Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is an application that helps you create documents. It is widely used in
offices or schools. Since MS word is easy to use, most students or office workers use it to
create text files. Microsoft word is a word processor. Moreover, MS word is the most famous
word processor around the world.

Essential Questions

• What is Word Processing?

Intended Learning Outcome

• Master and navigate applications properly. Create and customized attractive and easy to
edit documents.
Word Processing Software
The first word processors were computerized typewriters, which did little more than
place characters on a screen, which could then be printed. Modern word processing programs,
however, include features to customize the style of the text, change the page formatting, and
may be able to add headers, footers, and page numbers to each page. Some may also include
a word count option, which counts the words and characters within a document. Word
processing software is used to manipulate text and apply a basic design to your pages.

History of MS Word
The first version of Microsoft Word was developed by Charles Simonyi and Richard
Brodie, former Xerox programmers hired by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1981. Both
programmers worked on Xerox Bravo, the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
word processor. The first Word version, Word 1.0, was released in October 1983 for Xenix and
MS-DOS; it was followed by four very similar versions that were not very successful. The first
Windows version was released in 1989, with a slightly improved interface. When Windows 3.0
was released in 1990, Word became a huge commercial success. Word for Windows 1.0 was
followed by Word 2.0 in 1991 and Word 6.0 in 1993. Then it was renamed to Word 95 and Word
97, Word 2000 and Word for Office XP (to follow Windows commercial names). With the release
of Word 2003, the numbering was again year-based. Since then, Windows versions include
Word 2007, Word 2010, Word 2013, Word 2016, and most recently, Word for Office 365.

Parts of MS Word

When you open MS word a blank page is created as well. In this blank page is where
you start writing your document. This is also can be called as the document area.
 This part of MS word is called the quick access toolbar. It contains commands that are used
most often. Each icon above has their own purpose.

• Save - this button saves your document’s progress. When saving a document, you
can use a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl + S).

• Undo Typing - This retracts your recent action.

• Repeat Typing - when you use the undo button, you can use the repeat typing to
return the undid action.

• Customize Quick Access Toolbar - This help you customize the buttons on your
quick access toolbar.

• Ribbon Display Options - It contains three options which are auto-hide ribbon,
show tabs, and show tabs and commands.

• Minimize - It shrinks the window and places it on the taskbar while leaving the
program running.

• Maximize - It is used to enlarge a window to cover the entire desktop.

• Close - closes the entire application.

• Main Menu - The file menu is one you will find yourself using extensively. It is
used to create new documents, open existing documents and saving your new/updated
documents. It also includes the page setup, print preview, and other important functions
relating to your document and its properties.

This is called menu bar. Menu bar is a horizontal bar, typically located at the top of the
screen below the title bar, containing drop-down menus. Each tab in the menu bar shows
different ribbons.

• Home – contains different tools that mainly focuses on the text for the documents like
fonts, font size, bullets, font color, etc.

• Insert - used to insert different features such as tables, pictures, clip art, shapes, charts,
page numbers, word art, headers, and footers into a document.
• Design - This tab lets you work with a document's overall design, from choosing a pre-
designed template or theme to customizing colors, fonts, paragraph spacing and more.

• Layout – it holds all the options that allow you to arrange your document pages just the
way you want them. You can set margins, apply themes, control of page orientation and
size, add sections and line breaks, display line numbers, and set paragraph indentation
and lines.

• References – it offers a quick way to enter your document sources, citations and choose
a style like APA, MLA etc.

• Mailings - This can help print envelopes or labels out along with writing and inserting
different fields. There is a handy option to preview the results and an option to convert
the file to a PDF format.

• Review - This ribbon contains groups that can be used to check the spelling and
grammar in a document, add comments to a document, track the changes in a
document, compare two or more versions of a document, or to protect a document.

• View - The View tab in Microsoft Word has the functionality to change your document
views. The View tab has the following groups: Document Views, Show/ Hide, Zoom,
Window and Macros.