Splitting the screen..............................................................................................................6
Paragraphs and Formatting...................................................................................................8
Page Break......................................................................................................................8
Line Breaks......................................................................................................................9
Common Shortcuts...............................................................................................................9
Selecting Text Shortcuts...................................................................................................9
Moving Around Shortcuts................................................................................................10
Introducing the Word Screen
Seeing the Word screen for the first time is like trying to find your way through a busy subway
station. It’s intimidating. But when you start using Word, you quickly learn what everything is. To
help you get going, the following figure shows you the different parts of the screen. Here are
shorthand descriptions of these screen parts:

 Quick Access toolbar: This toolbar offers the Save, Undo, Repeat, and Customize
buttons (and on touchscreens, the Touch/Mouse mode button). Wherever you go in Word,
you see the Quick Access toolbar. (Will be discussed further.)
 Document tab: At the top of the screen, the Document tab lists the names of open Word
documents. Select a tab to go from one document to another.
 Ribbon Display Options button: Clicking this button opens a menu for handling the
Ribbon.
 Minimize, Restore, Close buttons: These three magic buttons make it very easy to
shrink, enlarge, and close the window you are working in.
 File tab: Go to the File tab to do file-management tasks (Office 365 Only).
 The Ribbon: Select a tab on the Ribbon to undertake a new task. (Will be discussed
further.)
 Status bar: The status bar gives you basic information about where you are and what
you’re doing in a document. It tells you what page and what section you’re in, and the total
number of pages and words in your document.
 View buttons: Click one of these buttons — Read Mode, Print Layout, or Web Layout —
to change your view of a document.
 Zoom controls: Use these controls to zoom in and out on your work.
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Creating a New Document
Document is just a fancy word for a letter, report, announcement, or proclamation that you create
with Word. All documents are created using a special kind of file called a template. The template
provides the formats — the fonts, styles, margin specifications, layouts and other stuff — that give
a document its appearance.
When you create a document, you are asked to choose a template to establish what your
document will look like. If your aim is to create an academic report, flyer, newsletter, calendar,
résumé, or other sophisticated document, see whether you can spare yourself the formatting work
by choosing the appropriate template when you create your document. (The next modules will
discuss how we can create our own template.)
Follow these basic steps to create a document:
1. On the File tab, choose New.

2. Click to select a template.

3. Click the Create button in the preview window.
Your new Word document opens.

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Choosing a Template

 Choose the Blank Document template: Choose Blank Document to create a bare-
bones document with few styles. Blank Document is the default template for creating
documents. (By pressing Ctrl+N, you can create a new document without opening the New
window.)
 Search online for a template: Enter a search term in the Search box and click the Start
Searching button (or click a suggested search term). Templates appear in the New window.
You can click a template to examine it closely in a preview window.
Click the Create button to create a document from the template.
 Choose a template: Select a template to examine it in a preview window. Click the
Create button in the preview window to create a document from the template.
 Choose a personal template: On the Personal tab, click to select a template and create
a document. A personal template is one that you created or copied to your computer or
network.
NOTE: The Personal tab appears in the New window only if you’ve created templates or
copied them to your computer.

TIP: To find out which template was used to create a document, go to the File tab, choose Info,
and in the Info window, click the Show All Properties link (it’s located in the lower-right corner of
the window). The Properties list appears. Among other things, it tells you the template with which
the document was created.

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Getting a Better Look at Your Documents

Welcome Back
To help you pick up where you left off, the Welcome back! notice appears when you reopen a
Word document. It tells you which page you read most recently, the heading on that page, and
when you last viewed the page.

Changing Views
In word processing, you want to focus sometimes on the writing, sometimes on the layout, and
sometimes on the organization of your work. To help you stay in focus, Word offers different ways
of viewing a document. The figure below shows these views.

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Read Mode
While you’re in Read mode, you can double-click a table, image, or chart to enlarge it onscreen
and get a better look at it. Moreover, after the item gets enlarged, you can click the Zoom button
(the magnifying glass) to enlarge it several times more.
To shrink an item back to size, press Esc or click onscreen (don’t click the item itself).

Outline view
Switch to Outline view to see how your work is organized. In this view, you can see only the
headings in a document. You can get a sense of how your document unfolds and easily move
sections of text backward and forward in a document.
In other words, you can reorganize a document in Outline view. (Will focus on the next modules.)

Draft view
Switch to Draft view when you’re writing a document and you want to focus on the words.
Pictures, shapes, and other distractions don’t appear in this view, nor do page breaks (although
you can clearly see section breaks). Draft view is best for writing first drafts.

Splitting the screen

Besides opening a second window on a document (a subject of Book 1, Chapter 3), you can be
two places at one time in a Word document by splitting the screen. One reason you might do this:
You’re writing a long report and want the introduction to support the conclusion, plus you want
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the conclusion to fulfill all promises made by the introduction. Achieving both goals can be difficult
to do sometimes, but you can make it easier by splitting the screen so that you can be two places
at one time as you write your introduction and conclusion.
Splitting a window means to divide it into north and south halves, as shown in the figure below. In
a split screen, two sets of scroll bars appear so that you can travel in one half of the screen
without disturbing the other half. Follow these steps to split the screen:

1. On the View tab, click the Split button.

A gray line appears onscreen.
2. Drag the gray line until the gray line is where you want the split to be.
You get two screens split down the middle.
TIP: You can also split the screen by pressing Ctrl+Alt+S.
When you tire of this split-screen arrangement, click the Remove Split button on the View tab or
drag the line to the top or bottom of the screen. You can also double-click the line that splits the
screen in two.
In a split screen, you can choose a different view for the different halves. For example, click in the
top half of the screen and choose Outline view to see your document in outline form, and click in
the bottom half and choose Draft view to see the other half in Draft view. This way, for example,
you can see the headings in a document while you write the introduction.

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Paragraphs and Formatting
Back in English class, your teacher taught you that a paragraph is a part of a longer composition
that presents one idea or, in the case of dialogue, presents the words of one speaker. Your
teacher was right, too, but for word-processing purposes, a paragraph is a lot less than that. In
word processing, a paragraph is simply what you put onscreen before you press the Enter key.
For instance, a heading is a paragraph. If you press Enter on a blank line to go to the next line,
the blank line is considered a paragraph. If you type Dear John at the top of a letter and press
Enter, “Dear John” is a paragraph.
Knowing what Word considers to be a paragraph is important because paragraphs have a lot to
do with formatting. If you click the Paragraph group button on the Home tab and monkey around
with the paragraph formatting in the Paragraph dialog box, your changes affect everything in the
paragraph where the cursor is located. To make format changes to a whole paragraph, all you
have to do is place the cursor there. You don’t have to select the paragraph. And if you want to
make format changes to several paragraphs, simply select those paragraphs first.

Page Break
Word gives you another page so that you can keep going when you fill up one page. But what if
you’re impatient and want to start a new page right away? Whatever you do, don’t press Enter
again and again until you fill up the page.
Instead, create a hard page break by doing one the following on the Insert tab:
 Click the Page Break button (or press Ctrl+Enter). Word starts a new page at the
cursor position. (You can also go to the Layout tab, click the Breaks button, and choose
Page on the drop-down list.)
 Click the Blank Page button. Word enters two hard page breaks to create an empty,
blank page at the cursor position.

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Line Breaks
To break a line of text before it reaches the right margin without starting a new paragraph, press
Shift+Enter. Figure 2-2 shows how you can press Shift+Enter to make lines break better. The
paragraphs are identical, but I broke lines in the right-side paragraph to make the text easier to
read. Line breaks are marked with the ↲ symbol. To erase line breaks, click the Show/Hide¶
button to see these symbols and then backspace over them.

Common Shortcuts

Selecting Text Shortcuts

TIP: If a bunch of highlighted text is onscreen and you want it to go away but it won’t
(because you pressed F8), press the Esc key.

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Moving Around Shortcuts

Reference
Weverka, P. (2019). Office 2019 all-in-one. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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 Assignment
The document did not utilize page breaks. As a result, Statement of the Problem and Chapter
2 did not end up in the right locations. Use page breaks (Ctrl + Enter) or see in Explore other
ways to insert page breaks to fix the document.

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