Chapter 5 -- Getting Started Using Word

Chapter 5

Welcome to Microsoft Word, a general-purpose word processing program that provides an unprecedented number and variety of features. The tasks you can perform using Word range from writing simple documents, such as memos and letters, to producing the camera-ready materials for professional-looking publications, such as newsletters and books. You can also use Word to create striking and dynamic pages for the World Wide Web or your company intranet.

Yet Word is relatively easy to use. First, its visual tools—that is, its menus, toolbars, and mouse interface—eliminate the need to memorize an extensive set of keyboard commands. Also, Word provides many predefined templates, styles, and visual themes that can assist you in producing attractive and effective documents or Web pages. Finally, Word fully automates many important tasks, such as creating new documents, formatting paragraphs, and correcting text.

You can compare Word to a sophisticated modern camera, which provides automatic settings for taking quick snapshots as well as manually adjustable settings for achieving precise visual effects. With Word, not only can you choose"automatic" or"manual" methods to control virtually any feature of the documents you create, but you can also customize the Word tools themselves—that is, the menus, toolbars, and shortcut keys—and the way you view and work with documents.