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About this lesson
Learn how to format a basic letter layout.
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Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Word documents from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Basic Letter Layout.docx59.8 KB Basic Letter Layout - Solution.docx
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Quick reference
Basic Letter Layout
Learn the base rules for letter layout.
When to use
Anytime you want to type a formal or semi-formal letter.
Instructions
- Enter the Date at the top of the document
- Press “enter” four times to put a large space between the data and greeting line.
- Enter the greeting line
- Press “enter” two times before typing the letter.
- Enter text of the letter.
- Indent each paragraph by ½ inch (by pressing “Tab” on the keyboard)
- Press “enter” at the end of each paragraph, which places a space between the paragraphs.
- Enter the closing line
Press “enter” four times to put a large space between the closing and your signature line.
A faster way is to use the FILE, NEW feature in Word 2016
There are hundreds of pre-typed and formatted letters at your disposal.
- Click the File ribbon, choose “New” and then click the “Letters” link OR type "letters" in the search bar
- Wait just a moment and then sift through all the letters to find the one you would like to use.
- When you find and open the pre-formatted letter, just fill in the fields and adjust the text as you would like.
- 00:04 In this lesson, we're gonna talk about basic letter format.
- 00:08 Now, all letters start with a date.
- 00:10 So, if I type the month, hit the space bar, it offers up the auto-complete.
- 00:16 Hit Enter and accept that, now I hit Enter again four times, one, two, three, four.
- 00:21 Now in this part, I start my salutation.
- 00:24 So I will type Dear Sirs, or whatever the salutation maybe,
- 00:28 and I hit Enter twice, one, two.
- 00:30 And now I'm going to actually start on my letter.
- 00:33 Now first speed, I'm just going to simply type in
- 00:37 the code =rand, means random, (3,3).
- 00:41 That will put in three paragraphs, three lines apiece, hit Enter, there we go.
- 00:47 All right, now I'm gonna finish up the closing, so, Sincerely.
- 00:52 Now if you type it wrong, you're going to have a typo, and to correct the typo,
- 00:56 simply right click and choose the correct spelling, there we go.
- 01:00 And hit Enter three times, and then type the signature line, whatever that may be.
- 01:06 There you go, that is your basic layout for a letter.
- 01:10 Now let's get a little more formal about this letter.
- 01:13 If this is basically a casual business letter,
- 01:17 I'm going to indent every single paragraph.
- 01:19 So I'll click at the front of the first paragraph, and
- 01:22 I'll press Tab on my keyboard.
- 01:24 Tab will give us a nice half inch indent, all right?
- 01:27 Now I'm going to repeat that and do the same thing for the next two paragraphs.
- 01:32 There we go, and now we're gonna talk about paragraph spacing.
- 01:35 Now, on my document, and by every default document in 2016,
- 01:40 they automatically put spacing in there.
- 01:43 And that's fine, because it helps the eye travel from paragraph to paragraph,
- 01:47 splitting a little bit of space between the paragraph, so
- 01:50 it's easier to read when you have spacing.
- 01:54 But I'm gonna go ahead and select these three paragraphs, and
- 01:57 right up here in the Paragraph section,
- 02:00 we have an option right here that is line and paragraph spacing.
- 02:04 So you can choose whether you want to add more space between the paragraphs or
- 02:08 remove space.
- 02:10 Now if you remove space, basically those paragraphs are slammed together.
- 02:15 There's no real extra space between them, and
- 02:18 you would manually do that by clicking at the end of the paragraph and
- 02:22 pressing Enter on your keyboard just once to force some space in there.
- 02:26 It is your personal preference to wanna leave it the way Word already does it or
- 02:31 do you wanna take control and do it your own way.
- 02:33 That is simply up to you.
- 02:36 Now the next thing I wanna talk to you about is what should you actually say
- 02:39 in your letter?
- 02:40 Well, it all depends on what your letter is.
- 02:42 But if you're having a hard time coming up with an idea of what to say,
- 02:46 let me introduce you to the File ribbon.
- 02:49 On the File ribbon, when I click that, the second option down says, New.
- 02:54 Now File > New is full of pre-formatted templates.
- 02:57 We have suggested searches, Business, Personal, Industry.
- 03:00 I'll go ahead and click on Personal to let those load.
- 03:03 And basically, these particular,
- 03:06 there they go, these templates are free for you to use.
- 03:11 They're available because you have purchased a copy of Microsoft for
- 03:15 your computer, so you may use all of these till your heart is content.
- 03:18 And all that I have to do is put my mouse on it, personal letterhead.
- 03:23 Here's a flower postcard.
- 03:24 Here is a thank you letter for a personal gift.
- 03:27 That sounds wonderful.
- 03:29 So I'm gonna go ahead and double click to choose that particular one.
- 03:33 It's downloading cuz I am connected online.
- 03:36 For some reason,
- 03:37 whenever I download these, I get a big gap up here on my Quick Actions bar.
- 03:41 I don't know why, I just don't want you to be afraid of that and
- 03:43 wonder what happened.
- 03:44 It's happening to me too.
- 03:46 This is what we call a little bug in the system.
- 03:49 I don't know why it happened.
- 03:49 But what I wanna point out to you are the fields here, so
- 03:52 when I click, let me go ahead and collapse that ribbon, that helped a little bit.
- 03:58 Okay, when I click in here, it says Dear [Recipient Name] and
- 04:03 has these brackets around it, that's called a field.
- 04:06 And all you have to do is click that, and type your friend's name.
- 04:11 Okay, and then let's see, your address.
- 04:14 So I click there, and I would type my address right here.
- 04:17 So as you can see, it's prompting you by putting these fields in here.
- 04:23 It's prompting you just to fill in the blanks.
- 04:26 And it has a nicely formatted letter for you already with all the nice words.
- 04:31 You can change the name on here if you want.
- 04:34 It's excellent, and it's under File > New.
- 04:36 Please use those, don't reinvent the wheel.
- 04:40 If you don't know what to say, go in there and dig around.
- 04:42 There's some very professional letters in there that will help you.
- 04:45 All right, have fun with that.
- 04:46 It's a pretty awesome thing to know.
- 04:49 Thank you.
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