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I’d like to talk to you about Microsoft Office products and how they really can make
your life easier. Word is the one I use more than anything else. I am going to show you
the features that I use the most often for my college classes, whether it’s a project,
a paper, or even just for studying for a test. I really like the changes Microsoft has added
in recent years that makes navigation easier, for example, to find a recent document you’ve
been working on, instead of clicking the Start button on your computer, then going to My
Documents here and then to your files, etc., you can simply open Word from the taskbar,
then click on the file tab in the ribbon. Once I click on the Recent tab on the left
side, we can see a list of the recent documents in the left column. Then to the right we can
see the recent folders that have been accessed. So if your document doesn’t happen to be
in the list, most likely the folder is over here.
Another feature I love is having the tabs at the top of the page. It really bugged me
when they first changed this, but now that I have figured out where my favorite features
are listed, I don’t know how I did without it. The Home tab has most of what we use every
day. And then for those that use more advanced features, they can be found in the various
other tabs across the ribbon. If I need to change the margins, orientation,
etc. for projects or special papers, I can just go to page layout. When I am studying
for an exam, and I have taken a lot of notes or answered questions from the review that
the instructor gave the class, I will often widen the top, bottom and side margins to
fit more information on the page. Then I will either Highlight or BOLD the key topics or
phrases to help my studying as I am a visual learner. Or for a simple presentation, these
are also great tools. To use these functions, you simply right click your mouse and slide
it across the word(s) or phrase you want to change, then click the proper button in the
ribbon above. And then here’s the one for Bold.
The spell check and grammar features are tried and true helpers. As you type your paper,
there are different clues you get while typing indicating spelling or grammatical errors
that you can go back and review and make any necessary corrections. For example, I will
spell something incorrectly and I immediately see the red underline. I can either manually
correct it by changing the text, or let Word give me a list to choose from like so. I’ll
right click on the word and the dialogue box pops up for me to choose. Simply click the
correct version of the word and it’s done. Spelling is something that has always been
easy for me and I have always manually corrected my errors along the way. I have had to force
myself to get used to this feature to save more time.
The last thing I’d like to show you today is really handy when you are writing a paper
for a class and it needs to contain a certain number of words, or lines or paragraphs. Just
go up to the ribbon, click on “Review” then you’ll notice the “Word Count”
button. Click on it and you’ll get this dialogue box that shows you all the details
of your current document. I only have a few words on this page, but it counts the lines,
paragraphs, words, etc. There are so many features Word has now that
you can use for so many things to make your life easier. Again, these are the main ones
I use for school papers and projects. There are many more features, from simple to advanced
that make Word so powerful.