Creating a long document from scratch
Creating a long document from scratch
It's now time to launch Microsoft Word 2007 and begin the creation process for our first long document. In this lesson we will be doing it from scratch. We'll be creating our document, laying out some of the pages, getting ready for the content that we will be using from P.T. Barnum's book, but right now, we need to launch Microsoft Word. So let's go down to the Start button. If you don't see it on your list of recently used applications here in the menu, you may want to go down to All Programs, locate it that way or what I like to do where it says Start Search here. I'm just going to click down here and type-in Word. That's the fastest way to locate an application.
Look at the top right here under Programs, Microsoft Office Word 2007. We will give it a click, which not only launches the application, but starts a brand new blank document for you. This new blank document that we see in front of us is using a number of default settings that we are going to need to adjust and that's exactly what we are going to do in this lesson. Some of the defaults you can see right away. As we look up here at the Ribbon, for example, you can see the default font. Yours may be different from mine. The Font Size that's about to be used. Look over here under Styles. We are using a Normal style right now. We will be talking about all these things later on as we move through the lessons in this title.
Right now though, let's go up to the View tab on our Ribbon because one of the things I like to do when I'm manipulating page layout and adjusting some of those settings is to have a nice look at the entire page. So here under View in the Zoom section, you might be using 100%, which is actual size or something different, but the best view for working with page layout is the One Page View. This allows you to zoom out far enough to see the entire page on one screen. And this is great when you are going to be adjusting things like paper size and margins for example. So let's do that now by going to the Page Layout tab.
Now we know that we are going to be creating a book here. We are going to be using content from P.T. Barnum and the book we have decided is going to be 6" wide by 9" long. We are going to need room for headers and footers at the top and bottom. We are going to be binding this book down the middle so we might need extra space on the inside margins versus the outside margins. All these things to consider as we lay out this book. Let's go down here to our Page Setup section where we have got dropdown buttons, shortcuts for things like Orientation, here is Size, for example.
If I click on Paper Size or Page Size, you can see Letter is currently selected, it's highlighted, 8.5x11. We have got some presets in here as well. I don't see any 6x9 options. Maybe if I scroll further down. No, not even close. So I'm going to be creating what would be a Custom Selection. Notice down at the bottom I have got More Paper Sizes here. We won't go there quite yet. I'm going to click on my page to close up that menu. Same thing goes for Margins, I'll click the dropdown, I have got Presets here. If I don't see something I'm interested in, I have got Custom Margins down at the bottom. But we will come back to that a little bit later on.
I do want you to see one option here, which is Mirrored. This changes settings for left and right margins to inside and outside margins, very helpful when binding a book together like we will be doing. Let's click out here on our page to close this up. What I would like to do is access all of these options from one location, one dialog box. If I go up to the Page Setup section here in the bottom right corner, you will notice that little arrow. As I hover over it, this is going to show my Page Setup dialog box. Some sections on the Ribbon will have this; some will not. So when you see that little icon in the bottom right corner, you know you can access a dialog box.
We are going to do that here for our Page Setup dialog box and it has three sections: Margins, Paper and Layout. We are going to start with Paper. Here's where we can adjust our paper size. You can see the default setting of Letter, 8.5x11 currently selected. If I click the dropdown here I see those same presets I saw from the Ribbon, knowing that none of these fit. So I'm going to go to Custom Size. When I choose Custom Size, now I have the ability to change the width and height to something that's not available on that preset list.
I'm going to click up here where it says Width. I can use the up and down arrows if I wanted to do. As soon as I do that, Custom Size will show up here automatically. You don't have to select it first like I did, but I'm going to take it out by backspacing over the width and putting in my own, which is 6 inches, and when I move to the Height field, watch what happens down here with the Preview. Just got a lot skinnier. Now the height can be adjusted the same way. I can use the arrows over here on the right or just backspace over the contents and put in my own, which is 9.
I won't see the preview change until I leave this field. So I'm going to hit my Tab key and there it is. There is a preview of what that will look like. Now notice that this is being applied to the whole document, which happens to be one blank page at the time. This is important later on when we know that we are going to have different settings for different sections. When I click the dropdown, it could be the whole document or just from this point forward. In our case, it really doesn't matter which one we choose. It will be the exact same thing. I'll leave it at Whole document. Next, I'm going to go up to the Margins here. Notice that my default margins are 1" for the top, bottom, left and right. There is also an option down here for Gutters. We will talk about that later on. Right now we don't need to be concerned with a gutter or a gutter position, but we do need to concern ourselves with the margins.
Now the Top Margin, I want that to be three quarters of an inch. Now I'm going to be using headers and footers and I need to reserve some space for that but the top margin, I can bump that down to 0.75. Now you can see, it goes from 0.7 to 0.8, so I do need to come in here. I'm going to put down to 0.7, click right after the 7 and put in a 5. I'm allowed to do that, three-quarters of an inch. The Bottom, I'm going to bump that down to 0.6. So even less room at the bottom. Keeping in mind that I probably will want something showing up down there in the way of a footer, so I'm going to keep some of the space down there for that reason.
Now, Left and Right, I don't really want left and right margins. I want inside and outside margins. On an even page in a book I'll probably want, for example, if it's on the right side, a little more room on the inside margin because I'll be binding the book together and a little less room on the outside. The reverse would be true for my odd pages. So I need to change this to inside and outside margins. The way to do that is to go down to the Pages section here where it says Multiple Pages. Change it from Normal to Mirror margins.
That's exactly what I want to do. Now it says Inside and Outside. The Inside margin, I'm going to need space for binding it, so whether it's going to be glued together or using a ring binder type binding. I need that extra space that's going to be used up by the binding itself. So I'm going to leave that at 1", but the Outside margin, I'm going to bump that down to about 0.5". So you can use the arrows or type in 0.5, whatever you like, and you will see the Preview down below shows you more room on the inside and less room on the outside, perfect! Let's go up to the Layout tab here for a second now. Sections will be an important part of our document. For example, the first page in our document might be a title page or the cover of the book. The next section might be where we have our matter for the beginning of the book, such as a Table of Contents and Copyright Information, Acknowledgments, and then the third section might be the actual chapter where it begins. And then I might want separate sections for each chapter. It depends on the format.
So down here, you can see Section Start is set at New Page. I have also got the ability here to select even or odd pages. I'm not going to be using columns here. So New Columns doesn't pertain and Continuous might be useful when I get into the chapter. So if I want some of the formatting from one section to flow into the next section, I'll get into all of this. Later on there is a whole chapter dedicated to working with sections. Down here though, I'll be using headers and footers. So I can set that up now to be different for odd and even pages. For example, on an odd page, I might want the header to be left-aligned and on an even page right-aligned. So it's always at the outside of my pages. So yes, definitely, I want a different header for odd and even pages.
I also want a different first page header, where I might want to suppress whatever shows up at the top, for example. You can see the default settings are set to 0.5" from the edge of the paper. So 0.5" at the top and the bottom. That can be adjusted and I may need to do that later on when we get into headers and footers in detail. The other thing that really doesn't apply to us-- we are going to keep the default setting-- is the vertical alignment of our text. In a book, we want it to flow from the top of the page down. So top is the default and we are going to leave it at that.
Other options though that we might consider for different sections might be centered for example, if I have acknowledgment. I might want the content on that page to be centered vertically on my page. Justified is going to add extra spaces between lines, so it fills the entire page or I may want something to flow from the bottom of the page up as I enter the content. I'm going to leave it at top and I may need to adjust some of these settings for different sections of course. Here is my preview down below. When I click OK, I have got my first blank page using the New Settings. The New Settings are what I'm going to keep.
So obviously I want to save this document. I'm going to go up to my Save button, there it is. It's going to be saved to My Documents folder by default. You can see the name down below, Doc1. I haven't actually entered any content so I don't see anything here for the file name, but I'm going to type in NewBlankDocument, just like that, and when I click Save, it's now been saved to My Documents folder. I am ready to continue working with this document if there are any further layout changes to be made, I can do that knowing that I have saved all of my previous settings or I might be ready to start typing, entering content manually or borrowing that content from somewhere else.
Now just before I do that, I may want to create different sections right off the top. So if I did, I might want several pages. How do I insert a new page? Well, I could go up here under the Page Layout tab to Breaks and click the dropdown and insert a new page. You can see I also have sections down below. Again we will be talking about sections in detail later on. Right now, I want another page and I'm going to do the exact same thing by selecting Page. There we go. Ctrl+ Enter on your keyboard is the shortcut for inserting a page break. Notice now I've got three different pages, so I created room for my cover, I have got room for some of that matter that appears before the actual chapters, like a table of contents might go in here.
Little further down, I've got my third page where I might start writing the chapters of my book for example. Made another change. I need to save that change by clicking the Save button. I update my NewBlankDocument, which appears up here on the title bar, and I'm ready to move on. The next step might just be getting some content into this document. You may wish to take existing content that you already have and reformat that document. That's the type of thing we are going to talk about in the next lesson.
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