- Most of your work in Microsoft Word
will be a variation of two actions.
First, you'll insert some content into a document,
and then you will format that content.
In this video,
we're going to see the most basic version of that.
We're just going to type some text in the document,
then we'll format that text.
Now most people already know
how to write text in a document.
You do need to keep an eye out for this blinking cursor,
that's where the text will go when you type on the keyboard.
So if I want to add some text,
first I need to click where I want that cursor to be.
So I want to add something at the beginning of this line,
so I'll click there.
Now I've moved that blinking cursor
and I can just type something in.
And then you can also hit the return key,
which starts a new paragraph.
But in this case,
I'm just using it to add some separation
between these two lines.
Later in this course,
you'll see better ways to add separation between lines.
But for now, if you hit the return key,
it starts a new paragraph.
Next, let's see how to format text
to change the size, the font or other characteristics.
So first, you need to select the texts
that you want to format.
Now, if you just want to select one single word,
you can double click on it,
and that's what it looks like when it's selected.
Or if you want to select more than that,
you can move your mouse to one side,
click and hold the mouse button down, drag across it,
then let go, and now that's selected.
If you click anywhere outside of that selection,
it will deselect that.
Or if you want to select much more than that, that's fine,
just click your mouse button down and drag
and keep dragging all the way down
until you've selected everything that you want.
Now I just want this first line.
So once again, I'm going to drag across
and let go to select it.
Now if you're using windows,
when you select some texts you will see this floating panel
with some text formatting options.
This is really convenient and you can use that.
Or you can also get these options in the home ribbon.
So up at the top, just click where it says Home,
to make sure the home ribbon is active,
and then you have those text formatting options here.
So let's start with the size of your text.
You can click this arrow which opens up this menu.
And of course the larger the number,
the larger your text will be.
So you can select one there
and it changes the size of your text.
Or you could just click directly on that number
and type in a new number, hit the return key,
and it will apply that size.
Next, I want to open up this menu
where you can change the font of your text.
Now the font will give your text a different look
and design.
And in this menu,
you can see what each font looks like before you select it.
So I'm just going to choose one
and it changes the look of that text.
So as long as you have something selected,
you can apply any of these formatting options to it.
So let's look at a few other options.
I could make my text bold by clicking here,
I could I tell assize it by clicking this button,
or I could put an underline under it.
There's also an option here in this menu
to change the color of your text.
Choose the color you want
and that will be applied to what you have selected.
And there's also an option here
to add a highlight color to your text.
So a bunch of options here that you can experiment with.
And if you ever change your mind,
you can always click the undo button
in the quick access toolbar
to undo the last action that you made.
So I'm going to click that a few times
and maybe that's how I want my text to look.
So those are your basic options for writing your text
and formatting that text.
We're going to build on that foundation,
but for a lot of documents,
most of your work will be just typing in text
and formatting it.