Microsoft Word 2007

a summary look

Microsoft Word 2007 represents considerable change over Word 97-2003. The biggest change is in the interface, which looks much different. Microsoft opted for a more visual presentation of Word's features. The interface is flashy, even somewhat distracting, but effective even so

New Look

The most obvious change in Word 2007 lies in its user interface. The interface centers on what Microsoft calls the Ribbon. The Ribbon replaces the previous organizational toolbar buttons with tabs. The new interface looks confusing at first, but it organizes functions better. Its visual emphasis keeps more functions in sight. The downside of the Ribbon is its cluttered look.

The Ribbon features icons as well as titles, with many dropdown menus. The interface is busy but the organization of features makes sense.

Office Button

You might not immediately recognize that the Windows icon at the top left of the Ribbon is a button, and not just decoration. This is the Office Button. Click it to reveal basic familiar functions:

New, start a new document.
Open, open an existing document.
Save, save an already saved document.
Save As, create or change save properties of a document.

Note: Word 2007 saves to a new format: .docx. Word 2007 can still work with the old .doc format of Word 97-2003, but older versions of Word cannot read .docx. Remember this when sharing documents. Word 2007 is still new and many people and businesses have yet to switch to it. Word 2007 currently gives you 19 save options, so you can choose the appropriate format.

Print, print options.
Prepare, view properties, encrypt, inspect a document.
Send, send document as email, fax, or pdf.
Publish, publish document to blog, document management server, or document workspace.
Close, saves document and closes program.

Each function has an intuitive drop down menu of related features. Next to the Office Button is the Quick Access Toolbar. The buttons on this toolbar pair with the Start button to give you your most commonly used functions.

Quick Access Tool Bar

The Quick Access Tool Bar is a customizable array of icons representing more of the functions that you will use frequently.

Undo, undoes your last action.
Undo Typing, lists recent changes. Click the drop down arrow then select the point to return to.
Repeat Clear, erases your last actions incrementally.
Open, opens the Open Document dialogue box, so that you can choose a file to open.
Save, saves file under current save definitions.
Draw Table, opens the draw table dialogue.

These are the default buttons for this tool bar. The drop down arrow on the right lists more options that can be added to the toolbar:

New, opens a blank document.
Email, sends document by email.
Quick Print, opens the print dialogue box.
Spelling and Grammar, opens the spelling and grammar checker, which is also located under the Review tab.
More Commands, offers more commands that you might find useful to have easily accessible. Essentially, you can select any Word 2007 command.
Show Below Ribbon, moves the Quick Access Toolbar below the ribbon. If the toolbar is already below the ribbon, it can be moved above.
Minimize the Ribbon, removes the ribbon from view. Check to remove, uncheck to return the ribbon to view.

The Tabs

Once the Start Button and Quick Access Toolbar have become familiar, the tabs make more sense. There are seven tabs. Take them separately:

Home, the functions that you use most frequently can be found on this tab.
Insert, pictures, tables, headers and footers, and more, can be added by selecting the features of this tab.
Page Layout, issues of font, margin, line spacing, and more are addressed with this tab.

References, footnotes, table of contents, indexes, and citations can all be created in this tab.

Mailings, various mail merge functions can be accomplished with this tab.

Review, spell check, commenting, track changes, and more can be accomplished with this tab.

View, gridlines or rulers can be added, zoom, view as outline, web layout, or print layout, and more.

Acrobat, create a pdf of your document.

Home

The Home tab gives you access to the most frequently used formatting commands. The tab is divided into five rationally-organized sections.

Clipboard, cut and paste options are available here.
Font, change the font and its style and effect.
Paragraph, alignment, line spacing, and list options are accomplished on this tab.
Styles, select consistent formatting styles, which you can modify.
Editing , find, replace, and select options.

Clipboard

Clipboard offers cut, copy, and paste options. You can also perform these functions using keyboard shortcuts (ctrl+x for cut, ctrl + c for copy, ctrl + v for paste), or right-clicking and selecting the option that you want.

Note: The Paste Special command can only be accessed via the Ribbon. Use Paste Special if what you are pasting has different formatting than where it is being pasted. You can keep source formatting or match target formatting.

Font

This section gives you your font options: type, size, color, and so forth. Note the boxed arrow at the lower right of this section of the tab. Clicking the arrow at the bottom right corner of the font section opens the font dialog. This gives you all available font options.

Most tab sections of the Ribbonhave these expansions of possibility. The Ribbonkeeps the most popular options readily accessible and visible. If you cannot find what you need, dig deeper.

Paragraph

These options control alignment, indents, bullets, and so on. Though the options of the Home tab are the ones you will use most often, you cannot keep them constantly visible. This may prove disadvantageous for you. If you have another tab open, you cannot glance to see if bold or center alignments are on.

Styles

Styles gives you pre-set formatting options, defining header size and style. Right-click on any style button to create your own definitions. Microsoft's defaults are fine but define styles as you feel fit. Microsoft's defaults often use colored fonts, for instance. You may prefer to save your color cartridges and use only black.

Hovering the cursor over a style button previews the style in whatever paragraph currently has the insertion mark. It may disconcert you to see the format change suddenly if the cursor should accidentally move over the buttons.

Editing

Editing consists of Find, Replace, and Select. This placement of these functions seems no more intuitive than in previous versions of Word.

Note: The minimalist question mark (?) located at the top right of the Ribbonis Microsoft's Help Menu. The three tabs of earlier versions of Help have been replaced by Browse and Table of Contents in separate sections, plus a search window. It looks more stylish, in a distracting way.

The other tabs work similarly and can be described briefly.

Insert

There are seven sections to the Insert tab. Microsoft performed considerable reordering from previous versions of Word to organize functions in this way. The seven sections are:

Pages, add cover page, blank page, or page break.
Table, draw and insert a table, or Excel spreadsheet.
Illustrations, add pictures, charts, and call outs.
Links, insert hyperlinks, bookmarks, or cross-references.
Header & Footer, add headers, footers, and page numbering.
Text, create text boxes, word art, drop caps, date & time, and more.
Symbols, insert equations or symbols.

Page Layout

These are all the options that affect the look of the page.

Themes, pre-set formats. Word's default font is Calibri, 11 point, for some reason. Select a pre-set, or devise your own.
Page Setup, margins, orientation, columns, breaks, line numbers, and hyphenation.
Page Background, watermark, background color, or page borders.
Paragraph, indentation and line spacing.
Arrange, move objects and define their emphasis. Place graphics underneath text, wrap text, rotate, and otherwise adjust how graphics, text, and tables, and boxes work together.

References

References supplies the tools for scholarly works. The six sections are self-explanatory:

Table of Contents
Footnotes
Citations and Bibliography, with several references styles accommodated
Captions
Index
Table of Authorities

Mailings

This tab makes the process of creating a mailing list much simpler than earlier versions of Word. All options are laid out in a clearly logical, comprehensive presentation.

Create, create envelopes and labels.
Start Mail Merge, start mail merge, select recipients.
Write and Insert Fields, highlight and create merge fields.
Preview Results, find recipients, check for errors.
Finish, finish and merge.
Acrobat, merge the results to Adobe Acrobat's pdf format

Review

Revise and receive comments on your document.

Proofing, spell check, translate, word count.
Comments, create and delete comments.
Tracking, track changes in the document.
Changes, accept or reject changes in document.
Compare, compare and combine two versions of a document.
Protect, control who can make editorial changes to document.

View

Controls Word's display.

Document View, print layout, web layout, outline, et cetera.
Show/Hide, show or hide ruler, gridlines, document map, or thumbnails.
Zoom, increase or decrease the view's percentage of the page's actual size, or choose two page view.
Window, open and arrange additional windows.
Macros, what is this doing here? Create and manage macros

Acrobat

Word can now create documents in Adobe's PDF format. PDF, which stands for Portable Document Format, is now a standard format. Its advantage lies in its consistency. PDFs cannot be directly edited. If you need to make changes, you must go back to the original Word document, make your changes, then create a new PDF. Make sure that you specify that Adobe Reader opens all PDFs, otherwise Word will try to. Word can only open PDFs that it created.

Create Adobe PDF, process your document into a PDF.

Create and Email, Microsoft obviously lacked sections for this tab. This is a redundancy with the Mailings tab. It is not difficult to email a PDF: send as an attachment.

Summation

Microsoft Word 2007 is fully loaded. You might not need all of its features, in which case use Microsoft's Notepad or any other simple word processor. For better or worse, Word is a word processing standard.