WinWord Notes

Table of Contents

Introduction to Word Processors.......................................................... B

Formatting Levels .................................................................................. I

Sections ............................................................................................... III

Styles ................................................................................................ VIII

Miscellaneous ..................................................................................... XI

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Introduction to Word Processors ord processor programs are basically tools to format text. To format text means to change the way text is displayed or printed. With a text editor

program, like Notepad, which has no formatting tools, to separate paragraphs from each other, you might either indent the first paragraph with space or tab characters, or press the Enter key twice (first to end the current paragraph, and then to create an empty paragraph), like:

Paragraph One

Paragraph Two1 2

With a word processing program, on the other hand, you probably would not use this method, because it creates too much distance between paragraphs. Instead, with a word processing program like Microsoft WinWord, for example, you can either indent the first line like the current one (Home => Paragraph => Indentation => Special => First

1 This actually is paragraph 3, not 2, if we count the preceding empty

one.

2 This is a footnote. To insert one, apply References => Insert Footnote.

W

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line) or, if you do not like the default 10 points after spacing, use Home => Paragraph => Spacing => Before or After, and can set a precise distance between paragraphs. For example:

Paragraph One

Paragraph Two

As a matter of fact, in this document, all paragraphs are formatted to have 7 points of distance after, except Paragraph One and the empty paragraph following it in the first example, which have 10 points after.3

Again, with a text editor program, in order to center a paragraph (like a title), you might have to use spaces or tab characters, like:

Centered Text

Using this method with a word processing program may cause unwanted results. Look what happens when we change the font size of the above paragraph from the default 12 points Calibri to 16 points Calibri:

3 To select the whole document excluding footnotes (in order to set

paragraph spacing), press Ctrl-A. However, as it will be discussed in Styles section, modifying the normal style may be a better idea for this task.

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Centered Text

It is no longer centered! Instead of inserting spaces and/or tabs to center the same paragraph, let’s use the paragraph alignment feature (Home => Paragraph => Alignment => Center) and see what happens when we make the same change to the font size:

Centered Text

Centered Text

The lesson is that, whatever change we make (like altering the font size here), the paragraphs will remain centered.

As we discussed in class, default paragraph alignment of word processing programs used to be justified, that is, both left- and right-aligned. The reason is easy to understand: it simply looks neat and good (to most people, at least). Default alignment is now changed to left, the reason being that uniform spacing between words is believed to make reading easier.

As seen in this paragraph, which is justified, when long words at the ends of lines are wrapped to the next line, the remaining words may have large distances between them as the program attempts to maintain justification. Paragraph alignment is found under Home => Paragraph => Alignment.

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With the default (Letter) page size, this document would take only four pages. A document that is too short is not suitable for header / footer applications. Therefore, to span the text over more pages, I changed the page size to 19 centimeters high and 16.5 centimeters wide. Left and right margins are 1 inch and top and bottom margins are 1.2” If you need to change the measurent unit from/to centimeters/inches, click Office Button at the top left corner of the screen; use Word Options => Advanced => Display => Show measurement in units of …. Page and margin sizes can be changed via Page Layout => Page Setup.

An interesting option of WinWord is the ability to make what it calls “formatting marks”, like paragraph marks and even space characters, visible4 5. Personally, while I work on a document, I prefer to have it checked. Yes, it looks ugly, but it is very informative. The images of these pages are

4 To have formatting marks (non-printing characters) displayed or

hidden, use the right top button seen in this image:

5 To put an image into a document, use Insert => Picture.

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supplied in two sets: One is with, the other is without formatting marks.

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Formatting Levels s we have already mentioned repeatedly both in class discussions and previous quizzes, formatting commands of Microsoft Word for Windows can be grouped at three levels:

Character

Paragraph

Section

Character, Paragraph and Section Formatting

1) Character: Character-related formatting commands are found under Home / Font (both menu and tools)

2) Paragraph: Some commands pertaining to paragraph formatting are:

a) Home / Paragraph menu

b) Home / Paragraph tools

i) Bullets

ii) Numbering

iii) Multilevel List

A

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iv) Shading

v) Borders

c) Tab settings (ruler must be viewable)

3) Section-related menu commands are under the following major tool groups:

a) Page Layout =>Page Setup6 and Columns

b) Insert => Header & Footer

6 Paper size of this document is 7.5 by 6.5 inches and all the margins are

1.2”.

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Sections s can be seen in the multilevel list above7, menu items related to character and paragraph formatting are reasonably well-grouped, whereas those related to section formatting are scattered all around.

We need not be aware of sections unless we need more than one section in a document. We would need more than one section if we want to have a different section attribute in the same document. Section-specific commands are collected in the Page Layout tool group. Paper size, margin values, paper orientation, vertical alignment, etc., are some of some of these attributes.

For example, if, in the same document, we need to have

both portrait (default) and landscape orientations,

in addition to default top vertical alignment, some other (center or justified or bottom) alignment,

both single column (default) and multi-column

7 One way of promoting or demoting levels in multilevel list is to use the

Tab and Shift-Tab keys. Another way is to use the “Increase Indent” and “Decrease Indent” tools on the Home tab.

A

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different header/footer (other than different first page and odd/even numbered pages)

The first three above are easily done: You select the relevant portion of the document and apply the command to “Selected text”; the program inserts necessary section breaks. For the last example, however, you need to manually insert a section break.

Headers and footers are text that appear at the top and bottom of every page. To insert a header or a footer, use Insert => Header or Footer buttons (to edit existing headers/footers, double-click on them). Please note that odd- and even-numbered pages of this document have slightly different headers and footers, and the first page has none8.

In version 2007, Microsoft has attempted to make insertion of page numbers easier by providing templates to choose from. I prefer to use fields, which I find more flexible.

Let us see how we can deal with two different numbering systems for page numbers within the same document. Let’s

8 Check “Different Odd & Even Pages” and/or “Different First Page”

boxes in order to do what they say.

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say we have a dissertation that has a main text (in this document, the part beginning with Formatting Levels) that will have Arabic numerals for page numbers like 1, 2, etc., and a preface (in this document, the part preceding Formatting Levels) that will have page numbers with lower case Roman numerals, like i, ii, etc. Here are the steps I followed to accomplish this task:

A. Since page numbers appear on every page, they are either a header or footer, depending on their location (in this case a footer). As footer is a section attribute, we need a new section to have two different number formats. Thus, we start by inserting a section break just before Formatting Levels (Page Layout => Breaks => Section Btreaks => Next Page).

B. While in the second section, Insert => Footer => Blank C. Click Link to Previous, so that the connection with the

first section is broken D. Quick parts => Field => Page E. Page Number => Format Page Numbers… Start at 1 F. Now go to a footer in the first section (Introduction

part). Again, Quick Parts => Field => Page, this time choosing i, ii, iii, ... as Format

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There are two methods of dealing with multi-section documents.

We can manually insert a section break where needed by applying the Page Layout tab, Break command. Then, we can apply the needed format command in the relevant section.

We can select the text to which we want to apply a different section format (like the table in the above example), and apply the command. In this case, the program will insert the necessary section(s) where appropriate.

In both usages, we should be careful where the changes are going to be applied. So, please pay attention to “Apply to” choices. The options available may be one or more of the following, depending on, among other factors, whether the command is given with selected text, or whether there already are additional sections:

Whole document

This point forward

This section

Selected text

Be warned, however, that Microsoft seems to have forgotten to supply the “Apply to:” option for orientation,

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which means that only the first method is available when changing the orientation of part of a document.

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Styles As far as character and paragraph formatting are concerned, WinWord has an interesting feature called styles:

Styles are defined as sets of character and paragraph formatting properties.

This feature is one of the few innovations Microsoft has introduced to the word-processing world (rather than “borrowing” an idea and developing it). It is implemented in all Office programs and is also “borrowed” by some of Microsoft’s competitors.

Styles can broadly be classified under two categories:

WinWord has pre-defined styles like normal, heading 1, heading 2, etc. Normal style is the default paragraph style, which also controls the default font. If we want to change the way the majority of paragraphs are displayed (all paragraphs other than specifically styled ones), we can modify the normal style, rather than selecting the whole document and applying the formatting change. For example, paragraphs in this document are separated from each other with a distance of 7 points (after) and the default font of this document is 12 points Calibri. The method used here was to modify the normal style. Another built-in style utilized in this document is the heading 1 style (as implied by the table of contents on first page). The titles appearing in the table

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are linked to that style. One of the advantages of Heading styles is that one can create tables of content, as described later in this document.

In addition to WinWord’s pre-defined styles, users can define their own styles. For example, the bulleted paragraphs

in this document have “” as their bullet character and their font is Garamond 11 points. Instead of formatting each of those paragraphs as Home => Bullets => Define New Bullet => Symbol, and then selecting that character, I have created a new style, named it MyBullet, and applied that style to all bulleted paragraphs. An advantage of a style is that, if I want to change, for example, the bullet character or the indentation or the character font of those paragraphs, I only need to modify the MyBullet style, without the need to individually re-format each bulleted paragraph.

Table of Contents

Here is a decription of how you can create a table of contents:

Link titles that are going to appear in the table of contents (in this case, the five titles that you see in the images) to Heading 1 style.

Go where you want the table to appear (in our case, to the top of the document). Then, Refences => Table of Contents => Insert Table of Contents… For Tab leader, choose “___.”. For Formats, choose Formal. When you

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press OK, your ToC will be inserted. Before the table, type “Table of Contents”.

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Miscellaneous Drop Cap: I used to think that drop cap (the first letter of a

paragraph being a large font, dropped upper case letter) was a paragraph format attribute. For some reason, Microsoft does not think so, and they have put it in the Insert tool group.

Mail merge, used to send personalized letters to an address list, has a whole set of tools in Mailings tool group.

Hyperlinks: There is a link in footnote 3 to the Styles title. In Word, you can insert a hyperlink to a file or to a web page or, as in this case, to a location within a document. For the latter, you first need to insert a bookmark to the link destination (Styles title). Once you insert bookmarks, they will appear in “Select a place in this document “ list when you start Insert => Hyperlink command.