Microsoft® Office 2008 for Mac® Bible

Chapter 6. Building Word Documents

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Typing text and automating text entry tasks

• Selecting and editing text

• Creating columnar text layouts

• Inserting special text

• Building documents using the Outline, Publishing Layout, and Notebook Layout views

Building a document may seem like a simple task—just start typing. Alas, there's a bit more to it than that. First, you need to decide what kind of document you're creating. Is it a letter, a report, a blog? Figuring out what type of document you're creating can help you utilize the proper tools and features to get the job done. This chapter teaches you what you need to know to enter basic text or build a complex page layout document.

We go over the rudimentary steps for entering and working with text onscreen, as well as how to move it around, copy it, search through it, and automate it to make document building easier. You also learn how to create tabular columns and regular columns and how to insert specialized character and text features, like drop caps. Finally, you find out that creating complex documents isn't so complex when using Word's outlining, page layout, and notebook features.

Typing Text

You're probably ready to jump in and just start typing, right? That's the nice thing about Microsoft Word, you can do just that—jump in and start tapping into the keyboard. Click where you want to type in the document window, and let those fingers fly across the keys. As you tap the keyboard, characters, numbers, and symbols magically ...