Let's get started then and open up Word. So I'm gonna go to the start menu, I'm gonna go up to the Office icons at the top of the start menu and I'm gonna select Word from there and word will open up. When it opens up, we're gonna go straight to a blank document. So select the blank document at the top and now we'll have a little tour of this document. So at the moment I'm in page layouts and if you look at the very bottom of the screen here, this is called the status bar. And it kind of tells you this is the print layout. We can change the layout to read mode if we want to or also web mode, as well. But most of the time when you are writing a document it's better to leave it in print layout cause then you know what it will look like when you print it out. However, this little black mark at the top here this will not print out. It's a non printable character. And actually, if I move my mouse up here up to the ribbon, which I'll talk about shortly, this says that we're showing the paragraph marks and other hidden formatting symbols and it allows us to understand exactly what the document will look like when it's printed out and it's definitely best practice to leave this visible okay, at all times and you'll see why as we go through the videos. So to do that, the shortcut is CTRL+SHIFT+8. That toggles it on and off. I'll just write that out there, CTRL+SHIFT+8.

What else have we got on this screen then? Across the top you'll see you've got a gray area and then we've got the white bit. And then we've got another gray area. This represents the margins and they're two and a half centimeters, either side or one inch, depending on where you are in the world. And similarly along the side, we also have a margin here as well. That's again two and a half centimeters and again, in another video you'll learn how to change those. This area at the top is called the ribbon. And as with all Microsoft applications now you can access the ribbon easily by hitting the ALT key. So ALT equals to access the ribbon. And once we've pressed ALT, we can access a menu within the ribbon really easily. So at the moment, I'm in the home menu. If I press H for home, and then I could maybe do FC for font color and that would mean I can now select a different color font and that would be my different colored font.

Now you may not have all of these menus. You'll notice that mine's suddenly gone to the draw menu and that's because I have a stylus pen on my particular computer. If you're using a desktop computer, you may not have this menu. Similarly, if you haven't got things like Acrobat installed as well, Adobe Acrobat, then you won't have that menu either. What you'll all have, however, is this thing at the top of the screen called the quick access toolbar but yours will look different to mine. My quick access toolbar just has this style button. Okay, yours will probably have a save icon, an undo icon, a redo icon, okay? Now I don't use those icons up there cause I know the keyboard shortcuts for them. So what you can do is you can customize that quick access toolbar really easily just by finding something you want to put up there, so maybe you do a lot of highlighting, you could right click on the text highlighter and then select add to quick access toolbar. So now if I wanted to highlight something, I could select it and then just click on the highlight really easily. Okay, so that's a quick overview of the interface. Now if I go right to the very bottom of the screen, back to the status bar, there's some other useful functions here as well. On the far left hand side, you've got your page number. Now, at the moment there's only one page, so it says page one of one. It gives us a word count, 12 words and if I click on the 12 words, it actually breaks it down into the number of pages, the number of words on the page, the number of characters, et cetera, okay? So if you're writing an essay or something or a university project, super useful and just it gives you a general idea of how big your document has got as well. Some other icons will come to again later on but this one is looking for errors in your document. This one allows you to choose the language.

And also, you could also look at accessibility options in here as well. All right, that's probably enough for now. Let's move on and start writing our documents.