the steps. For example, if I say to choose Home ⇒ Clipboard ⇒ Copy, click the Home tab, find the Clipboard group, and then click the Copy button in that group. In most cases, I provide the group name as part of the path to help you find the command more quickly. (Each tab has a lot of different commands on it.)
This is your book; use it how you want. You can start at the beginning and read it straight through, or you can hop to whatever chapter or topic you want. For those of you who are pretty new to computers, you might want to start at the beginning. If you’re new to Office, the beginning part will give you a good foundation on what features work similarly in all the programs.
Part I
Getting Started with Office 2016
Chapter 1
The Two-Dollar Tour
Get ready to.
Step right up for a tour of Microsoft Office, the most popular suite of applications in the world!
Here are some of the things you can do with Office:
✔ Write letters, reports, and newsletters.
✔ Track bank account balances and investments.
✔ Create presentations to support speeches and meetings.
✔ Send and receive email.
The Office suite consists of several very powerful applications (programs), each with its own features and interface, but the applications also have a lot in common with one another. Learning about one application gives you a head start in learning the others.
In this chapter (and Chapter 2), I take you on a quick tour of some of the features that multiple Office applications have in common, including the tabbed Ribbon area. I also show you how to insert text and graphics in the various applications, and how to move around and zoom in and out.
In these first few chapters, I use Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel as the example applications because all of them work more or less the same way: They let you open and save data files that contain your work on various projects. Microsoft Outlook works a bit differently, as I show you in Chapters 11 through 13.
The steps for starting an Office application differ depending on which version of Windows you have:
✔ Windows 10: Click the Start button, and then click All Apps. Scroll down to the M section, and click Microsoft Office 16. Then click the desired Office application.
✔ Windows 8.1: From the Start screen, click the down arrow at the bottom and then locate and click the application you want. Or, from the Start screen, begin typing the first few letter of the application’s name and then click it in the search results.
✔ Windows 7: Click the Start button, and click All Programs. Click the Microsoft Office 2016 folder, and then click the Office application you want to start.
When you open Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, a Start screen appears, containing a list of recently used documents and thumbnail images of templates you can use to start new documents. To start a new blank document (which you’ll want to do in order to follow along with this chapter), you can press the Esc key, or you can click the Blank template. The template has a slightly different name depending on the application; in Word it is called Blank document, in Excel it’s Blank workbook, and so on. Figure 1-1 shows the Start screen for Microsoft Word, for example.
To create an additional new blank document after the application is already up-and-running, press Ctrl+N at any time.
All Office 2016 applications have a common system of navigation called the Ribbon, which is a tabbed bar across the top of the application window. Each tab is like a page of buttons. You click different tabs to access different sets of buttons and features.
Figure 1-2 shows the Ribbon in Microsoft Word, with the Home tab displayed. Within a tab, buttons are organized into groups. In Figure 1-2, the Home tab’s groups are Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, Styles, and Editing.
Each Office application has a set of tabs for the tasks it performs. For