Over the more than thirty years it has existed, Microsoft® Word has become more than just the leading word processor. It is a comprehensive and feature-laden content authoring tool. Word has features and capabilities that even some long-time users are not familiar with. To use Word efficiently and effectively, you need to know how to navigate effectively—how to locate and select portions of the document that you want to work with, and how to issue commands to get the results you want.

Documents are visually more appealing and easier to read when certain formatting and layout options are applied. Microsoft® Word gives you a wide range of control over the appearance of your document, from specific font formats affecting a small text selection to more general formats such as indentation affecting paragraphs to formats that apply to the entire document or large sections of the document, such as page sizes, orientation, and layout. In this lesson, you'll focus on specific formatting options—those that affect text characters and paragraphs.

Some editing and formatting tasks may be repetitive. It quickly becomes tedious when you have to apply the same formatting combinations or text edits in hundreds of different locations in the same document or across multiple documents. Fortunately, Microsoft® Word provides some tools to help you efficiently perform such repetitive tasks.

When people write business, technical, legal, and personal documents, they often include lists of information. Lists might include such things as procedures, examples, and so forth. There may be quite a bit of effort involved in formatting lists. List items may need to be sorted, and preceded with numbers, letters, or bullets. And they may be indented to set them off from normal paragraphs or to depict a hierarchical structure of some sort. Fortunately, Microsoft® Word provides tools to help you efficiently create and manage lists.

You've used tabs and tab stops to create the appearance of columns or tables, but for certain table layouts, tabs alone won't give you the control you need to create, format, and efficiently update information. Microsoft® Word's table feature provides another way to present information in table form, and provides you with additional flexibility and ease of formatting for producing table or grid layouts in your documents.

You've created documents containing text, formatting, lists, and tables. You can create a huge variety of documents using only these features. However, there are times when you'll need to include graphics in your documents. These may be as simple as symbols that you insert inline with text, such as the trademark symbol, or currency such as the Euro or British Pound. Or you might need to include complex illustrations, photos, or diagrams that may express certain kinds of information more efficiently and effectively than you can do with words alone. Fortunately, Microsoft® Word includes features that make it fairly simple to insert these kinds of graphic elements.

You've applied formatting options and inserted illustrations and other elements that boost the readability of the text in your document. You can also configure other formatting options to alter the appearance of the pages themselves. Fine-tuning a Microsoft® Word page can mean adding design elements that help give either a more professional look or an informal feel, depending on your intent. Layout options can determine how text and graphics flow on the page.

You've applied design and layout options to pages. Before you print or publish your document, you should perform various proofing tasks to ensure the document doesn't contain misspelled words, grammar errors, or punctuation mistakes. Microsoft® Word provides several useful tools to support you in this task. You may also need to share your document with other users who don't have Word. Fortunately, you can export Word documents to a variety of other file formats.

You'll wrap things up and then validate what you've learned in this course by taking an assessment.