chapter 1: basic word processing 25
Press the Space bar only once—not twice—after punctuation such as periods,
colons, and semicolons. Double-spacing after punctuation is a holdover from
the days of the typewriter, when you had to manually add extra space after punc-
tuation for an attractive, readable result. On a Mac, Word automatically places
the correct amount of space after each period or other punctuation mark. Add-
ing an extra space is superfluous and clutters your file with extra characters.
Save early, save often. Choose FileSave (or press c-S) after every paragraph or
sentence.
Note: Word 2001 veterans will be happy to hear that the “Disk is full” bug no longer exists in Word X. Now
you can save a document as many times as you want, without worrying that Word will be unable to save
changes because of an erroneous out-of-space message.
A Window into Word
The tools you use most often—those for navigating your document and for basic
formatting—are clustered around the main text window, which is shown in Figure
1-4.
Title Bar
Word X’s title bar does all the usual Mac things—sends the window to the Dock
when double-clicked, moves it when dragged, etc.—but it has a few unheralded
powers, too. It also performs like a Mac OS X folder window in two key respects:
Figure 1-4:
A Word window is
surrounded by controls,
gizmos, and levers. Almost
anything you click, drag, or
double-click produces some
change to your document
or Word’s own settings.
Title bar Ruler Scroll bar Split box
Navigation buttonsStatus barView buttons
Word Processing
Basics
26 office x for macintosh: the missing manual
To find out what folder your document is nested in, c-click the documents title.
As shown in Figure 1-5, a pop-up menu appears, identifying your document
icons location on the hard drive. Click any folder or drive on the list to open it
into a new window.
See the tiny Word icon next to the document’s name in the title bar? That’s your
document proxy icon, which works just like the folder proxy icon in every Finder
window title bar. As shown at right in Figure 1-5, you can drag that icon just as
you would any icon in the Finder. You might do so to move the current docu-
ment to a different folder, to copy it to a different disk, or even to drag it directly
to the Trash. In true Mac OS X fashion, you see a translucent ghost of the icon as
you move it. (You have to hold the cursor down on this icon for about one sec-
ond, making it turn dark, before you can drag it in this way. If you drag it too
quickly, Word thinks you’re simply trying to move the window on the screen.)
Tip: The document proxy icon appears faded out (disabled) whenever you’ve edited your document
without saving the changes. (And you can’t drag it to move, copy, or trash your document when you
haven’t saved changes.) Only when you choose FileSave (c-S) does the icon spring to life, ready for
dragging.
The Ruler
The ruler across the top of the page displays the current settings for margins, tabs,
and indents. See page 121 for details on how to use and change these settings.
Scroll Bar and Navigator Buttons
Figure 1-4 depicts the Navigator buttons—double arrows flanking a little round but-
ton at the lower right of the Word window. When you first open a document, these
Navigator buttons act as page up/page down buttons. But once you’ve used the Find
and Replace command (see page 75), or in some other way changed the browse ob-
ject, the double arrows act differently.
For instance, after you’ve used Find and Replace, clicking the Navigator buttons
takes you from each occurrence of the word youre trying to find to the next. For
more detail on the Browse Object feature and Navigator buttons, see page 73.
Figure 1-5:
Left: When you
c
-click the
document name, you can
choose and open, in a Finder
window, any folder or disk in
the list. Right: After clicking
and holding for a second,
you can drag the tiny icon
into any folder or disk on
your desktop.
A Window
into Word

Get Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.