Chapter 1

The Two-Dollar Tour

IN THIS CHAPTER

Start an Office Application

Start a New Document

Explore the Office Ribbon and Tabs

Understand the File Menu (Backstage View)

Create a Document

Type Text

Insert a Picture

Move Around in a Document

Select Content

Zoom In and Out

Change the View

Step right up for a tour of Microsoft Office, the most popular suite of applications in the world!

Here are some of the things you can do with Office:

• Write letters, reports, and newsletters.
• Track bank account balances and investments.
• Create presentations to support speeches and meetings.
• Send and receive email.

The Office suite consists of several very powerful applications (programs), each with its own features and interface, but the applications also have a lot in common with one another. Learning about one application gives you a head start in learning the others.

In this chapter (and Chapter 2), I take you on a quick tour of some of the features that multiple Office applications have in common, including the tabbed Ribbon area. I also show you how to insert text and graphics in the various applications, and how to move around and zoom in and out.

In these first few chapters, I use Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel as the example applications because all of them work more or less the same way: They let you open and save data files that contain your work on various projects. Microsoft Outlook works a bit differently, as I show you in Chapters 11 through 13.

Start an Office Application

Follow these steps to start an Office application:

1. Click the Start button in the lower left corner of the Windows desktop, opening the Start menu.
2. Do any of the following (your choice!)
   • Look for a shortcut tile for the application on the right side of the Start menu. If you see one, click it.
   • Scroll down in the Start menu's left pane until you get to the section for the letter of the alphabet for the desired application (for example, P for PowerPoint) and click the application name.
   • Start typing the first few letters of the application name (for example, po for PowerPoint) and then click the application name on the filtered list that appears.

Start a New Document

When you open Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, a Start screen appears (no relation to the Windows Start menu), containing a list of recently used documents and thumbnail images of templates you can use to start new documents. To start a new blank document (which you'll want to do in order to follow along with this chapter), you can press the Esc key, or you can click the Blank template. The template has a slightly different name depending on the application; in Word it is called Blank document, in Excel it's Blank workbook, and so on. Figure 1-1 shows the Start screen for Microsoft Word, for example.

FIGURE 1-1

To create an additional new blank document after the application is already up-and-running, press Ctrl+N at any time.

Office 2010 and earlier started a blank document automatically in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, without having to go through a Start screen. If you want that old-style behavior back, click File and then click Options. On the General page, scroll down to the bottom and clear the Show the Start Screen When This Application Starts check box.

Explore the Office Ribbon and Tabs

All Office applications have a common system of navigation called the Ribbon, which is a tabbed bar across the top of the application window. Each tab is like a page of buttons. You click different tabs to access different sets of buttons and features.

Figure 1-2 shows the Ribbon in Microsoft Word, with the Home tab displayed. Within a tab, buttons are organized into groups. In Figure 1-2, the Home tab's groups are Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, Styles, Editing, and Voice.

FIGURE 1-2

Each Office application has a set of tabs for the tasks it performs. For example, Word has a Mailings tab that holds the commands for doing mail merges. Excel has a Formulas tab that holds the commands for setting up calculations.

If you run Office applications on a device that has a touchscreen, you get an extra tab in the Ribbon: Draw. This contains tools for drawing with a finger or a stylus. The figures in this book were captured from a touchscreen PC, but keep in mind that the Draw tab isn't present on computers without touchscreens.

You might find tabs that were added by third-party (non-Microsoft) software. For example, if you have a program called Adobe Acrobat installed, you might have an Acrobat tab in each of the Office applications.

The buttons and controls on the tabs operate in different ways. Figure 1-3 points out some examples on Word's Home tab.

• On/off toggles: When the button is selected (it turns orange), the feature is on. Each time you click the button, it switches between on and off.
• Command buttons: When you click the button, the command executes. If you click a command button again, the command repeats.

• Connected button sets: In connected sets of buttons, selecting a button deselects (cancels) the previous selection in the set.

  For example, Figure 1-3 has four buttons in the bottom row for paragraph alignment. The leftmost one is selected; if you click one of the others, it's automatically canceled.

• Menu buttons: Buttons with arrows on them open menus or color palettes.
• Galleries: A gallery is like a permanently open menu or palette; click a selection directly from a gallery. Most galleries also have a More button that shows more choices.

FIGURE 1-3

You can hover the mouse pointer over a button to see a pop-up box, called a ScreenTip, which tells the button's name and/or purpose.

With some buttons that contain arrows, you can click anywhere on the button face - directly on the arrow or not - to open the menu or palette (an array of colored squares from which you can choose a color). With others, the button face and the arrow are separate clickable areas. Clicking the arrow opens the menu, but clicking the button face applies whatever setting was most recently chosen from the menu.

To tell the difference between the two types of menu buttons, point the mouse at the button. If the button face and the arrow are different colors or if there is a thin line between them, it's the type where you have to click directly on the arrow to get the menu. If there's no separation, you can click anywhere on the button.

In the bottom-right corner of many of the groups is a small square with an arrow. Clicking this square (called a dialog box launcher or a properties button) opens a dialog box related to that group. For example, the one for the Paragraph group in Figure 1-3 opens the Paragraph dialog box, which contains controls for every button in that group plus more options not available on the Ribbon.

Not sure which tab contains the command you want, or what the command is called? The Tell me what you want to do. box (shown in Figure 1-2) enables you to ask questions in plain English. Just type your question in the box and press Enter to see a list of relevant commands, and then click the one you want to issue that command.

When you resize the application's window so the window is narrower than normal, or when you run the application on a computer that has low-resolution video settings, the controls on the Ribbon compress (squeeze together). Some of the groups turn into single buttons with drop-down lists for accessing the individual controls within that group. For example, in Figure 1-4, most of the groups are compressed, and one of the groups has been opened as a drop-down list.

FIGURE 1-4

Above the main part of the Ribbon is a small toolbar called the Quick Access toolbar. You can add buttons for frequently used commands here (as many as you can fit). To add a button, right-click any control from any tab and choose Add to Quick Access Toolbar, as shown in Figure 1-5. To change the position of the Quick Access Toolbar, right-click it and choose Show the Quick Access Toolbar Below the Ribbon (or Above, if it's already below).

FIGURE 1-5

You can also customize the Ribbon itself, but that's beyond the scope of this book. If you want to experiment with it on your own, choose File???Options and click Customize Ribbon.

Understand the File Menu (Backstage View)

Clicking the File tab opens the File menu, also known as Backstage view. Backstage View provides access to commands that have to do with the data file you are working with - things like saving, opening, printing, mailing, and checking its properties. The File tab is a different color in each application. In Word, for example, it is blue. To leave Backstage view, click some other tab or press the Esc...