Certificate in Introduction to Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac Online Course

Getting to Know Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac

Microsoft Word is the standard word processing program in business today. Now you can use this powerful program on your Mac, and even share files with anyone who uses Word for Windows. In this first lesson, you'll learn your way around the program, and master the key steps to getting up and running. You'll also start using the program to understand its basic user interface. Finally, you'll see how to create and save a new document.

Navigating and Editing Text

Once you understand the basic user interface of Word 2011, you'll probably be anxious to start using Word to create letters and reports. In this lesson, you'll take the next step by learning how to work with a document you've created. We'll start by examining several methods for moving around quickly within your text. Then we'll explore the different ways Word helps you edit your text. Through editing, you can make your writing cleaner and more focused by changing, deleting, or adding words, or by moving text to different locations. And, as you'll see, Word gives you lots of options for doing all these things!

Searching and Correcting Text

So, now you've learned how to create a new document and type in your text. Oh, no! You realize there's a word you need to change all throughout the document. That means you've got to scroll through the whole thing, slowly and tediously, reading until you find that word, right? Actually, no! In this lesson, you'll learn how you can simplify this task by letting Word find the word or phrase for you. Word can even replace the word with a new word, so you can modify your document quickly and accurately. And all this happens with just a few clicks of the mouse. In addition, you'll get a handle on the tools Word offers, so you can check your spelling and grammar, as well as resources for finding exactly the right word so that your writing always shines.

Formatting Text, Part 1

After you've typed and saved a document, it's time to fine-tune the appearance of your text. One common way to do this is through formatting. With formatting, you don't simply make your text prettier—you also make it easier to read. You can use bold and italics to emphasize important words, capitalization to make headlines really stand out, or make your text easier to read by choosing just the right font. In this lesson, you'll learn about the most commonly used features for formatting your text.

Formatting Text, Part 2

In this lesson, you'll gain even more text formatting techniques, so you can enhance the look of your document and make it more readable. We'll start by seeing how to add a splash of color, either by changing the color of the text or the background behind the text. Then we'll explore a few different ways for changing the formatting of entire paragraphs. You'll learn how to adjust left and right margins, indentation, line spacing, and alignment to create a distinctive look for your document and help make entire paragraphs stand out.

Formatting Pages

You've already seen how to format text. Now it's time to learn how you can format entire pages! Changing the appearance of your pages can be practical, such as defining page margins around the top, bottom, left, and right edges. But formatting pages can also serve a decorative purpose, such as placing a border around the edges. Of course, don't think formatting can't be both decorative and practical at the same time. If you want to change the background color or image on your pages, or display watermarks that show text, images, or even a corporate logo, you can do that, too. In this lesson, you'll learn about all the ways Word can make your pages look pretty.

Designing and Viewing Pages

Flip open any book or magazine, and chances are good that you'll see repetitive text that appears at the top or bottom of each page. This text, called a header and footer, typically displays page numbers, chapter headings, or book titles. If you need to print long documents and want to print specific information at the top or bottom of each page, you need to learn how to create and use headers and footers. Since headers and footers appear on every page, they can get distracting when you're writing or editing a document. To fix this, Word offers different ways to view your document, so you can temporarily display or hide altogether headers and footers.

Manipulating Document Windows

One nice feature of Word is that it lets you open one or more documents and display them on the screen. As long as your screen is big enough, you can arrange multiple document windows side by side, so you can compare text stored in two or more different files. If you're writing a new document, you can open an existing document to use as reference, and even copy and cut text from one document window to paste in a second document window. By manipulating multiple windows, you can be productive with two or more documents at the same time!

Printing and Sharing Documents

Editing and formatting text can make your documents look perfect, but eventually you'll want to share your hard work with others. The simplest way to share any document is to print it on paper and give that paper copy of your document to others. You can print just a single copy, or you can get fancy and print one or more pages, a range of pages, or multiple copies. Besides printing your documents, you can also distribute documents by sharing files with others. In this lesson, you'll learn all the different ways to share your document with others in person or through the Internet.

Typing Math Symbols and Foreign Language Characters

You can type any text into Word and format it to look pretty with different fonts, colors, and font sizes. However, Word can do more than just print characters from your keyboard, such as letters, numbers, and symbols. You can also type characters that you don't actually see on a typical keyboard, such as mathematical symbols and foreign language characters. In this lesson, you'll learn how to add these unusual symbols and characters, so you can type in foreign languages or add mathematical symbols into a document such as a scientific report.

Playing With Pictures

Word may be the most popular word processing program in the world, but it can do more than just let you write, edit, and format text. What makes many reports, letters, and books come alive is the combination of text with other items such as photographs, drawings, and other objects. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a picture combined with text can say much more than text by itself. In this lesson, you'll learn how to spice up your documents with pictures, so you can make your documents more visually appealing.

Customizing Word

Word offers so many features—but you'll probably only use a fraction of them. That can make it hard to find the features you need most. To fix this problem, you can customize Word. In this lesson, you'll get tips for adjusting the Ribbon interface, learn about ways to control how Word saves documents, see how to alter your privacy settings, and find out how you can change Word's appearance to suit your preferences. Now you can make Word look and behave exactly the way you want without wasting time changing the program every time you want to use it.