Microsoft Word 2007 - Insert Tab

Microsoft Word 2007 - Insert Tab

The Insert Tab is right next to the Home Tab in Microsoft Word 2007. This tab has a lot of useful features that will let you insert things like pictures, clip art images, shapes, SmartArt graphics, charts and a host of other items. Let us review a few of these features in this exciting new tab.

Before we do that here is a screen shot of the insert tab shown below.





Today we will be working with several different documents to show you the functionality in the Insert Tab. A common task in Microsoft Word is to add a Page Break. For this practice we will use the definition assignment document as illustrated below.

We would like to add a page break right before the Research Analysis section. In order to do this in Microsoft Word 2007, you can select the Insert Tab and then select the Pages group and then choose Page Break. Here is a screen shot of this action.





After performing the above mentioned action we were able to insert a page break right before the Research Analysis section. This is highlighted by the red rectangle in the following figure.





Next we are going to look at a Meeting Agenda for more practice with the Insert Tab in Microsoft Word 2007. We have some basic information about the meeting like date, time and presenter in the beginning of our document.

We need to add at least two more things, the schedule and the company logo as highlighted in yellow.





One quick way to add a meeting schedule in Microsoft word 2007 is to use a table. Let us see how we can achieve this task next. Select the Table command from the Insert Tab which will launch the Insert Table functionality in Microsoft Word 2007. It will let you pick the number of columns and rows of the desired table in your document. As you drag your mouse over the highlighted area, you can select the rows and columns that you would like.

Here I have chosen a 2x5 table for my meeting agenda. Also notice that as you drag the mouse you will get a live preview of your table in your document, very cool! This is shown below in the screen shot.





Before we go ahead and enter the data, I want to talk about Contextual tabs. These are special tabs that appear only when certain objects are being used such as a table or a picture. The idea is to keep them hidden until the object is active, leading to a more efficient work flow and less cluttered area.

The Table object has two such contextual tabs: design and layout. The design lets you control things like table styles, borders and shading. This tab is illustrated below in the screen capture.





The next contextual tab related to Tables is the layout tab. This tab will actually let you modify the structure of the table including rows and columns plus alignment and cell size. This is shown below with all the available options.





Once the table is created, you can start entering the data as you wish. In my case I went ahead and entered the training schedule times and information shown as follows.

I also unchecked the header row and the first column check boxes on the Ribbon shown in red squares. I also clicked on the More command to choose a different gallery style for my table.





WOW!! look at all these predefined, ready made table styles available in Microsoft Word 2007. These styles use a combination of color schemes, font properties and graphical effects. As I hover my mouse over the styles, I get a preview of what my table will look like if I select that option.

I like the Burgundy color so I'm going to choose "Colorful Shading - Accent 2". Here is a screen shot.





My first column is taking way too much space so I would like to move the border a little to the left. I can do this by selecting the first column border and moving it left.

This is shown by the red arrow in the screen shot below. Notice the dotted line will be the new location for the column border.





The final touch that I want to give to my table is borders on all sides and in between cells. I'm going to select the Borders command in table styles group under the Table Tools Tab in Microsoft Word 2007. This will show a drop down menu where I will choose all borders.

This is illustrated below in the screen shot.





The meeting schedule is now complete. Let us take a look at the end product shown below. Very Nice and professional looking!








Let's switch gears and insert a company logo into our document. I would like to use a free Clip Art image for this step. I am working on a sales meeting so I would like to add a picture of cash or money in my document. I can use the Clip Art feature of Microsoft Office 2007 that will let me insert free images and graphics in this document.

I clicked on Clip Art command on the Illustrations group to start the process. Here's what it looks like in my document.





The Clip Art dialog box launches on the right side of my document. I will type business in the Search for text box and hit Go. Looks like it found a currency symbol, I like it for now. I will go ahead and choose this one for my company logo.

This is shown below the screen capture.





After you enter the image, Microsoft Word 2007 will launch the Picture Contextual Tools tab shown as follows.

This tab will let you enhance the image further if you like. You can do things like change styles, borders, colors, sizes and other picture effects. I would like to make the company logo a little bit bigger before I mess with any other effects.




I can do modify the image size by grabbing the sizing handles on the bottom right corner of the image, as shown by the blue arrow. Using the mouse, I can drag the picture to increase the size.

A screen shot of the Picture Tools tab and the updated image is as follows.





What else can I do to make the image stand out more? Adding a border to my company logo may enhance the effect. So I will click on the Picture Styles group under the Picture Tools tab. I will select the drop down arrow to launch gallery of styles. I will choose the black Simple Frame for my Logo.

I've included a screen shot of this.





I'm ready to print my meeting agenda now as I have added the necessary elements into my document. It is always a good idea to do Print Preview before printing any document. So when I did that, I got the following preview. I think this looks awesome!!





The last thing I wanted to show you is Inserting Header section for my Definition Assignment project. I will switch to the other document for this exercise.

Headers and footers are important items to add to your documents to give them a professional look and feel. A header could have information on the document title, author name, version number etc. while a footer is useful as it contains things like Page Numbers and Dates.

In order to create a Header section, click on the Insert Tab and select Header in the Header and Footer group. This will launch the built-in Header gallery as shown below.






I will pick the Austere style which will give me a nice color scheme with Date and Title layout for my header. After I made the selection, Microsoft Word 2007 inserted the header block and I was prompted to enter the Date and Title information. It was nice to get a date time picker for the date. I selected today's date, entered the title of my document and voila!

I have included a screen capture here also:






Notice that I was given a Header & Footer Tools tab above where I could have further tweaked the settings.

I am actually happy with my existing layout so I am done at this point. Now this header will be visible on the top of all the pages in my definition assignment report.

When I did a Print Preview, I was able to see the document and it looks like the one below.

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Microsoft Word 2007 - Home Tab

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.

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Microsoft Word 2007 - The New Look

Microsoft Word 2007 - The New Look

Original Text was taken from www.learningcomputer.com

 

Microsoft has done a great job with the new graphic user interface in Microsoft Office 2007. It has a brand new look and feel. The focus behind the change is an optimized, task oriented approach which translates to better documents prepared in less time. Let us take a look at some of these new features in Microsoft Word 2007:

• Office Button
• The Ribbon
• Quick Access Toolbar
• Mini Toolbar
• Shortcut Menu

Office ButtonThe Office Button in Microsoft Word 2007 replaces the File menu available in previous versions of Word. The new Office Button is shown below.



The Office Button provides functionality common to all Office applications, including opening, saving, printing, and closing a file. Commands are listed on the left, and recently opened documents appear on the right side. When I click on the Office Button in Microsoft Word 2007, this is what I see:






As you click on the various commands, you will be given related options. For example, when I selected the Print command, I was given the flyout menu with additional print options like Print, Quick Print and Print Preview. Here is a screen shot shown below.








The Ribbon:

In Microsoft Word 2007, the old Menus and the Toolbars have been replaced by what's called the Ribbon. The Ribbon is what Microsoft is calling the new user interface. The idea is to give the application user a task oriented user interface where one will spend more time working on the actual document and less time looking for specific commands. Here is a screen shot of what the Ribbon looks like.






The Ribbon in Microsoft Word 2007 is broken down into Tabs that deal specifically with a certain task. For example if you're trying to insert an object, you will find the related commands under the Insert Tab. The tabs are further broken down into logical groups. For example if you're in the Home Tab, all the text formatting commands will be found under the Font group. The Tab (top) and the Group (bottom) areas are shown in the figure below and highlighted using red rectangles.








Quick Access Toolbar:The next new feature in Microsoft Word 2007 that we are going to look at is the Quick Access Toolbar. The Quick Access Toolbar is a global toolbar which is present regardless of what tab you are on. Out of the box, Quick Access Toolbar has the Save, Undo, and Redo commands. Here is what the Quick Access Toolbar looks like on my screen.






You can customize the Quick Access Toolbar to add the more often used commands. Let us say that you wanted to add the Bold command to this Quick Access Toolbar. If you can, browse to the Home Tab and then the Font group. Next, move the mouse over the bold icon, right click and then select Add to Quick Access Toolbar. This will add the Bold command to the quick access toolbar and will be present at all times. This is shown below in the next two figures.












Mini Toolbar:The Mini Toolbar is also a big time saver as it also contains commonly used commands in Microsoft Word 2007. If you highlight some text using the mouse, you will see a faded Mini toolbar. As you move the mouse towards the faded area, it will become solid and then you can select one of the commands on it. Here is a screen shot of what I'm talking about.






Example: we're going to change the color of the quoted article to blue. In order to do this I'm going to highlight text and then use the Mini Toolbar to change the font color. This is shown below in the illustration.








Shortcut Menu:The last thing I want to cover is the Shortcut Menu sometimes known as the Right Click Menu or Context Menu. The concept for the shortcut menu is similar to the Mini Toolbar. The idea is to have common commands available to you as you're working on your document. However there is one BIG difference. The Shortcut Menu changes depending what screen and application you are in. On the other hand, the Mini Toolbar does not change. Here is a screen shot of what it looks like on my document.






If you notice the Shortcut Menu not only has formatting commands for text, paragraphs settings, line numbering etc. you can also view features such as finding synonyms, translating to another language, inserting a hyperlink and reference features. Also notice that on top of the shortcut menu, you will find the Mini Toolbar for easy access and use

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