There are at least four ways to create a new document from scratch. They are as follows:
Choose File → Project Gallery and click the Word Document icon, as described on the next page.
Choose File → New Blank Document.
Press ⌘-N.
Click the New Blank Document button (the very first icon) on the Standard toolbar that appears just beneath your menu bar.
However you do it, the result is a pristine, empty document, willing and able to become your next note to self, pithy sermon, or environmental impact report.
Tip
In fact, this new document isn’t really empty at all. Behind the scenes, it’s already loaded up with such settings as an automatic font, margin settings, style sheets, and so on. It inherits these starter settings from a special document called the Normal template.
You can read much more about Templates on Normal and Global Templates. For now, though, it’s enough to know that you can modify the Normal template so that each new document you open automatically has your own favorite settings.
The first thing you see when you launch Word is the Project Gallery (see Figure 1-1), where you choose the kind of document you’d like to create.
Figure 1-1. The Project Gallery opens automatically when you first launch Word. When you wish to open another new document, just open the Project Gallery again by choosing File → Project Gallery or pressing Shift-⌘-P. Use the three buttons in the upper-left corner to switch between icon view, list view, and list view with preview.
The Project Gallery is your entry point to the many types of documents Office 2008 (not just Word) is equipped to handle. Your choices include brochures, spreadsheets, and even email messages. (For more detail, see Chapter 18.)
When the Project Gallery opens, the Word Document icon is highlighted, as shown in Figure 1-1. If you click Open (or press Return or Enter) now, a new blank Word document opens, just as if you’d chosen File → New Blank Document (or pressed ⌘-N).
Opening any kind of document in the Project Gallery works the same way: Click the list items in the Category list on the left until you see the desired template or document type on the right. Then double-click the document icon to open it.
If you’re entering the world of Word for the purposes of editing an existing document, just double-click the document in the Finder (or click it in the Dock, if that’s where you stashed it). If you’re already in Word, though, simply choose the fastest of the following options:
Choose File → Open Recent and select a recently used file from the list.
Click the Recent tab in the Project Gallery and double-click a recently used file in the list.
Choose File → Open.
Press ⌘-O.
Click the second (arrow-from-folder) icon on the Standard toolbar.
No matter which method you use, Mac OS X’s standard Open box appears (Figure 1-2). It has a column view, just like the Mac OS X Finder, and a pop-up menu to make it easier to access the document you seek. (See Mac OS X: The Missing Manual for a complete list of Save and Open dialog box features.) Once you’ve located the document you want in this dialog box, double-click to open it.
Figure 1-2. The fastest way to use Mac OS X’s Open dialog box is to take advantage of the folder selection menu. It lists the folders you’ve been using recently as well as a quick way to hop to the desktop or your Home folder. Because Word 2008 can open so many different document formats, leave the Enable pop-up menu set to All Documents so you can take, say, a plain text document and open it in Word—and take advantage of all Word’s powerful features.
Tip
When you choose File → Open, Word shows you the contents of the folder you last opened. But if you keep all your Word files in one folder, you might rather see that list of files when you use the Open command.
To make it so, choose Word → Preferences. Click the File Locations button (in the bottom row), then Documents, and then Modify. Navigate to and highlight the folder you use most often, and then click Choose. From now on, choosing File → Open automatically uses your favorite starting folder.
In addition, Microsoft has added the following special features of its own to the Open dialog box:
Enable. Use this pop-up menu (at the top of the Open dialog box) to choose which kinds of documents you want to see. The setting “All Readable Documents” lets the Open dialog box display any possible document on your Mac that you can open in Word—not just Microsoft Office documents, but text files, JPEG graphics, HTML Web page documents, and so on. If you know that the document you’re seeking is of a certain type, you might save time by telling Word to show only those choices (other kinds of documents are “grayed out.”) No need to waste time browsing through, say, HTML files when you’re looking for an RTF document.
Tip
Don’t miss the “Recover text from any file” option listed in this pop-up menu; it’s a spectacular tool. It lets you extract recognizable text from any file and place it into a new window. It was intended to rescue usable prose from a corrupted Word document, of course, but it means what it says: any file.
Folder Selection Menu. The pop-up menu underneath the Enable pop-up menu lets you quickly select a folder. You may then browse its contents in the center panel. This list includes the folders that you’ve recently visited—handy stuff for accessing commonly used folders.
Open. This pop-up menu lets you choose one of the three different ways Word can open the same document. Original opens the document itself; Copy opens a copy, leaving the original untouched; and Read-Only opens the document but doesn’t let you make changes to it.
Most of the time, you’ll open the original and get to work. But opening a copy is a convenient way of leaving an electronic paper trail of your work. No matter how many changes you make or how badly you mess up a document, you still have an unsullied copy saved on your Mac. To save changes you’ve made to a Read-Only document, you have to save it under a different title by choosing File → Save As (or just attempt to save your changes and Word will guide you to the Save As dialog box).
View Buttons. The two List View and Column View buttons at the top left of the Open dialogue box switch the view from the list to the vertical dividers, as shown in Figure 1-3. Clicking the list icon displays the folders and documents in the selected location. Click the flippy triangle to view a folder’s contents, which will be displayed below and indented from the folder (just like the list view in Finder windows). Clicking on the three-pane column icon displays the files in multiple panels. In this view (just like the Column view in Finder windows), clicking on a folder in the one panel displays its contents in a panel to the right. Column view is better for diving through swarms of nested folders, while list view lets you see more information about each file.
New Folder. You guessed it—creates a new folder in the selected location. For example, you know you want to save your document into a folder called Resumes08 in your Job Search folder…but you don’t have a folder called Resumes08. No problem. Navigate to the Job Search folder and click the New Folder button. Type the new folder’s name in the little dialog box that appears, and click Create to forge the folder.
Figure 1-3. You can change the way you navigate the Open dialog box by clicking the List View and Column View buttons. The list view displays the contents of folders below the selected folders, while column view has two or more panels. When you click a folder in one column, its contents are displayed in the column to the right.
Like most people, you probably work with the same documents and templates over and over again. Word knows that and offers three shortcuts to retrieving files you’ve used recently or you intend to use frequently.
You’ll find a list of recently opened Word documents when you choose File → Open Recent. Just choose a file name to open the corresponding document, wherever it may be on your machine. (That is, unless it’s no longer on your machine, or you’ve moved it from the location where you last saved it, in which case you get only a cheerful error message.)
Choose File → Project Gallery and click the Recent tab to see a long list of recently used Office files. You can narrow your choices to only Word documents by using the Show pop-up menu near the bottom. The Project Gallery’s memory for recently used files can be long indeed; it can recall the last 999 Office files you’ve worked on. Click the Settings tab and adjust the number in the box marked “Show this number of recently opened files.”
Word’s Work menu is a vestigial appendage left over from when it was difficult to file frequently used documents for easy retrieval—before the Mac OS X Dock, Sidebar, and Desktop icons made it simple. You can use this menu to store your current project files, book outlines, invoice templates, and so on for easy access, but the Work menu isn’t even in the same organizational ballpark as Office 2008’s Project Center, which automatically compiles a folder of all Office files related to a specific project—not just Word documents. (For more information on the Project Center, see Chapter 11.)
The Work menu still works and it’s easy to add items to it. The problem is, it’s difficult and confusing to remove items from the menu. To add a Word document to the Work menu, save it, and then choose Work → Add to Work Menu. Now click the Work menu; the name of your document appears, ready for opening just by choosing its name.
You can only remove a document from the Work menu the way you’d remove any Word menu command— see AppleScripting Office for instructions.
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