- [Instructor] If you already have an existing
Microsoft Word document that you want to open,
it's pretty easy.
One option is to start by going to file explorer,
if you're on Windows,
or finder if you're on a Mac,
then navigate to the folder where you have your document.
Now, if you have access to the exercise files
for this course,
you can open one of those files.
I've moved my exercise files to the documents folder.
So I'll go there, open my exercise files folder,
then I'll go to chapter one,
and I've got some files to work with here.
Now, a file that has the extension at the end
that says .doc or .docx can be opened in Microsoft Word.
But don't worry if you don't see those extensions,
that's fine too.
Word documents also have an icon like this
that shows that they are Word documents.
So you can just double click on a Word document,
and that will open that document in Word.
And you can start editing the document,
just remember to save it when you make changes.
For now, I'm just going to close this,
which will quit Word if you're working in Windows.
Now, another option is to start by launching Word.
So I'll go to the start menu and I'll launch Word from here.
Now here on the welcome screen,
if I click open on the left side,
I could open a document that I've opened recently
from this list,
or I could open a file from my drive.
If you're using Windows,
you can click this browse button,
or if you're using a Mac,
there's a similar button that says on my Mac.
So I could click that.
And in this window, I can navigate to that folder.
So I'll go to my documents,
to my exercise files,
open up the chapter one folder,
and then I can double click on the file that I want.
Okay, and then there's one more option.
If you already have a document open
and you want to open another one,
that's no problem.
And this one works a little differently on the Mac,
so we're going to start here on Windows.
If you're using Windows,
just click the file button near the top left corner
to go to the backstage view,
then go to where it says open,
and you can just open another file from here.
So I'll click browse.
I'm still in that last folder I was in,
so I'm going to select this other file.
And from here, I could select it and click open,
or I could just double click on it.
So now, I have two documents open.
And if I move this window,
I can see that other document is open as well.
Or if you're working with Windows,
you can move your mouse cursor to the task bar,
you can point at the icon for Microsoft Word,
and then you can select whichever window
you want to be active.
Click on that,
and that window will be active.
Okay, let's switch over to a Mac.
So here on the Mac,
if you already have a document open,
there's no option for the backstage view.
Instead, you'll need to go to the file menu
by clicking file up at the top.
Then you can go to open.
And of course,
navigate to the folder where you have the file
that you want to open.
Then choose that file,
and you can double click on it or click open from here.
Now on the Mac, when you have multiple documents open,
of course you can move the windows around
and you can click on the window that you want to be active,
or you can use a nice keyboard command.
Just hold the command key on your keyboard
and then tap the accent key just under the escape key.
And in that way,
you can quickly switch between windows
in the same application.
So now you should have no problem opening documents
that you already have on your computer.