Winging it in Word 2000

I am sitting here, in front of my PC, Winamp playing some MID files and looking at my Word (Microsoft Office 2000) screen. I have 5 lines of toolbars, 4 top and 1 bottom plus a menu bar, oh yes, and my Office Assistant - F1 looking bored in the corner of my screen. All this with only half the toolbars active!

A far cry from the days of DOS word processors like WordPerfect that left you with a simple "Blue Screen" ready for your typing.

Scanning across these toolbars, I can do such things as enter 3-D elements, import pictures, change the colour of my text and background. I can directly import data from other programs - not just Office components.

I can use tables and columns, sort lists and change all manner of things to aid in the production of my document and it struck me that if you saw this for the first time you could be forgiven for being confused!

On these lines, the next few articles will be about the many tools and options you can use on Word 2000 - part of the Office 2000 suite of programs.

Don't worry if you don't have Word 2000 or even Word, as you will find many of these options in other word processors. There is something here for anyone that uses word processors.

Word - The Office 2000 Word Processor

At this stage, it is worth looking at the kind of things you can do with word processors as they have come a long way since the early days of electronic typewriters.

The primary function of a word processor is to allow you to type text, amend it if required, and then print the result (in this day an age, "printing" could be to a paper printer, a web page or a generic file format such as Adobe Acrobat). That is it - that is all a word processor does. So why do we have all these tools, some of which I mentioned above?

The answer is - presentation. The way that we present our document (regardless of the format you print to). Why is presentation important?

Take the next section of text...

This section of text has exactly the same text as the following section but this section does not contain any punctuation or formatting whatsoever see which section you find easiest to read I think you will find this is quite hard to read but in the next section I have used punctuation which is a simple form of formatting remember that formatting a document should make it easier to read and follow after all you want to make the message as clear as possible whether it is a school report a sales report or a letter to a dear friend Its quite hard to read this isnt it Now lets try this section with punctuation

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