Word 2016 Essentials for Mac

As one of the cornerstones of the Office suite, Word 2016 for Mac is a powerful word processor that allows users to create both simple and sophisticated documents. This series explores the essentials to getting started with Word 2016 for Mac. We begin with basic skills such as navigating a document, selecting text, inputting basic text, and proofing a document. The series also explores all aspects of character and paragraph formatting as well as page formatting and layout. While this series is designed for beginner users, it has lots of great tips and tricks for experienced users as well. This series is specifically for locally installed Word 2016 on Mac OS.

[MUSIC] Hello everyone, and welcome to Word 2016 Essentials for Mac. My name is Vonne Smith, and in this course overview, we're going to be reviewing what exactly is in this series. Who is our target audience and who should be watching this, any prerequisites that we need to know before we get started, and a little extra tidbits along the way. So what are we covering in this series? This is broken up into three main topics. We have Introduction, Text Formatting and Page Layout. In the introduction, well, it's an introduction to Word. We get started with what is Word? What about the interface of Word? We know where we're going so it's always important to understand. When I say go to the ribbon, you know where the ribbon is. Or look at the status bar, the status bar is down at the bottom. We talk about the interface of the Word environment. Then we also get into navigating a Word document. Do you know that Ctrl-Home will always take you to the very beginning of your document? We go over that and a lot of other cool tips and tricks of getting around a document to make it easier, to be a little bit more efficient and faster with typing up a document. We're gonna be selecting text. You think, that's just click, hold and drag, right? There's a lot of cool shortcuts that we can do to make you more efficient there when selecting a text. We go over the different auto-correct and the proofing. We also talk about the all important cut, copy and paste, and knowing about our paste options. And then Find and replace and some different things within Find and replace with the finding special characters and how that can really benefit you. Then we move into formatting your text. How do you make things look bigger, bolder, different colors, different fonts? So we go into the world of character formatting and paragraph formatting. We also talk about formatting text in lists, either a bulleted list or a numbered list. Tabs, I love some tabs. In tab stops, we learned about left inline tab stops, center inline tab stops, what is a leader, all of those fun things. And then my all-time favorite which would be styles. We introduced what is a style, why you want to use them, how important they are, and actually really how easy they are to implement into your document. Then we end with our topic of page layout. This would be how the text flows within your document. How do you do the different pagination, and really what they normally would say is page setup. Things like margins, our breaks, our keep options. What is a widow and orphan control? We have section breaks. Sections are so important in a document, understanding them can just open up a whole new world of how you can use Word. We talk about columns, we insert some blank cover pages which are really easy to do. And then we talk about our headers and footers within our margins, and how we can add page numbers. That can always be a little tricky, so we go ahead and dedicated an entire episode to that. And then we end on some decoration. Adding some borders and some shading, and some different watermarks and things like that. So that would be the end of that particular topic. Now, that's the wrong way, how about we go this way? [LAUGH] Our target audience, man, I'm getting all tripped up here. All Office users, now that means Office with a capital O, as in the Office Suite. Not necessarily that you work in a physical office. Which maybe a lot of you do, but this could be your small business, home business, school, work, whichever way. But Microsoft Office and Word is one of the main programs within that particular suite. This is an Essentials course, which means it starts from the very beginning, so this would be anybody that is a basic user, and then may try to get up into an intermediate level of understanding Word. That being said, you do not have to have any prior knowledge of Word before starting this course. You maybe not even know what it does. Well, we start from there. We talked about, what is the Enter key? Like, really we're gonna talk about the Enter key? You'll be surprised. And really some other tricks, like if you hold Command and Enter what does that do? And just I mean some basic understanding of your MAC operating systems is going to be very helpful. Understand that we find, we do cover some of those basics within the introduction of just understanding, how to do a File New, how to close the program. And if you have any familiarity with other Office products, that would be helpful for you getting into Word. In these series, or in these episodes, we have files and notes that are for each episode. Those are my notes that I use to help guide us along within the episode, and those are available to you. And more often than not, there is a file, a Word file that we're using for demonstration purposes, and that is available to you. Now you can download all of them for the entire series right here in this course overview or they are available on individual episodes. And if for any reason we miss something, maybe it's the wrong file, it's attached to the wrong episode, let us know. Contact us and we'll go ahead and get that fixed. Here's some extra tidbits to end this overview is that there are always multiple options to do things in Word. And I might cover three of them, and not cover the other two. And you're like, well I know you could do it this way. Totally fine. There's many, many options of how to use Word and the different commands that are available. And really in any Office product. Updates. Updates do happen. And that's where you might have, there might be a major update that has happened with the Office Suite that makes my, at this time of recording, Word different than yours. So just be aware of that, and it will change things in there from time to time. And in any of your Office products, if you go to the Help menu, there is an option for check for updates. And it will run to see if you need updates and then go ahead and install. A lot of times, if you have your preferences in the auto-update to do automatically, it will a lot of times prompt you maybe when you open one of your Office products to say Hey, there's an update. And you can go ahead and run that. And that's also where you can check your different versions in your Word menu. And I cover that in the introduction to Word and showing you where you can go ahead and find that. There's always lots of answers online, searching for answers either in the Microsoft Help files or just in what we call the Oracle. Just go to any of your favorite search engines and just type in what you want to find. And there's the world of the Internet to help find the answers for any of your questions. And everybody uses these products for different reasons. The way I use Word may not be the same as the way you use Word, or the person down the street. So everybody has a different way that they function within the product. So just be aware of that, and everybody has different reasons for it. And most of all have fun with this. I know that it can be really frustrating sometimes when you're trying to make Word do something. It's just not doing it, I've been there, I totally understand. In these episodes we like to keep it light, we like to keep it fun, and make jokes. And try to keep that when you're off on your own and using Word is just try to have fun with it. And so I hope to see you in some future episodes, and let's go ahead and get on with Word. [MUSIC]