Basic Letter Layout

Quick reference

• 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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