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About this lesson

Learn how to enter text and save your first document.

Quick reference

Your First Document

Enter text for your first document in order to have a base to work with in future lessons.

When to use

The objective here is to type words into a document in order to prepare for formatting in the next lesson.

Instructions

  1. Type the current date and press enter when the tooltip appears.
  2. Press enter 3 more times to place the insertion point at the start of the Greeting line.
  3. Type a Salutation or Greeting line
  4. Press enter 2 times
  5. Type the code: =rand(3,3)  and press ENTER on the keyboard
    called “Place holder” text
  6. Press enter 1 more time at the bottom of the text.
  7. Type a Complimentary Closing line, “Sincerely,”
  8. Press enter 3 times after the closing line
  9. Type a signature line “Your Name Here”
     
  10.  Note: If a red line appears under a word, ex: Sincrely, it represents a misspelling.
    1. Right-click the word with the red underline
    2. Read the list and left-click to choose the word offered that is the correct spelling

To Save a document:

  1. Click the Save or Save As button, or
  2. Click File, then Save.

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  • 00:05 In this lesson, we'll be typing your first document.
  • 00:09 In order to start that, we've opened a brand new blank document on the screen.
  • 00:14 Go ahead and activate the screen by clicking once and
  • 00:16 observing your insertion point.
  • 00:18 Next, we're going to enter today's date.
  • 00:20 Now it happens to be February at the time of this recording, so I'll start to
  • 00:25 type the word February, but observe what happens as I type the fourth letter.
  • 00:30 All of a sudden, a tooltip pops up and allows me to hit Enter to accept that,
  • 00:36 or I could just keep typing and I will ignore it.
  • 00:40 So I'll hit Enter.
  • 00:42 It completes the word February.
  • 00:43 Now, watch what happens when I hit my space bar.
  • 00:46 It actually wants to enter the entire date for me.
  • 00:49 So again, I'm going to hit Enter on my keyboard to accept that.
  • 00:54 Hit the Enter three times in order to get to my citation or my greeting line.
  • 01:00 Now, we could type a very proper one, Dear Sirs, with a comma, and hit Enter again.
  • 01:06 Now watch what happens, again, as I start typing February.
  • 01:10 Even though it's offering to complete it, I can just keep going if I want.
  • 01:18 And now I'm going to hit Enter at the end of that sentence.
  • 01:22 In order to very quickly put in some placeholder text, there's a little-known
  • 01:27 trick where you can actually type a formula into Microsoft Word.
  • 01:31 It's a random formula, and
  • 01:33 then we tell it how many paragraphs with how many sentence per paragraph.
  • 01:37 So every formula starts with an = sign.
  • 01:41 The random is simply rand.
  • 01:43 Then I open the parenthese and I tell it, three paragraphs,
  • 01:47 three sentences each, and end the parenthese.
  • 01:51 Hitting Enter, there it is.
  • 01:54 Quick way to put in some placeholder text, that's all it is.
  • 01:57 Now, it's time to put in the complimentary closing at the end of this.
  • 02:01 I'm going to type it incorrectly and type Sincerely with this typo.
  • 02:06 It automatically fixed it for me because it's a very common word.
  • 02:10 Even though I typed it wrong, as soon as I hit the space bar, it corrected it.
  • 02:15 I'm going to hit Enter three times, and now we put in your proper name.
  • 02:23 And hit Enter again.
  • 02:26 Anytime you type a word and it has a squiggly line under it,
  • 02:30 let's do this again.
  • 02:32 I'm going to type sincerely wrong again.
  • 02:35 And in this case, it has a red squiggly underline.
  • 02:39 Well, that means a typo.
  • 02:41 The way to fix a typo is simply a right-click on it and read the list.
  • 02:45 You notice at the top it says, spelling.
  • 02:49 And you can choose which one you want.
  • 02:52 So I'll choose this top one.
  • 02:53 Noticing also another arrow, that allows me to have it read aloud to me.
  • 02:58 I can change all versions of this incorrect spelling,
  • 03:01 I can add it to the Autocorrect.
  • 03:03 Maybe it's your last name and it always has a typo on your last name,
  • 03:07 just add it to the dictionary or AutoCorrect options.
  • 03:11 Actually, the Add to the Dictionary is right down here.
  • 03:14 Regardless, I'm going to go ahead and click the one I want it to change to, and
  • 03:17 there it is.
  • 03:19 I'll go ahead and select that and delete it, because I don't need that at all.
  • 03:22 And now we'll just save the document.
  • 03:25 You can hit the Save button or the Save As, or just hit Ctrl+S.
  • 03:31 So when I click Save, I'll choose where I want to save this document, and
  • 03:35 I will name it My First Document.
  • 03:40 And now we are ready for our next lesson on formatting.

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