Microsoft Word Level 5

Table of Contents

Mailings Tab

Mail merge is an amazing tool offered by Word, what it does is allow you to type up generic letters, envelopes or labels. You’ve probably witnessed this yourself, if you were ever eligible to win millions of dollars because your name was picked by the Publishers Clearing House. For this to work though you’ll need to supply or create a mailing list, these include names and address information and can include phone numbers or emails as well. The beauty about mail merge is that it’s not limited to just snail mail but can be used to mass email customers, friends or whoever you’d like.

Create Group

There are two buttons in the Create group and both of them bring up the same dialog box just with different pre-selected tabs. The only real difference between the two tabs is in the Options part depending on which tab you have selected you’ll either receive options for a predefined envelope or labels. You can also specify your own dimensions to create new envelopes or labels. The other difference is that the envelope also has a return address portion to fill out, along with e postage which is electronic postage and can be arranged for your business to help from licking stamps. With envelopes you also receive a preview option and a feed option which let you take a sneak peak and set how you’ll feed the envelope into the printer vertically, horizontally etc.

Both tabs offer you the option of just creating the labels or envelopes right through the dialog box by filling in the boxes and retrieving information from Outlook. After you’ve filled in the information all you need to do is click on Print. If you’d like to work with them in document mode then you can click New Document or Change Document depending on which tabs open again.

Start Mail Merge Group

The first button Start Mail Merge allows you to choose the type of document you’d like to work on in your current project. Depending on what you choose you might receive a dialog box prompting you for more information like size of paper, label or envelope etc. Once you’ve selected an option, your document you should reflect your selection and could possibly be chopped up into sections to represent multiple labels on a single page for example.

In order for mail merge to work you’ll need a recipients list, unlike the options given in the Create group we actually have several options here now. One of them is to select from an Outlook list like we would with the Create group, but now we also have the option of creating a list by clicking Type New List. This will bring up a dialog box prompting you for user information in a table format. Just follow the columns and fill in the proper information for each recipient one line at a time. You’ll have the opportunity to save this list as well should you want to use it later. To use this we would click on Use Existing List and then browse for the file we created. This is a special file that’s created by using Word, we however aren’t limited to this type of file. We could use a spreadsheet, database, .csv file (coma separated value) or other supported file type, which can be viewed in the list. The next button Edit Recipient List allows you to choose from your list who you’d like to send it too, by default everyone will be checked off, to take someone off the list remove the check beside their name. After creating a list should you notice a mistake this is where you’d need to go to correct it. At the bottom of the dialog box is the source file double click or click on it and select edit and you’ll be taken into the list itself where you can make textual changes. One other option available from the Start Mail Merge drop down menu is to use the Step by Step Mail Merge Wizard which will open up the Mail Merge pain displayed in the picture, the wizard will provide you with step by step instruction on setting up a mail merge document, by asking you a series of 6 questions, then presenting you with options to create your document and finally finish it.

Write & Insert Fields Group

Now to use the information from the mail merge list you use the options available in the Write & Insert Fields group. With the user information available you can select groups of it to go together for example like an address block which is what the Address Block button does or like the Greeting Line button which inserts your salutation and allows you to format how you’d like the recipient’s name to look.  Do you want the title included, just the first name, maybe the first and last name etc. The Insert Merge Field button allows you to insert a single piece of information like first name, last name and address from the drop down menu that’s presented. The Rules drop down gives you several interesting options for your mail merge. The first two Ask and Fill-in will prompt you for what you would like to insert during the mail merge process. If…Then… Else… will allow you to do a comparison and if that equals true it will insert one piece of text if it’s not then it will insert another one. The rest of the menu except for Set Bookmark will allow you to insert a piece from another merge user into the same merge, depending on which one you choose and two of them use an If like the If…Then…Else function.  Should your list be out of whack compared to the options you select from the Word list, for example last names showing up when you click first name, then you can select the Match Fields button and fix it by associating the proper field with the Word field. When working with labels you only need to fill in the first label with the mail merge items by clicking on Update Labels you’ll make all the labels the same as the first one. 

Preview Results Group

Here’s where you can come to take a look to see what will be printed out to the printer once you commit. Using the blue arrows you can scroll through the different recipients the arrows with the line mean beginning or end of list and the other arrows allow you to cycle back or forward one at a time. You could use the Find Recipient button to search for a particular recipient. The Auto Check for Errors button will present you with a dialog box where you tell Word how you’d like it to handle errors if encountered.

Finish Group

When you are finally done with setting up your mail merge document and are ready to send it away this is where you come, by clicking on the Finish & Merge button a drop down menu will present itself letting you choose to Edit Individual Documents, which will create a new document with all your recipients divided by pages, here you can make any particular changes you’d like individually. Typically most people just send it to the printer by clicking on Print Documents. The last and final option you have is to send emails by clicking Send E-Mail Messages, this will open up Outlook and start the process of sending the documents.

View Tab

Macros

What the heck is a Macro? It has nothing to do with economics here, what it’s used for is recording steps you take in Word. This would be ones that you do over and over again, something like taking some text for example and bolding it, adding an underline, italics as well and maybe even a little background highlight. Now if you found yourself doing this often for a piece of text, then a Macro is what you need, it’ll record all of those steps and save it to a name you give it. You could even associate a short cut keyboard combination to trigger this macro. So now instead of highlighting text and having to do each step to that text to make it stand out you’d simply highlight and click on the macro function you’d like to run or use a shortcut key and bam it’s done instantly. By clicking on Record Macro you’ll be presented with a dialog box which will ask you for the macro’s name, where you’d like to store (this document or all documents) and how you’d like to use or find it with the Button or Keyboard. If you select Button you’ll need to tell Word where you’d like to place it on the quick access bar or in one of the tabs on the ribbon. You can also use the View Macros button to find macros in your document and execute them from there, delete them and even create them as well.

Backstage

We briefly talked about what some of the items offer in Backstage some are fairly simply like Save, Save As, Open, Close and Recent. Here we’ll discuss some of the other options in a bit more detail.

Info Tab

The Info tab of the Backstage offers you valuable information that’s visible on the right side of the page, you can also get a few more properties displayed by clicking on Show More Properties at the bottom of the page. By clicking the first button on the left you can use Mark as Final to approve all changes and place your document in a read only state. Encrypt with Password will protect your document from others opening it without knowing the password. Restrict Editing works the same as it does on the review bar and allows you to specify what tools a user can use while editing your document, this can also be stopped if no password was set for this feature by anyone or you can supply the appropriate users with a password if they need to use a tool that’s been disabled.

The next button on the Info tab is the Prepare for Sharing button, it’ll allow you to do several things from the drop down menu. The first one is to inspect your document. By clicking this you’ll receive a dialog box asking you what you’d like Word to inspect each of which is described for you with the title and is activated by checking off the checkbox beside it. You can speed the process up by removing stuff you know is not applicable to your cause. Once you’re ready just click the Inspect button and wait for Word to do its thing, afterwards you’ll be presented with another dialog box which will inform you of what Word found, with options of Remove All being presented via a button beside those one’s with errors found. Before clicking on it though please note that this process cannot be undone on some of them, before continuing you might want to save a copy of the document so that if it does go wrong you can bring it back via the copy. The second option from this drop down list is to check your document for accessibility, this function will try to detect anything in the document that might be hard for someone with a disability. After clicking this option a window pane will open to the side of your window presenting you the results and a description of the problem just below the results. Check Compatability the last option in the drop down will run a scan of your document and tell you what parts will not work in other versions of Word, from the Select versions to show drop down you can check which versions you’d like to check against, Word 2007, Word 97-2003 or both.

Word 2010 has an auto-save feature that saves your document periodically even before you name it to a temporary file name. If you should ever experience a crash, your computer loses power or any other reason then there is a chance that Word might have saved a copy. This can be done through the Versions button by clicking on it and selecting Recover Unsaved Documents from the drop down menu.  It’s a good idea to clear this every so often as well, which can be done by selecting Delete All Unsaved Documents.

New Tab

With the New tab you have a window the presents several options most of them being template choices. Templates are documents already created by yourself or someone else. They tend to have a theme or message behind them and are organized into categories based on this. With the New tab window you get navigation in the top left, that kind of resembles a browser’s navigation that moves you back and forward through your choices of categories and sub-categories. Under the Home row your first choice is to create a new blank document the way word start’s up. You also have a choice of a Blog Post, Recent Templates which are templates you’ve used before should have forgot what you were looking at. Sample templates has a wide list of templates available on your computer, My templates will contain your templates when you create some. New from existing will allow you to open an existing document but will start it as if you just begun it in a new document without a name.

In the next row is an organized reservoir of templates available off of Office.com. You can browse through the categories and sub-categories available through the list via Office.com. Once you’ve found what you were looking for you simply double click the document or highlight it and click on the Download button. 

Print Tab

In the Print tab window you’ll see a preview of your document along with some other options. With the preview of your document you can control the page and the zoom at which you are looking at just like in document mode. On the left side of the window you’ll be presented with different printer setting options. The first option you have is at the top and this is where you tell Word how many copies you’d like to print. Moving down you’ll receive a drop down menu from the Printer button, which will allow you select what type of printer you’d like to send the file to, typically you’ll just send it to your default printer but in an office you might have different printers one for colour another black and white or even a dot matrix old school one for forms that use carbon copies. There’s also the option of printing to a virtual printer or file typically as well.  The next option under the Printer button is what you’d like to print, is it the whole document, maybe just a page or a range of specified pages, other options include printing information or variations of the document. The next two options let you choose if you’d like to double or single side printing and if you’d like to have it collated or not. Use Print Orientation to change from landscape to portrait or vice versa. You can even change the type of paper you are printing from here should you want too, maybe you ran out of legal paper or regular paper and need to use the other or whatever reason you’d need too. The option to play around with margins is here as well, should you want to see what it would look like with more or less white space. The last option here is to tell the printer to print an X number of pages on a single page, the default being one but if you don’t mind smaller writing or are just looking at the layout and flow of text or something you can print several more on a single sheet.  Some people actually like 2 pages per sheet as the text isn’t too small. 

Save & Send Tab

On the right side of this window are different ways of sending the document via email, some of these might need a shared location like a SharePoint server. The first Button for sending an email is to Send as Attachment, this will create a new email in outlook with this file already inserted into it. If you’re using a SharePoint server then you can Send a Link through an email to the location of the document. Send as PDF will do the same as the first option as will Send as XPS the only difference is it will convert the document before attaching it to your choice of file type. If you have a fax service provider the final option on the right is to Send as Internet Fax.

The left side will allow you to Send Using E-mail as well. Save to Web, SharePoint or Publish as Blog Post  require you to have a server set up somewhere and you’ll need not only permission to save to it but will more than likely need to provide some type of credentials to access it, name, password, etc. The last two options basically allow you to choose to save the file under a variety of different of file types some accessible from the list others can be chosen from the Save As dialog which contains all the compatible file formats.

Help Tab

The Help window’s first two options will allow you to access the web and get help regarding Word. If you are experiencing problems then you can come here to Contact Us to talk to Microsoft to fix it. Options will take you to Word options which are described in the next tab. Check for Updates will tell you that the operating system takes care of it, so it probably depends on the operating system. Another useful one time piece of information here is if your product has been activated or not.

Options Tab

The options is where you control how Word works with you, they have a huge range of options available here. The following are quick summaries of the different tabs which are available through the options dialog window. Some of the choices have more information available to you, when hovering over an item with an i and a circle around it you’ll receive a brief description. If an item doesn’t have an i around it then you can find a bit more info online via the help option. Excluded is the Quick Access Bar and Ribbon tab as they were covered in a previous level.

General Tab

The General tab lets you turn on and off the mini toolbar, live preview and screen tips. You can also specify your user name and initials here which Word uses in the background. If you wanted to open email attachments in full screen view.

Display Tab

With the Display tab you control how different settings appear in your window. You can remove the headers, footer and space between pages. Remove highlighter marks and tool tips. If you prefer to see paragraph marks then you can select individual ones or all of them. This is where you go as well if you’d like to make adjustments to what’s being printed through the printer.

Proofing Tab

The Proofing tab is where you control the settings for things like autocorrect, spelling and grammar. You can enable/disable highlighting, change the dictionary and much more. The AutoCorrect Options button will open a new dialog box where you can control a ton of options specifically for the autocorrect.

Save Tab

The Save tab controls the way you save files in Word, starting with what type of extension you use. Word has an auto save feature that by default happens every 10 min if you’d like to change how often this happens then this is where it goes. The locations where this file and the default save location are specified here as well.

Language Tab

The Language tab is where you go to specify the languages you’d like to use for spell checker. You can also specify more than one language here so that you can quickly switch back and forth for different documents.

Advanced Tab

The Advanced tab has most of the options you can change for Word, almost a good bet that if you’re looking for something that it’ll be here. The options are broken up into the following categories Editing options, Cut, Copy and paste, Image Size and Quality, Show document content, Display, Print, When printing this document, Save, Preserve fidelity when sharing this document, General and Compatibility options for.

Trust Center Tab

This tab is where you go to view the different license agreements involved with Word by clicking on Trust Center Settings. It’s also where you control the different security settings like if you can run a macro or not. 

Keyboard Shortcuts

There are a number of keyboard shortcuts which we’ve mentioned in previous levels and they are one’s that are directly connected with a specific function like CTRL-V for paste. With the introduction of the ribbon came another method of shortcut, after pressing the ALT button you’ll be presented with a number of options in grey squares, with number and letters in them. By pressing them, you’ll activate that option and be presented with more options as you enter each further level. They’ve really done a good job of easily guiding you through the different key presses required to get you to be able to use all the functions available.

 
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