Microsoft Word 2007 - Home Tab
The Home Tab is by far the most important Tab in Microsoft Word 2007. The Home Tab contains all the commands that are used most often. These include formatting commands like changing text size, font style, font color, list types, and clipboard functionality like Cut, Copy and Paste. Furthermore, the home tab in Word 2007 includes features like text alignment, line spacing, gallery styles and theme settings. Finally, the Home Tab includes the ability to find and replace text.
For this lesson I will be using a sample resume for practice. Here is a print screen of the Home Tab in Microsoft Word 2007.
The groups on the Home Tab are as follows:
Clipboard
Font
Paragraph
Styles
Editing
Let us take a look at these groups one at a time. The first one is the Clipboard. This group includes popular commands like Cut, Copy and Paste. Using the Cut command, you can remove a piece of text from one location and insert it into a new location within the same document. You can also use the Copy command instead of the Cut command, however this will leave the original text in place. Next you can browse to the new location where you would like to insert the cut text. Using the Paste command you can then insert the text at this new spot.
For our example, I am going to move the section on Education all the way down in sample resume. You can first select the text using the keyboard or mouse. Next you can click on Cut button to add this to the clipboard. Here is a screen shot of what I am talking about.
Next I scroll all the way down in sample resume. I find a new line and click on the mouse to enable the insertion point. Then, I click on the Paste command under the Clipboard group to insert the section on Education.
Here is a screen capture of this action:
You will notice that the Education text block has now been inserted into the new area which happens to be on a new page. You can see that we are currently on the second page whereas we were on page one before we did the Cut and Paste operation.
When you need to modify a part of the text in your Microsoft Word document, you can use the Font group under Home Tab. You can choose from options like font size, font type, bold, italicize, underline etc. In addition you can highlight a portion of your document and experiment with different font colors under the Font group in Microsoft Word 2007. Here is a display of the formatting options relating to Font.
Let's say we would like to change TECHNICAL SUMMARY heading in sample resume to bold. You can highlight the specific text and then click on the Bold command as shown in the red square below.
Here is the end result in Bold instead of Normal font setting shown previously.
Notice that the font group also has a dialog box launcher on the bottom-right corner in the Ribbon screen shot below. This gives you even more options related to font and character spacing. These may look familiar to you as they were available in Microsoft Word 2003 and earlier versions. The next few figures display these options.
I'm going to switch back to the Format Painter option that I skipped over from the clipboard group. This is a handy little feature that will let you copy formatting from one place to another using the mouse. This is what you need to do. First you need to select your text, apply the necessary formatting and then double click on the format painter command. Now you can highlight any text in your document that needs to have the same formatting. Sweet! In the case of sample resume, I want to copy formatting from Technical Summary to all the Headings like Software Skillset, Professional Experience, etc. Here is a screen shot of the needed steps in order.
As long as the Format Painter option is enabled, you can simply copy that formatting anywhere in the document. I just applied the formatting from Technical Summary to Software Skillset as shown below.
I also feel that I need to emphasize the Technical Summary portion of my document. I'm going to highlight the specific area and then change the font style to something more eye catching. After I select my text, I can click on font style drop down, and try one of the many available fonts from the list. You will notice as you hover over these font styles, Microsoft word 2007 will give you a live preview of what the text will look like after the selection has been made. I really like the Live Preview feature in Microsoft word 2007, very cool. I think I like the Franklin Gothic Demit font style, so I will choose that one. This is shown as follows.
The Headings look good in sample resume, however actual software skills look rather blah. How about a little font color change to spice things up? I can do just that by using the color palette options under the font group. Purple looks good so I will select this choice for skills section. sample resume looks acceptable now so I will go ahead and save this document.
Sometimes you may have made a lot of changes, maybe more than you wanted to, I do that sometimes. At that juncture you may wish to clear all the formatting from your document. You are in luck as Microsoft Word 2007 has just this option for you. It is the Clear Formatting command under the Font group. The keyboard shortcut for this is Ctrl + Spacebar.
Here is what it looks like and the screen capture below.
After I used this option, I was able to get back to original plain resume. It's good to remember the Clear Formatting option when you need to get back to the way things were originally.
Moving on to the Paragraph Group, here you are able to start a bulleted list, numbered list, multilevel list, increase or decrease indentation, change the text alignment, increase or decrease line spacing... Furthermore you can add features like borders and shading. Here is a screen shot of this listed below.
The Paragraph Group in Microsoft Word 2007 has a lot of different options just like the font group. Let us jump right into it and start looking at these features one at a time. After I switched sample resume to the old boring format, I am ready to redesign it again. I will be using bullets to highlight the Technical Summary section. In order to do this, I will select the section and then click on Bullets command on the paragraph group.
Here is an example using this feature.
As I scroll down sample resume, I would like to align all the employers along the right margin. You can do this by selecting the appropriate text and choosing the align text right command.
I have a screen capture of this right below in red rectangle. Notice that now the employer info. has shifted to the right margin, perfect!
Within job highlights, all the items are jumbled up, that is definitely not good. I would like to possibly use a numbered list to organize the highlights of prior job positions. Let's try this in our next practice area. You can highlight the necessary part in your document, click on the numbered drop down menu of commands as shown below.
In case I used the one in the red square. After I selected this option, it applied the formatting rather nicely to sample resume, shown in the long red rectangle.
As a final touch to position highlights at the consulting company in Bloomington Minnesota, I would like to add some more line spacing here. Currently it is using a single spacing which needs to be changed to 1.5 instead. I will highlight the text, click on the line spacing command and then choose 1.5. This will apply the correct line spacing as follows.
The last feature I want to look at in the paragraph group is the ability to add indentation in a document. A good candidate for this in sample resume is the Education section. I will highlight that entire area and then click on increase indent command (red square). When I did that, it moved the text to the right about half an inch.
This is illustrated by the red arrows shown below. Ok, I am done with this resume for now so I will go ahead and save it.
The next group, Styles is going to make the biggest impact in your document layout and design. Microsoft Word 2007 has done an excellent job of creating pre-defined quick text styles that you can easily put to work.
A style is a set of formatting settings, such as font type, size, color, paragraph alignment, spacing and graphic settings. When you use these ready made styles to format your document, you can quickly and easily apply a set of formatting choices consistently throughout your document.
Here is a screen capture of the different styles with a preview of what they look like on top.
Notice in the document above we are using Normal style. Right next to it you will see some other gallery styles, including Heading 5, Strong, Subtitle etc. In order to work with the styles, you can simply highlight the text and choose one of the many pre-defined styles.
Let's practice with one of these styles now. We are going to select contact information in the resume, and choose one of the styles. This is what you need to do to make this happen. First select the text that you would like to change (step 1), then click on quick styles (step 2) and finally choose one of the available styles. Using these steps I was able to change contact information to Intense Quote, very nice indeed.
Here's what it looks like on my computer screen.
Another excellent function of this group is the Live Preview mode in Microsoft Word 2007. When you highlight certain text and choose a quick style, Microsoft will apply a temporary formatting to it that will let you review the style before you decide to accept, sort of like "Test drive before you buy". You can even change the style in your document to a global level by choosing Style Set command under the styles group.
Here is a screen shot of this with the necessary steps in order of action.
Using the same Quick Styles I'm going to apply the Heading 2 to Software Skillset and Professional Experience also. These are visible by the red rectangle in the screen capture below.
Sample resume is looking quite good now as opposed to the plain one that I started with. However I still need to add a little more pizazz to this document. What can we do to achieve this? How about using one of the ready made style sets available from the styles group? When you select one of these style sets, you will notice that not only do the styles on the ribbon change but all styles in your document are updated as well.
Before using the style sets you need to define elements like headings, titles, quotes, and subtitles in your document. We already did that in the previous step so we are good to go. For sample resume I will click on change styles, choose style set, and then select "Word 2007" style. Wow! Notice the dramatic change in my document as captured by the screen shot below!
I think I have finally found what I was looking for. Sample resume looks awesome with selected color scheme, font choices and smooth graphical formatting. Let us go ahead and save this document now.
Here is a preview of the final product, just a little improvement over the original one, don't you think?
The final option I wanted to talk about is the Editing group. This will help us in finding text, replacing text and selecting document elements. Let's say you wanted to find a certain text or expression in your document, no problem. I can use the Find command to do just that. You can even change the text easily by using the replace command. In my case I want to replace the word DBA to database administrator in sample resume.
I need to select the text first, click on Editing option and then choose Replace. This is shown below in the screen shot.
This will invoke the Find and Replace dialog box as shown below. The original word is in Find what textbox, the new word is in the Replace with textbox. As I click Replace, it will switch DBA to database administrator.
I have highlighted the first word that it found as shown below. This looks good so let's go ahead and click on Replace All command button.
For this lesson I will be using a sample resume for practice. Here is a print screen of the Home Tab in Microsoft Word 2007.
The groups on the Home Tab are as follows:
Clipboard
Font
Paragraph
Styles
Editing
Let us take a look at these groups one at a time. The first one is the Clipboard. This group includes popular commands like Cut, Copy and Paste. Using the Cut command, you can remove a piece of text from one location and insert it into a new location within the same document. You can also use the Copy command instead of the Cut command, however this will leave the original text in place. Next you can browse to the new location where you would like to insert the cut text. Using the Paste command you can then insert the text at this new spot.
For our example, I am going to move the section on Education all the way down in sample resume. You can first select the text using the keyboard or mouse. Next you can click on Cut button to add this to the clipboard. Here is a screen shot of what I am talking about.
Next I scroll all the way down in sample resume. I find a new line and click on the mouse to enable the insertion point. Then, I click on the Paste command under the Clipboard group to insert the section on Education.
Here is a screen capture of this action:
You will notice that the Education text block has now been inserted into the new area which happens to be on a new page. You can see that we are currently on the second page whereas we were on page one before we did the Cut and Paste operation.
When you need to modify a part of the text in your Microsoft Word document, you can use the Font group under Home Tab. You can choose from options like font size, font type, bold, italicize, underline etc. In addition you can highlight a portion of your document and experiment with different font colors under the Font group in Microsoft Word 2007. Here is a display of the formatting options relating to Font.
Let's say we would like to change TECHNICAL SUMMARY heading in sample resume to bold. You can highlight the specific text and then click on the Bold command as shown in the red square below.
Here is the end result in Bold instead of Normal font setting shown previously.
Notice that the font group also has a dialog box launcher on the bottom-right corner in the Ribbon screen shot below. This gives you even more options related to font and character spacing. These may look familiar to you as they were available in Microsoft Word 2003 and earlier versions. The next few figures display these options.
I'm going to switch back to the Format Painter option that I skipped over from the clipboard group. This is a handy little feature that will let you copy formatting from one place to another using the mouse. This is what you need to do. First you need to select your text, apply the necessary formatting and then double click on the format painter command. Now you can highlight any text in your document that needs to have the same formatting. Sweet! In the case of sample resume, I want to copy formatting from Technical Summary to all the Headings like Software Skillset, Professional Experience, etc. Here is a screen shot of the needed steps in order.
As long as the Format Painter option is enabled, you can simply copy that formatting anywhere in the document. I just applied the formatting from Technical Summary to Software Skillset as shown below.
I also feel that I need to emphasize the Technical Summary portion of my document. I'm going to highlight the specific area and then change the font style to something more eye catching. After I select my text, I can click on font style drop down, and try one of the many available fonts from the list. You will notice as you hover over these font styles, Microsoft word 2007 will give you a live preview of what the text will look like after the selection has been made. I really like the Live Preview feature in Microsoft word 2007, very cool. I think I like the Franklin Gothic Demit font style, so I will choose that one. This is shown as follows.
The Headings look good in sample resume, however actual software skills look rather blah. How about a little font color change to spice things up? I can do just that by using the color palette options under the font group. Purple looks good so I will select this choice for skills section. sample resume looks acceptable now so I will go ahead and save this document.
Sometimes you may have made a lot of changes, maybe more than you wanted to, I do that sometimes. At that juncture you may wish to clear all the formatting from your document. You are in luck as Microsoft Word 2007 has just this option for you. It is the Clear Formatting command under the Font group. The keyboard shortcut for this is Ctrl + Spacebar.
Here is what it looks like and the screen capture below.
After I used this option, I was able to get back to original plain resume. It's good to remember the Clear Formatting option when you need to get back to the way things were originally.
Moving on to the Paragraph Group, here you are able to start a bulleted list, numbered list, multilevel list, increase or decrease indentation, change the text alignment, increase or decrease line spacing... Furthermore you can add features like borders and shading. Here is a screen shot of this listed below.
The Paragraph Group in Microsoft Word 2007 has a lot of different options just like the font group. Let us jump right into it and start looking at these features one at a time. After I switched sample resume to the old boring format, I am ready to redesign it again. I will be using bullets to highlight the Technical Summary section. In order to do this, I will select the section and then click on Bullets command on the paragraph group.
Here is an example using this feature.
As I scroll down sample resume, I would like to align all the employers along the right margin. You can do this by selecting the appropriate text and choosing the align text right command.
I have a screen capture of this right below in red rectangle. Notice that now the employer info. has shifted to the right margin, perfect!
Within job highlights, all the items are jumbled up, that is definitely not good. I would like to possibly use a numbered list to organize the highlights of prior job positions. Let's try this in our next practice area. You can highlight the necessary part in your document, click on the numbered drop down menu of commands as shown below.
In case I used the one in the red square. After I selected this option, it applied the formatting rather nicely to sample resume, shown in the long red rectangle.
As a final touch to position highlights at the consulting company in Bloomington Minnesota, I would like to add some more line spacing here. Currently it is using a single spacing which needs to be changed to 1.5 instead. I will highlight the text, click on the line spacing command and then choose 1.5. This will apply the correct line spacing as follows.
The last feature I want to look at in the paragraph group is the ability to add indentation in a document. A good candidate for this in sample resume is the Education section. I will highlight that entire area and then click on increase indent command (red square). When I did that, it moved the text to the right about half an inch.
This is illustrated by the red arrows shown below. Ok, I am done with this resume for now so I will go ahead and save it.
The next group, Styles is going to make the biggest impact in your document layout and design. Microsoft Word 2007 has done an excellent job of creating pre-defined quick text styles that you can easily put to work.
A style is a set of formatting settings, such as font type, size, color, paragraph alignment, spacing and graphic settings. When you use these ready made styles to format your document, you can quickly and easily apply a set of formatting choices consistently throughout your document.
Here is a screen capture of the different styles with a preview of what they look like on top.
Notice in the document above we are using Normal style. Right next to it you will see some other gallery styles, including Heading 5, Strong, Subtitle etc. In order to work with the styles, you can simply highlight the text and choose one of the many pre-defined styles.
Let's practice with one of these styles now. We are going to select contact information in the resume, and choose one of the styles. This is what you need to do to make this happen. First select the text that you would like to change (step 1), then click on quick styles (step 2) and finally choose one of the available styles. Using these steps I was able to change contact information to Intense Quote, very nice indeed.
Here's what it looks like on my computer screen.
Another excellent function of this group is the Live Preview mode in Microsoft Word 2007. When you highlight certain text and choose a quick style, Microsoft will apply a temporary formatting to it that will let you review the style before you decide to accept, sort of like "Test drive before you buy". You can even change the style in your document to a global level by choosing Style Set command under the styles group.
Here is a screen shot of this with the necessary steps in order of action.
Using the same Quick Styles I'm going to apply the Heading 2 to Software Skillset and Professional Experience also. These are visible by the red rectangle in the screen capture below.
Sample resume is looking quite good now as opposed to the plain one that I started with. However I still need to add a little more pizazz to this document. What can we do to achieve this? How about using one of the ready made style sets available from the styles group? When you select one of these style sets, you will notice that not only do the styles on the ribbon change but all styles in your document are updated as well.
Before using the style sets you need to define elements like headings, titles, quotes, and subtitles in your document. We already did that in the previous step so we are good to go. For sample resume I will click on change styles, choose style set, and then select "Word 2007" style. Wow! Notice the dramatic change in my document as captured by the screen shot below!
I think I have finally found what I was looking for. Sample resume looks awesome with selected color scheme, font choices and smooth graphical formatting. Let us go ahead and save this document now.
Here is a preview of the final product, just a little improvement over the original one, don't you think?
The final option I wanted to talk about is the Editing group. This will help us in finding text, replacing text and selecting document elements. Let's say you wanted to find a certain text or expression in your document, no problem. I can use the Find command to do just that. You can even change the text easily by using the replace command. In my case I want to replace the word DBA to database administrator in sample resume.
I need to select the text first, click on Editing option and then choose Replace. This is shown below in the screen shot.
This will invoke the Find and Replace dialog box as shown below. The original word is in Find what textbox, the new word is in the Replace with textbox. As I click Replace, it will switch DBA to database administrator.
I have highlighted the first word that it found as shown below. This looks good so let's go ahead and click on Replace All command button.
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