Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

chapter 1: basic word processing 15

chapter

1

I

t happens millions of times a day. Someone sits down at a computer, opens

Microsoft Word, and starts typing. When he wants to start a new paragraph, he

hits Return a couple of times and keeps going. When he’s done, he clicks the

Print button and voila!—a page of text that’s perfectly fine for handing out at a

meeting or posting on a bulletin board.

Of course, if that were the extent of your Office X ambitions, you wouldn’t be read-

ing a book about it. As you’ll discover later in this book, Word X offers a staggering

array of advanced features that were once found only in page layout programs and

graphics software (not to mention space shuttles).

These first three chapters (all 140 pages of them), however, cover the basics: how to

start a document, type into and format the document, print it, and, finally, save it

all. These may sound like standard Mac techniques, no different from TextEdit or

SimpleText and not worth rehashing. But as you’ll soon discover, Microsoft has its

own, greatly enhanced idea of the Macintosh Way.

New, Open, and the Project Gallery

The first thing you see when you initially launch Word is the Project Gallery (see

Figure 1-1), where you indicate what kind of document you wish to create.

If your reply is, “Well, duh—a word processing document!” then you must still be

under the impression that Word is a word processor, which it stopped being some

time in 1752.

Basic Word Processing

16 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

The Project Gallery

The Project Gallery is proof. The icons in this window represent the kinds of docu-

ments Office X (not just Word) can create for you. (Use the scroll bar to see all of

them.) They’re canned templates for mailing labels, résumés, budgets, brochures,

fax cover letters, and dozens of others—even Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage docu-

ments like spreadsheets and blank email messages. The idea is that you can use Word

as the launching point for your entire Office X experience, without having to know

ahead of time which of the four Office applications is most appropriate for creating

the document you want.

Tip: If you’d rather not visit the Project Gallery every time you launch Word, simply turn off “Show Project

Gallery at startup.” You can also choose Word→Preferences, click the General button (in the list at left)

and turn “Show Project Gallery at startup” on or off.

When the Project Gallery opens, the Word Document icon is highlighted as shown

in Figure 1-1. If you click OK (or press Return or Enter) now, a new blank Word

document opens, just as if you’d chosen File→New Blank Document (or pressed

c-N).

New, Open, and

the Project Gallery

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-

c

-P.

Back left: The List view

(use the lower-left pop-up

menu) offers a better

overview than the

Catalog view and saves

you some scrolling.

Right: The Catalog view.