Word 2016 for Power Users

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1. Introduction to Styles If you want to be a Word power user, then you will need to master styles. Styles, in its most basic form, are a set or a collection of formatting instructions, instructions for the font, paragraph spacing, even pagination. But it can be a bit more than just that. Styles apply meaning to a paragraph. By applying a style, you are designating and describing that paragraph in relation to a document's hierarchy. For example, by applying the Heading 1 style to a normal paragraph in Word, you are essentially stating that that paragraph describes the normal paragraphs that follow. So, at its heart, styles control both the appearance of paragraphs and their meaning within the document. There are many advantages to using styles in Word. In fact, formatting with styles are the preferred method for formatting long documents. In the most recent versions of Microsoft Word, the headings are collapsible. This is a fantastic feature for when you are writing or editing within the long document, for it allows you to quickly compare different sections. Styles can also be used to navigate a document. In the full desktop version of Word in the Navigation pane, if you have styles applied to a document, you can use those styles to quickly jump to a section of your document. But by far the best reason to use styles is to keep your document formatting consistent. Applying a style ensures that all paragraphs using that style look exactly the same. What's more, if you change your mind about how you'd like your document to look, you can quickly edit or modify a style and Word will update all at once every instance of that style in your document. So yes, there are many, many advantages to using styles in Word. Now, let's explore what we can do with styles in Word 2016. In Word 2016, here are the styles that are available to use. You have your basic paragraph styles, the Normal style, which is applied to all text by default. In fact, most styles that follow are based on the Normal style, meaning that these styles follow the Normal style, plus a few additional formatting options. In fact, if you change the Normal style, many of these styles will update to reflect that change. Beyond the Normal style, you have a No Spacing style, which is similar to the Normal style, except that it doesn't include extra space after a paragraph carriage return. Then we have a bunch of Heading styles. Then we have the rest of the Standard styles, a Title and Subtitle style, and some text styles like Emphasis, Strong, and the like. There are also styles for Quotes, References, a Book Title, and a List Paragraph. To apply any one of these styles, just select a paragraph, or move your insertion point to the paragraph that you'd like to format, and then click or tap on a style from your Styles gallery. And that's it as far as applying preset styles. If need be, you can always modify or update any style, or create your very own style to fit your needs. And that, we'll discuss in the next clip.


2. Creating Your Own Styles There are a couple of ways to create your own custom Word styles. One way is to modify an existing style, and another way is to create a style based on already formatted text. Let's begin with the first method, modifying an existing style. Now in the previous clip we learned how to apply a style, simply select your text, and then click or tap on the style you'd like to apply, but to modify or customize this particular style, the simplest way is to right-click the style and select Modify. If by chance you are unable to right-click, you can open the Styles dialog box launcher, hover your mouse over the style you wish to modify, click the drop arrow, and select Modify. It's a few more clicks, but does the same thing as right-clicking from the gallery. Upon selecting Modify, the Modify Style window will appear. From this window, you can customize the name of the style, what the style is based on, and what the style applies to, like the normal paragraph for example. Now most of the time you won't want to modify the settings above here if you already have styles applied in your document. More than likely, you will just want to customize the basic appearance of a style, such as the font, font size, style, or color. You can also customize alignment, spacing, and indentation. Once you've set the appearance of the style, you can then choose what to do with the style. You can add the style to the Style gallery, have the styles automatically update as you work within the document, which is probably not what you want to have happen by the way, so leave this option cleared if you want the ability to override a style in your document on the fly. This checked box, I know a lot of people who just find it kind of irritating when they work with it. A lot of people just want to change one quick thing in a Word document, and then find that it's changing everything, everywhere, not realizing that they have a style applied. So, I strongly recommend you leave this checkbox cleared. You can also apply Only in this document or New documents based on this template. Now this last option is a toggle, where Only in this document applies this style change to only this document and no others, whereas the latter option modifies the default template style. Now for more advanced options, clicking on the Format button here will open any number of formatting dialog boxes you are already familiar with in Word, such as the Tabs window, for example. So really, almost any format option in Word is available from this window. And that is one way to modify styles. Another way is kind of the reverse procedure. Rather than opening the style and setting the formatting, and then applying the new style to your document, you do those steps in reverse, where you apply the formatting in your document, and then tell Word to update the style and apply it to all other styles. So, let's say I select my style here, and just change the font and font color. Now, in my Styles pane, I can select the drop-down for that style and choose this option, Update Heading to Match Selection. And that is the other way to modify or customize a style in Word 2016. Now personally, that's my preferred method. So, in regards to modifying styles in Microsoft Word, not much has changed from previous versions. And that is how you can modify styles in Word 2016.


3. Working with Themes and Style Sets If you have styles applied to your document, there are some very cool things that you can do to quickly design and restyle your document with just a click of a button. Jumping over to the Design tab on the ribbon, this is the tab that we will be working with over the next few clips, starting with this area right here. This is your Themes gallery. If you work with other Office programs like PowerPoint for example, you are probably familiar with themes. They work similarly in Word. In fact, they are a great way to keep documents consistent with other office files. If you have PowerPoint presentations that use, say, the Gallery theme, why not use the same theme for your Microsoft Word document you pass out to your audience participants as well? To apply a theme, it is really simple. Just open a Themes gallery from your Design tab and click on a theme to apply. In addition to applying a theme, you could also apply a built-in document format or style sheet. You will find those options right next to the themes on the Design tab. Hovering your mouse over one of the document format options from the gallery here, will show you a live preview of what your document will look like with that format applied. To apply any of these formats, simply click your mouse. Likewise, if you don't like the colors, the fonts, the paragraph spacing options or effects, you can change those as well off to the right. Once you have everything set the way you want, if you really, really like it and want it to be the default for all future documents you can create, you can set these styles as the default for all future new Word documents right here by clicking this button. And that is working with themes and style sets in Word 2016.


4. Adding a Watermark If you'd like to label or signal that a document is confidential, or perhaps even a draft, you can add a watermark to the background of a document's page. To add a watermark, navigate to the Design tab and click on the Watermark button. From there, you will see several of the most popular watermark options, Confidential, Do Not Copy, Draft, Sample, ASAP, and Urgent. For any of these text options, you can choose between two layouts. One, where the text is written horizontally, or, diagonally across the page. To apply one of these watermarks, simply click or tap on the watermark you'd like to apply, and the watermark will be applied to your document. It's that simple. If none of these watermarks quite fits your needs, you can create your own custom watermark by entering your own text or uploading your own image, like a company logo. To do so, navigate back to that Design tab and click on the Watermark button one more time. Below the template previews, you'll see an option for Custom Watermark. Clicking that will open a window where you can select either No watermark, which is the default, Picture watermark, or Text watermark. Selecting Picture watermark, you can then choose a picture from a location on your computer, network drive, SharePoint, or even OneDrive folder, or Internet Bing search. Once you've selected a picture, you can set the scaling of the photo, as well as whether or not to apply a washout effect to the photo. For a Text watermark, you can choose a language, text from the list of drop-down options, or type in your own text, an option that isn't exactly apparent because of the combo box. And of course, you can select the font, size, color, layout, and transparency of the text. When you are finished customizing your watermark, simply click Apply to see those changes. And that is how you can add a watermark in Word 2016.


5. Changing the Page Color You more than likely won't want to apply this next option to a document destined for the printer, but for the ever-more-popular electronic-only docs, you can, if you so choose, change the document's page color. I should note that this is different from the Reading mode options where you change the background to sepia or black for easy reading. This option is actually applying a formatting change to the page, whereas in Reading mode, the effect only affects your particular screen. So with that mind, should you decide you'd like to change the page color formatting, from the Design tab click on the option Page Color. From there, you will see all of your theme colors and variations, as well as some standard colors that I would not recommend you ever use as the background color. No, for a page background you want to choose a color that will easy contrast with your text, and these bright, vivid colors are not great for that. Now, you have two more options below, More Colors, which you can use to specify a specific standard color, or enter in the RGB or RSL color values, an option particularly handy if you are trying to match a company-specific design palette or color. And that is how you change the page background color.


6. Adding Page Borders One last available feature on the Design tab in the Page Background group is this one, Page Borders. Clicking on this button will open a window directly to the Page Borders tab where you can use the options in this window to specify the type of page border, and apply that border to the entire document, or even a specific section. But this window can be a bit tricky to understand for some. Let me explain. There are three sections to this window, but that does not mean each section is exclusive to the other. What options you choose in one section will affect what happens in another. No matter, each section will affect how the border as a whole looks or is displayed. To the left in the Setting area, you choose the type of border, Box, Shadow, or 3D, but don't worry about Custom. Custom will be chosen only if you use the buttons in the Preview area over here to apply a different top, bottom, or sides borders. Like I said, this window is a bit confusing. So, let's say I select Box. You can see in the Preview area that will apply a small, thin box around my whole document. How do I know it will apply it to the whole document? Well, that is because this option, Whole document here, is selected in the Preview area by default, but I can change that to a specific section if I so choose. In addition to changing where to apply the border, I can also adjust the style and width, or even choose from a variety of special art, which incidentally has not received a facelift since I believe the '90s. So if you want your document to look like it was created in this century, I would steer clear of the art borders. Now you do have some more advanced options in the lower right-hand corner of the window. Clicking on Options will open yet another window where you can specify exactly how and where to measure and place said borders from the margin of the page, as well as some additional checked options, like Always display in front, and such. Now once you have your page border options set, click OK, and Word will place your border on your document. And that is adding page borders.


7. Creating Borders and Shading for a Paragraph Most users to Word are familiar with the options on the Home tab that allow them to change the background color of a paragraph, or apply a simple border around the paragraph using the options from this drop-down menu in the Borders button. But, if you go all the way down here to the option called Borders and Shading, buried deep within that Borders button, a window will appear that looks very similar to the window we were working with in the previous clip for page borders. So, if you didn't watch that clip, I strongly suggest you go back and watch that one, because this window, it can be a little quirky. Now since it functions the same for both, I'm going to quickly go through the options here. Now right now, I am on the Border tab, so any options I select will affect the border for my selected paragraph or paragraphs, depending on how many I have selected in my document. And from that Border tab, I can choose a type of border, a style border, as well as a color and a width, and where I'd like that border to appear. Now clicking on Options, I can customize how many points away from the text the border will appear. For shading, clicking on the Shading tab, here you can select a fill color, and even a style pattern and alternate color. When you are finished selecting all your fill and border options from this window, simply select OK to see what your paragraph looks like. Now, obviously, what I have chosen here isn't ideal or even good design. It's just for the demo, but personally, I've used these features in conjunction with things like pull and block quotations to stylistically set apart other's words from my own, and that can look very attractive. So trust me, there are purposes for these border and shading options for paragraphs in Microsoft Word, you just have to be a little creative.


8. Inserting a Page Break In this next clip, I will be showing you the proper way to insert a page break, and no it does not involve hitting the Return or Enter key a bunch of times. That is one of my biggest pet peeves, and I can't begin to tell you how many student papers I've graded over the years where students have done that. No, a proper page break is simpler than that, and there are two ways to do it. One, you can up to the Insert tab and click on Page Break. Wherever your insertion point is in Word, that is where Word will then place that page break. The Page Break command also exists in another location, specifically, on the Layout tab in the Breaks menu. Clicking on Breaks, Page break is the very first option in the menu, along with many other kinds of breaks that we will discuss in more depth in the next clip. But for right now, know that a page break is the simplest of all kinds of breaks. It only breaks the page. It does not change formatting, or rather create a new section. For that, if you want formatting to end here, and to begin a new page with a new section, and designate that new section with a new set of formatting, then you will have to create what is known as a next page section break. That, and more, we will cover in the next clip.


9. Working with Section Breaks If you are working with long documents complete with a cover, table of contents, a reference page, index, the works, each of which has their own unique and special look or formatting options, you might wonder how you might be able to achieve those various looks within the same document. Well, you do that by creating section breaks. Section breaks allow you to format one section completely differently from another. For example, one section could have narrow margins, whereas another might have a three-column text spread. Creating sections makes all of that possible. To create sections, you'll need to jump to your Layout tab. In your Page Setup group, you'll see a Breaks button. Clicking that button will reveal a menu, complete with all of your various types of breaks. The top section contains all of your page break options, and the bottom section, all of your section break options. For section breaks, you have the Next Page break. Like the page break, this will create a page break wherever your insertion point is. The difference is, it will also create a new section, meaning you can create a new set of page formatting options for this new section. For example, let's say we want to set the margins to Narrow. As you can see, the previous section margins still have the default margins, whereas this new section has the more narrow ones. In addition to the Next Page break, there is also the Continuous break. This creates a new section, but instead of pushing the content to a new page, the text will continue wherever it is. This is a great option if you want to have a section with columns and a section without columns all on the same page. Now, these last two options are rather self-explanatory. They create section breaks and push the content to a different even or odd page, respectively. So, really between all the different kinds of breaks, page and section, you can do almost anything layout wise, it'll just take a little bit of practice getting used to.


10. Working with Columns If you watched the last clip on section breaks, then you are all ready for this next clip on creating columns. Here I have a document with some fake text, and if I turn on my hidden characters, you'll see that there are a few continuous section breaks thrown in here. For this middle section, if I go ahead and select that, we're going to be adding some columns. To add columns, jump over to the Layout tab and click on the Columns button. That will open up a menu where you can choose the number of columns you would like to add, either One, Two, or Three, or between two different layouts of two, one where the left column is narrower than the right, and one where the right is narrower than the left. To specify your own custom columns, if none of these are appealing to you, click on More Columns to open the Columns window. Here, you can specify the number of columns and the specific spacing between each columns, and whether or not you would like a decorative line separating those columns. At the very bottom of the window, you also have the option to apply these changes to this section only, to this point forward, or to the whole document. Once you're finished creating your customizations, go ahead and click OK to apply those columns. Pretty simple.


11. Advanced Formatting Power Shortcuts for Word 2016 If you are looking to become a Microsoft Word power user, then this next section is not one to skip over. Power users utilize features like AutoCorrect, AutoFormat, Find and Replace, and Custom Dictionaries to save time and trouble when working in documents. The next set of videos is designed to get you acquainted with these features, and learn how to leverage them in your daily tasks, so let's get started.


12. Introduction to AutoCorrect In its most basic form, AutoCorrect corrects typos and misspelled words, but it can do a bit more than just that. You can use AutoCorrect to insert special symbols, use it to format text as you type, or, you can even use it as a shortcut. If you find yourself, for example, constantly typing out long phrases, such as Return on Investment, you can program in a shortcut like roi and have Word automatically replace the text roi with the full phrase for you as you type. The AutoCorrect feature is a cross-suite feature, meaning it is available in others apps besides Word. In fact, any customizations you make to AutoCorrect, will apply to other applications, like PowerPoint or Excel as well. To access your AutoCorrect options, no matter the program you are in, navigate up to your File menu, go to Options, Proofing, and then click on AutoCorrect Options. This will open a separate window that hasn't changed all that much in the last several versions of Microsoft Office. Up top, you should see several tabs. AutoCorrect will be the active tab selected by default. Up top, you'll see the majority of your basic AutoCorrect options, or simple checkboxes. To disable any of these features, simply uncheck the option. Now I haven't found many reasons to uncheck these options, but on occasion, they do exist. Most of the time though, if any of these AutoCorrect options are getting in the way, what you will want to do instead is to adjust your replace text list below, or, add or remove an exception for AutoCorrect. Now those options we will discuss in the upcoming clips.


13. Replace Text as You Type In this clip, we're going to explore our Replace Text as You Type feature, a sub-set of our AutoCorrect options in Microsoft Office. To navigate to our AutoCorrect window, once again, go to File, Options, Proofing, AutoCorrect Options. From there, you'll want to be on the AutoCorrect tab, and focus on the bottom most portion of the window, the area labeled Replace text as you type. Now, this is a feature that you can turn on or turn off, just by checking or unchecking this box. But power users leave this on and leverage the list below to work with them instead. Now if we scroll through this list, you will find a huge list of symbols and frequently misspelled words and phrases that have been preprogrammed. If you find that there are any words that you are constantly misspelling or any symbols that you are constantly have to go to Insert, Symbol, and locating that symbol to insert, stop doing that. Program it in here instead. That way, you can just type your shortcut in the Replace column and Word will replace it with what you type in here. Now the first thing I do in Word, or at least a brand-new copy of Word on a brand-new machine, is add my own name to AutoCorrect. Not that I often misspell my own name, but Heather Ackman is a tad long, and if I can save myself some time typing, great. So, in the Replace box, I type ha, and in the With box I can type out my full, perfectly spelled name, and then press Enter, and now I have that as an AutoText entry. So let's try that out in Word. Press OK, and return to our document. Now, I can simply type ha, press Space, and Word will type out my name for me. Now I've used this feature in the past for colleagues' names, company project names, or jargon, anything that will be referenced frequently during meetings, so that when I'm typing notes or taking minutes, it can go oh, so much faster.


14. AutoCorrect Exceptions You can program in several types of AutoCorrect exceptions. To access those exceptions, go to File, Proofing, AutoCorrect, the AutoCorrect tab, and then click on the Exceptions button. That will open a smaller window with three tabs in Word. The first tab contains a list of terms that end with periods, but after which Word will not capitalize the first letter. Hence, the are first letter exceptions. The second tab contains a list of terms that start with two initial capital letters where you don't want AutoCorrect to reduce the phrase or a series of letters to a single capital letter. The final tab will only appear in Word and Outlook. Here, you can list other terms that you don't want AutoCorrect to fix. Also only available in Word and Outlook is this checkbox, Automatically add words to list. This will, as it states, automatically add words to the exceptions list. This happens when you undo a correction AutoCorrect has made. Now, the Exceptions window is but one way that you can add an exception or override an AutoCorrect rule. Custom dictionaries are an additional way to work around these AutoCorrect rules. So, if you are looking to delete an exception here that is giving you trouble, and don't find that deleting that exception works, try looking in your custom dictionary list, a topic that we will be discussing shortly. But feel free, add your own exceptions, go through, delete, modify these as you see fit.


15. AutoFormat and AutoFormat as You Type Now a little confession here, AutoFormat and AutoFormat as You Type is a tool that I personally do not use that often, mainly because I see the writing process as separate from the formatting process. But for those that blend those two processes together, writing, editing, and formatting into one large step, the AutoFormat as You Type feature can be a big timesaver as it allows you to keep your hands on your keyboard while typing, and as we know, anything that keeps your hands as close to the keys, is a major time saver that increases our productivity in the long run. To access your AutoFormat options, just as before, go to File, Proofing, AutoCorrect, but this time, we need to navigate to the AutoFormat tab. Here, you'll see two main sections of options, one that will apply specific formatting as you type, and another that will replace formatting as you type. Now let's go through each option one at a time. Built-in Heading styles, with this option checked on, Word will apply a heading style automatically if certain conditions are met. So, if your paragraph contains five words or less, and doesn't end with punctuation, and you press Enter two times, then Word will convert the paragraph to a Heading 1 style. For different heading levels, you can proceed the new line of text with a tab. One tab will yield Heading 2, 2 tabs Heading 3, and so on. So as you type, without your hands leaving the keyboard, you can apply the Heading 1, the Heading 2 style, and so on, just by using simple keystrokes. Likewise, if you have automatic bulleted lists or list styles, or both checked, these options, Word will convert specifically formatted lists of texts into either bulleted or numbered lists. If you precede a list item with an asterisks, hyphen, or that greater than symbol, followed by a space or tab, then Word will convert your list to a bulleted list. If your line of text begins with a number or Roman numeral followed by a period or tab, Word will automatically convert your text to a numbered list as well. Now this last checkbox here isn't a very descriptive one, but there are two main paragraph styles that are affected by this option, Border Lines and Tables. With this option checked, when you type three consecutive characters on a new line, either a tilde, pound, asterisks, hyphen, underscore, or equals sign, and then press Enter, Word will draw a line across the page. Now depending on the type of symbol you type, that will determine the type of line drawn. So, as you can see here, as I type out a different symbol three times, and press Enter, a new type of line is drawn. For tables, you can insert a sequence of plus signs and hyphens to create a single row table. Just remember to begin and end the sequence with a plus sign. For example, typing a plus sign, followed by five hyphens, plus sign, five hyphens, plus sign, five hyphens, and finally a plus sign, then press Enter, that will create a three column, single row table. To make the columns wider while typing, just add more hyphens between the plus signs. Now that concludes the top most portion of our AutoFormat tab. Beneath that, we have a set of Replace options, which are a bit more self-explanatory. The checkbox, replace Straight quotes with smart quotes is a great one for word processors, but is not really a checkbox for everyone. Coders, for example, they need to use straight quotes in their code blocks, might want to turn this option off if referencing code in a paper. A lot of other little actions that you might have noticed Word doing automatically are here as well. Ordinals with superscript, Fractions with the fraction character, two hyphens replaced with the longer em dash, that, by the way, is one AutoFormat option that I do use quite often. And here's one formatting option may users are unaware of, instead of using the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+B for bold or Ctrl+I to italicize, you can surround your text in either asterisks or underscores to format each respectively. And finally, for all those students writing work cited pages, referencing web or internet resources, for print papers, you do not want to convert an address to a hyperlink, so this option I usually turn off when I'm writing an academic paper. That's right, I'm still a student, I'm still in grad school, and quite frankly if I had my choice about it, I'd always be a student in some kind of program somewhere. But enough about me. Now, a lot of the options we discussed here also live on the AutoFormat as You Type tab. In fact, on this tab you'll see more granular control over some of the Apply as you type features, like headings and borderlines, as well as a few additional options below, such as this one, Set left- and first-indent with tabs and backspaces. By default, on a new line, pressing Tab sets the first line left indent. If instead you just want Word to be old school and actually enter a tab character, uncheck this option. Now, one last thing I'd like to point out for all your mathematicians out there is the Math AutoCorrect tab. This area is your new best friend. Here, you will find a list of all kinds of shortcuts that are much easier to use in the math symbols window in Word. Turn this feature one, memorize your favorites, make a cheat sheet for the others, and keep it by your desk. This right here is a huge timesaver, and not just for Word, but for other Office programs like PowerPoint as well.


16. Custom Dictionaries As you may already know, when you run the Spelling Checker in Word, Word will compare the words in your document against a list of words preprogrammed into Word. This is your main dictionary in Office. It contains a wide variety of the most commonly used words, and as such, might be missing some special business or technical terms, acronyms, proper names, or specialized capitalization. Now as I hinted at in an earlier clip, rather than an adding an AutoCorrect rule or exception, you can instead add these proper or special terms to a custom dictionary in Office. In Word, and most Office programs, to access your custom dictionaries or to create a new one, navigate to File, down to Options, and Proofing. Under the When correcting spelling section, you'll see a number of options, including a button for Custom Dictionaries, but before we click on that, I want to point out a checkbox just above it here, Suggest from main dictionary only. If you want to use Custom Dictionaries, this option needs to be unchecked, or cleared. So, make sure that it is and then click on Custom Dictionaries. That will open a small window and display all the custom dictionaries you have available from this machine, including any roaming dictionaries attached to a Microsoft account, through which you are signed into Office. So, if you don't see exactly the same dictionaries as I see, it is probably due to your company or Office 365 subscription, or your computer setup. So don't worry, but no matter your subscription or setup, you should at least see one default dictionary and at least one custom dictionary. To view or edit your word list, select a dictionary, and click on the Edit Word List button, which will be available for any custom dictionary. Here, you will see every word that has been added to your dictionary from the Add to Dictionary button through the spell check or right-click menus in Office. You can remove any word you like by selecting a word and pressing Delete. To create a new custom dictionary, simply return to the previous window and click New, or if you would like to install a third party custom dictionary, you can click Add and navigate to where that DIC file is located to install it. And that is a quick overview of custom dictionaries in Office 2016.


17. Introduction to Find and Replace Many novice Word users are more than likely familiar with the basic Find and Replace techniques. If you aren't, or find that this a feature that you do not use as often as maybe you could, definitely watch this video, because it will prep you for the next clips, which, trust me, you will not want to miss. From Word's Home tab, if you click the Find button in Word 2016, you'll see that there is a shortcut to Word's newer Navigation pane where you can type in a keyword or phrase and search your document for all matches of that word or phrase. And even though this pane is nice and pretty, it doesn't have access to quite as many features as the old school Find window did, but if you go back to the Home tab to the Editing group and click on the Replace button, for long-time Microsoft Word users, here is your old school Find and Replace window. There is the Find tab, the Replace tab, and the Go To tab. In this clip though, we're going to stay focused on the Replace tab. In its most basic function, we can use this tab to find and replace simple text. So, let's say we have some contact information for an employee in this document who is no longer with the company, and let's say we want to replace her name and information with her replacement's info. Well, rather than scrolling and hunting through 12 pages of text, our Find and Replace window can do all of that for us in a matter of seconds. Just type out that employee's name here, and then type out the name that you'd like to replace it with. From here, you can click either Find Next to preview the place in the document, or simply just click on Replace or Replace All if you are confident that you will be replacing the correct info. For names, I usually like to double-check, so I'm going to hit Find Next, and yep, that is the name I want to swap out, so now I can hit that Replace button, and Word will tell me that we finished searching the document and ask if I want to continue searching from the beginning. But text is not all you can replace in Word. In fact, you can do oh, so much more. You can replace formatting, special characters, you can even reposition information in a document from this Replace box. Now that we'll be discussing in later clips. But let's say we want to replace these hyphens here with en dashes. Well, let's open up the Replace window again, and in that Find what box, we'll type a simple hyphen character. Now let's click on this More button towards the bottom of the window. That will open a variety of search and replace options. For Search, you can match case, use more advanced features like wildcards, or even ignore certain things like punctuation or whitespace. But down towards the bottom, this is the area I want to point out now, these Format and Special buttons. Here is where you can replace either special formatting like a font, or even a particular paragraph or style. Or, if you click on the Style button, you will see a huge list of special characters, breaks, and marks. In our Replace box, we want to add an en dash, so, with that selected, I'm going to hit the Replace All and Word will tell me that two replacements have been made. And going back to our document, there they are. The hyphens are now en dashes. And that is how you can use some of the more basic features in Word's Find and Replace window to make quick edits in longer documents.


18. Advanced Replacement Techniques Building off what we learned in the previous clip, we are going to be using the Find and Replace window, but instead of having it look for one specific piece of text in a large document, we're going to be using wildcards to search for any number of kinds of text through a document. Why would this ever be necessary? Well, lots of reasons depending on the situation. But here is a simple situation everyone can relate to. Let's say we have a document that stores contact information for a lot of employees, and let's say for some reason we want to change how that information is written or displayed within the document. For one or two contacts, that's no big deal, but for a directory of over 100 contacts, that would take a while to reformat. Using wildcards in our Find and Replace window, we can locate all text styled as phone numbers and reformat them virtually any way we like. The problem is, if we simply type in a phone number into the Find box, Word will search right now for that exact match and replace only that one phone number. So that's why we need to figure out to use wildcards to search for all phone numbers regardless of the individual numbers plugged into that format. Now, in Microsoft Word, there are many kinds of wildcards you can use to replace characters, a question mark will replace any single character, including spaces and punctuation characters. Placing brackets around a set of characters tells Word search to locate matches that contain one of these characters. For example, typing s, bracket, io, closed bracket, n will return sin and son, spelled s-o-n, but not sun, spelled s-u-n. You can also use brackets in conjunction with a hyphen to search for any single character within that range. So typing, for example, open bracket, 5-9, closed bracket, will return any number within the range of 5 through 9. To view a complete list of wildcards to use in Word, please consult this Microsoft support article. Now, jumping over to Word, let's try out some of our wildcards. Let's open up our Find and Replace window and click More, but this time, we need to check the box for wildcards to tell Word that we'll be using wildcards in our search. Now let's search for the name Allen, but let's say we're not sure how Allen spells his name. He could spell it Alan, or he could spell it Allen. In that case, we need to enter in our search box the letters A, l, we could type a question mark, but that question mark replaces only one character remember, so now there are several ways we could write this. We could write three more question marks, but that would return potentially a lot of results, as, well, it will return anything, any combination of characters starting with Al. So we need to get a little bit more creative with our wildcards. Instead of a question mark, let's try a range of characters. Let's try Al, bracket, a-z, closed bracket, n. Now, that a-z in brackets will search again for only one character. So, looking at that, that won't return A-l-l-e-n, so we need to keep trying. There is actually a special wildcard that will search one or more occurrences of the previous character or expression, and that wildcard is the @ symbol, or ampersand. So, if we type Al@?n, that is going to give us a much more reasonable search result, including Allen spelled A-l-a-n and Allen spelled A-l-l-e-n. Now, there are other ways to search using a little something called expressions, and that we are going to need to use to search and reformat our phone numbers. So be sure to watch the next clip on expressions.


19. Advanced Search Expressions Continuing on with our advanced Find and Replace clip series, in this clip we are going to be exploring a rather advanced topic, expressions. To create expressions in Word, all you need are parenthesis around any search string or wildcard combination. Seems simple enough, but using them logically in combination with wildcards and real characters can sometimes have its challenges. Basically, whenever you place anything inside parentheses, Word remembers the results of that search combination to use later in the replace operation. For example, let's say we have a name in Word listed out first name, space, last name, and instead we want it listed last name, first name. We can enter that name in our Find box, and place parentheses around each part of the name to tell Word to remember each part of that for later. Then, in the Replace box we can tell it how to reposition that text based on the order of the expressions. The first set is 1, the second set of parenthesis is 2, and so on. So, as such, in the Replace box, I can use the \n wildcard to tell Word how to arrange the text from the Find what box. So, in this case I will type \2,\1 to tell Word to place what is in the second set of parentheses first, followed by a comma, then whatever is in the first set of parentheses second. And to see that in action in Word, let's hit the Replace button, and there you go, it has replaced or repositioned our text just as we wanted it to. Now, we are going to be using the same principle, the same practice, to reformat our phone numbers, but there's a problem here. Our phone numbers begin with the very character that Word uses to form expressions. So, how do we tell Word what's a wildcard verses what is a literal character, like this open parenthesis for our area code? Well, there is a special wildcard just for that situation. If you precede any wildcard with the backslash in the Find what box, that tells Word you are looking for that literal character. So now, we know we are at least going to have two of these in our expression, one at the beginning of the area code, and one at the end. Now, we've got to figure out how to write our area code, and since there are a variety of area codes here, we need to tell Word to look for a range of numbers. So, that bracket, 0-9, closed bracket, that'll work, but remember, that only searches for 1 character, or 1 number, but if we add a special extra wildcard, curly brace, 3, closed curly brace, just after this wildcard, that will tell Word we are looking for exactly 3 occurrences of the previous character or expression. So now Word will search 0-9, 3 times. That's what that section means. Now, if we want Word to retain this information, we need to be sure to surround this information with those expression parentheses. Since we are reformatting the area code to remove the parentheses, and using simple periods between each part, we can place the parentheses here. Now what remains is just more of the same. Open parenthesis, bracket, 0-9, closed bracket, and we want 3 numbers, so we need to type curly brace, 3, closed curly brace, followed by a closed parenthesis, hyphen, open parenthesis, bracket, 0-9, closed bracket, now this time we're going to type open curly brace, 4, closed burly brace, because now we want 4 digits to end our phone number, and to close out the final piece of our expression, a closing parenthesis. Now we are ready for the easy part, telling Word where to place the text from the Find what box once it finds it. So, once again we will use the backslash and wildcard to position our text from above. And now we are not really repositioning text, but rather recalling it, along with our new formatting marks. So let's type \1, to recall our area code from above, followed by a period, followed by \2., \3, and let's see that in action in Word. Let's hit our Replace All button and there you have it, Word has made all the replacements, and now, this is what our phone numbers look like. And that is using expressions in Word's Find and Replace box.


20. Word Tools Creating Tables Tables have many uses in Word. They are not just to display tabular data, not anymore. In fact, one of the most popular uses of tables in Word is for simple formatting and page layout purposes. Let's face it, Word is no page layout program like Microsoft Publisher, or InDesign, or QuarkXPress. Word has some simple tools built in for controlling text and paragraph positioning, but when those fall short, which sometimes they do, tables can come to the rescue. To insert a table into Word, go to your Insert tab and click on Table. Now, there's a variety of options here and I want to draw your attention to the bottom- most option, Quick Tables. Word has a variety of built in tables preformatted for you, many of which are calendars. So, don't reinvent the wheel, check here first to see if this list has what you are looking for, or something close to it. It's easier and faster to reformat a table than it is to build it from scratch. But, if you are a control freak like me, and prefer building from scratch, Word gives you several ways to do that as well. You can insert a table using this grid, just move your mouse over to highlight the number of squares representing the dimensions of the table you'd like to create, or click on the Insert Table button and specify the number of columns and rows for your table. You can even specify the AutoFit behavior for table contents using this window to have it be fixed width, AutoFit to contents, or AutoFit to window. As for inserting tables goes, you do have a couple more options. There is the option to draw tables, but honestly, I am not a fan of this option. I've never found it very user friendly. The other methods are far easier and faster in my opinion, but try it out if you like. With this option selected, your cursor is a drawing pencil and you can draw a table, a row, or column line pretty much anywhere. If you make a mistake, you can go up to the tools on your ribbon, select the Eraser, and click and drag over any line you've drawn to erase it. The last option is to insert an Excel spreadsheet. Now, what this means, it kind of opens an app within an app, Excel within Word. In fact, you'll even see that same familiar spreadsheet and tools you get in Excel appear within Word. You can enter in data, just like Excel, perform basic calculations, etc. And then as soon as you click outside that mini Excel window, you'll then return to your Word document with all the same Word tools just as before. And those are a few different ways you can insert tables in Word 2016.


21. Modifying Tables So now that we have a table in Word, we are ready to begin formatting that table. A fast way to format tables is from your Table Tools format tab. There, you will see a gallery of predefined formatting. Opening that gallery and scrolling, you can hover your mouse over any format to see a preview of what that format will look like on your table. Don't worry if it doesn't look exactly just right, we can always make adjustments later. Just select something close to the look you are going for. Next, to the left of the gallery you will see a number of checkboxes you can use to add or remove a header row, banded rows or columns, or even a total row. If there is any special shading or special individual elements that you'd like to style, you can use the tools off to the right of that gallery. Just select the cell or cells you wish to format and manually apply that shading or a border style using the tools in this area. In addition to formatting your table, you can skip on over to the Layout tab to adjust a number of other table elements, properties, insert a row or column, change the alignment or text direction, or even sort information in your table. One feature in particular that I'd like to point out is the Merge and Split Cells and Table buttons in the Merge group. Sometimes you might not want or need a perfectly uniform table. Let's say our header row, we just want to display a title. Well, selecting those cells and clicking on this Merge button will join all of those cells into one large cell. Likewise, you can split a cell into several cells by selecting that cell, choosing Split, and then entering the numbers for how you want to split that cell, into how many rows and columns. Now a lot of the tools and buttons I've just talked about are also accessible from the right-click menu. So, if using a PC, you want to right-click on that table, you'll see a variety of options here to insert rows, columns, or delete things in your table. So don't forget to right-click. I find personally that right-clicking is a lot faster than going all the way up to the ribbon. And those are some ways to modify tables in Word 2016.


22. Inserting Pictures and Clip Art Graphics, illustrations, and pictures go a long way in communicating ideas and information that words just can't quite fully express on their own. Word offers several ways to insert graphics into your Word document, and a variety of ways to enhance them right from within Word. In the next several clips, we'll be exploring a few popular methods. Now to insert pictures, you guessed it, we'll need to go up to our Insert tab. From here on the ribbon in the Illustrations group, you'll see all the ways you can add illustrations in Word. Now we're going to be starting out by clicking this button right here, the Pictures button. Clicking on that button will open up the Insert Picture window, and from here you can navigate to just about anywhere you have photos saved on your computer, removable drive, or cloud drive that you can access from your Windows login, just navigate to where your pictures are, select the picture that you would like to insert, and then click on that Insert button to insert it wherever that insertion point is inside your document. Now that's one way you can insert pictures. Now let me undo that real quick. Going back up to the Insert tab, this time we're going to click on the Online Pictures button. Clicking this option will open a slightly different window. This window gives you the option to search a variety of other locations. If you have your Microsoft account connected to a SharePoint drive for example, you can use this window to search SharePoint for any images stored there. Now my specific Microsoft account is not an Office 365 account associated with a business account, so that option is not displayed here. Now if you're using one for business you might have SharePoint listed up top, but since this is a personal Microsoft account I have two options listed here, Bing Image Search and OneDrive - Personal. If you have any other services connected to your Microsoft account, such as Facebook, you'll see those options listed here as well, but you can also search those services for additional pictures. Now the Bing Image Search, you do need to be careful searching pictures here because not all pictures here will be royalty free and legal. For example, let's say we search for cat. So typing in that keyword cat and pressing Enter, we will get all image results that are tagged with Creative Commons licenses, but we do have the option to clear that filter and show all results. I wouldn't recommend doing that, especially if you are doing this for business, but we can choose one of these Creative Commons license photos and insert that into our document. And that photo will download and insert right there, wherever that insertion point is. And those are two different ways that you can insert photographs right into your Microsoft Word document.


23. Enhancing Pictures Now picking up where we left off in the last clip, we have our cute little kitty cat here, but looking at this cute little kitty cat, he doesn't look so little. In fact, he takes up the vast majority of this page. Well, the first thing we want to do is resize the photo to make it take up less real estate space on our page. There are a couple of ways to do that in Word. The first way, and the most obvious way for most users, is to grab hold of one of the corners of this photo with our mouse, just hover that mouse, that little arrow, right over one of the corners, and click and drag to begin resizing the photos. And it doesn't matter which corner you grab, you can just click and drag and that will resize the photo. That's one way. If you have some more precise measurements that you'd like to type in, you can go up to the Picture Tools Format tab, if you don't see it, if you click off that picture and it disappears, just take your mouse, click on that picture, and it'll pop right back up, Picture Tools Format into the Size group, and you can type in those exact measurements right here. You want the height or the width to be something specific, let's say we want the height to be 3, type that in, and the picture will resize. Also located in that Size group are your cropping options. If you don't like the dimensions of this particular photograph or if you just want a cute little kitty head floating there on the page, what you can do is come right over to this Crop button, and this Crop button has two parts to it, there's the actual cropping tool which will just turn the corners of the image into crop corners where you can click and drag to crop in or out, let me undo that, or if you take your mouse and hover over the lower half of that Crop button, you can click on it to crop to a specific shape, crop to a specific aspect ratio, this is one of my favorites, mainly because of this one, I love cropping to square, or to a specific portrait or landscape size, 16x9, 4x3, all popular choices right there. Now there's two more options down below, there's Fill and Fit. These two options are really more popular in programs like PowerPoint, where you are trying to fit or fill the picture to a slide or a picture placeholder. In fact, if you're working with SmartArt where you will have picture placeholders for certain SmartArt objects, these two options will be a little bit more useful in those scenarios, but for just a picture on a page I really don't see you using these two options. But Fit will resize the picture so the entire picture displays inside that frame or that placeholder, whereas Fill will expand it so the entire picture area is filled so the outside portions of it may not be seen, kind of expanding it outside the range. So Fit, you can kind of see by the little icon right there what it's doing, there the sun is kind of cut off, there it shrunk down, you get the idea. Well regardless, let's say here I want to crop to this aspect ratio of Square 1:1, there's my square. I can grab hold of the corner now and hold down my Shift key to maintain that square, drag it in, and now I can move that kitty face within those corners to keep it where I want it to go. And let's crop it right there where the eyes are almost center. When you are finished cropping, to save those changes you can click anywhere outside the photo or click that Crop button one more time to save those changes. And once again, that's how you can resize and crop your photo. Other things that you can do really quickly to enhance your photograph, in the Picture Styles group, you have a number of quick styles that you can apply to your photograph. There's a number of frames, shadows, mirrors, fades, shadows, all of these are preset styles that you can apply. If you'd like a preview of any one of these styles, just hover your mouse over any one of these to get that quick preview. If you don't like any one of these styles, hovering your mouse over any one these menus over here, you can apply any one of these single effects, shadow, reflection, glow, soft edges, bevel, or 3D rotations manually yourself, one by one, just by playing around with the options here. So lots to explore there. Next to that in the Adjust group you can also make picture corrections. In the Corrections drop-down menu you can soften or sharpen a picture, and in here you'll see a preview of what that picture looks like hovering your mouse over any one of these thumbnails, you'll see a preview, you can kind of see it in the background right there, or you can adjust the brightness and contrast of the photo. Again, you can see a quick preview of the thumbnails here or hovering your mouse over it you'll see the actual live preview of the photo itself in the background. Of course the menu's kind of covering it up here, if you don't like that you can bring up the grand master list of all picture corrections by choosing this button right here, and that pane will appear all the way to the right and not cover up your beautiful photograph. That way you can adjust the brightness and the contrast using these slider buttons, or if you mess things up and want to reset what you've done, just click the Reset button and everything will return to normal. Now in addition to these quick adjustments and picture styles, you can position the photograph on the page itself. In the Arrange group, there is a quick Position menu where you can adjust how the text flows around the image. There are some quick layout options. There is With Text Wrapping where you have the text flow around the image, and let me scroll back up here so you can see how that flows, there is the text where the picture is in the top left with Square Text Wrapping, and in fact most of this is with Square Text Wrapping, and it just moves the picture on the page itself. Now if you just want to adjust the text wrapping and not really adjust where the picture is over the entire page, there is a menu for just text wrapping. Clicking on the Wrap Text menu you can adjust it to square, tight, through, which is kind of a funny one. There's also top and bottom, behind text, in front of text, and edit wrap points, which if you are working with like an Illustrator graphic or you know, not a graphic that is square like one, but has a lot of funny jagged edges and you really want to get the text in there, edit wrap points is a fun one to play with. But let's just change ours to Square to have our text wrap around that. But those are some quick things that you can do to adjust the flow of text around an image. And now that we have that, we can actually move this image anywhere on the page and you can watch how the text flows around it. But feel free to select this picture, play with your options on this tab, and just see what happens. That's probably the best way to learn and kind of get comfortable with the options in Word and how pictures and these options behave. It does take a little bit of practice.


24. Exploring the Background Removal Tool In this next clip we're going to be playing with one of my favorite features in Microsoft Office, and one that doesn't get a lot of love in Microsoft Word, the Background Removal tool. Now, this tool, and I have selected a very special picture that I found online just for this one tutorial, now this picture right here is of a boy swinging, and I've set the Wrap Text to Behind Text, so it's really difficult to see the text right now but don't worry about that, we're going to be changing it later. It's just so you can see the image against the two columns of text. Now, to remove the background of any image, not just this particular image, but any image, it really depends on the image itself with how well it works, but if you have a photograph that has a good contrast between the subject you want to keep with the background like I have here, the tool, the Background Removal tool in Office will work very, very well. If you don't have really good contrast between the subject and the background, you'll get mixed results. You can play with it a little bit to try to tweak it to see if it'll work, but it may not get you the results that you want. But in this instant, we have a really high contrast between the boy in the swing and the background, so it's going to work really well. So, to use the Background Removal tool, select that picture, make sure you have the Picture Tools Format tab selected, and in the Adjust group all the way to the left, click on that Remove Background button. And that will open up a special toolbar, the Background Removal toolbar, or tab, and it will open up a special selection area on that photograph and try to highlight the area that is going to be removed and the area that's going to be kept. Now this area here that has the dots around it, that's the area that you're going to keep. I want to keep as much of the swing as possible, so I'm going to extend that area up and you can see it try to change what's being kept and what is going to be removed. Everything this is shaded purple it's going to try to remove. Everything that is the original photograph color, it's going to try to keep, so I need to adjust that, I want to get rid of this red so I'm going to click on Mark Areas to Remove, and there's a couple of ways to do this. I can click once to draw a little dot, or I can click and drag and draw a big old line, and you might have to do this several times over a large area to remove a big portion of that area, and you can see how as you keep on drawing and clicking and dragging, it's going to keep on adjusting the area that it is trying to remove. So do that a few times until you see enough of that purply-magenta area being removed. You want to be sure you grab all of it. Okay, once you think all of that is removed, go ahead click Keep Changes and you can see that I have a little bit that was kept, so I'm going to go ahead and select that picture one more time, click Remove Background, and I'm going to zoom in a little bit more of that picture, there we go. There's that area I need to mark to remove a little bit more of, and you can see how when I did that this came back, let's try that again. And now zoom out. Alright, so now I have this boy, which is white on white, can't really see him, but now that I have the background removed and the boy left, now I can begin playing with what remains of this photograph and use those tools we learned about in the previous video to really make some adjustments here. So now I can use that to do that, and if I start playing around with my wrap points, there I go, I can move this in, and move that there, there we go. Now I have something really interesting to look at here. Now isn't that cool? So that is how you can use that background removal tool in combination with some of your other features to create something really interesting to look at within a Word document.


25. Inserting Shapes Shapes. That's right, you can draw your own shapes right in Microsoft Word. Now, to be honest, personally I prefer PowerPoint or Publisher to draw my shapes and then copy and paste them into Word, that's my personal workflow, I just get a little bit more control in PowerPoint and Publisher when drawing than I do in Word, that's my personal preference, and plus I think I'm a little faster in PowerPoint and Publisher than I am Word, but you might be faster in Word, just use whatever program you are most comfortable in, but to insert a shape right into Word, you can go right up to that Insert tab and to that Illustrations group, and there are your shapes. Now like other Microsoft Office programs you have the same categories, Recently Used Shapes, Lines, Rectangles, Basic Shapes, and so on, but down towards the bottom underneath Callouts, you'll see this option right here, New Drawing Canvas. Now this is kind of cool for Word. If you're a long time Word user you probably won't really remember this, it was there, but buried, but anyway, clicking that will create this nice, blank, white area kind of like a sheet of paper or a canvas allowing you to draw and create your own shapes. It kind of treats that like a shape itself, in that it brings up the Drawing Tools Format tab and you can color this canvas anything you like, you can create a shape fill, an outline, you can add any special effects like a shadow, reflection, glow, soft edges, and add any shapes you like on top of this one. So we can go right back up here to the Drawing Tools Format tab and draw any additional shapes right on top of that. Now, if you want to draw a perfect shape, meaning you want to constrain the dimensions of any shape, not just a circle or a square, just hold down your Shift key while drawing, while clicking and dragging, and that will maintain or constrain those dimensions. So now I'm holding down Shift and you can see there's that perfect circle. If I let go of Shift, now it's that oval. So holding down Shift, perfect circle, no Shift, oval, and there you go. Now if you want to create multiple shapes, you can lock any one of these shape tools up here. Just right-click on any shape, and this very first option right here is Lock Drawing Mode, and with that option selected you can draw 1, 2, 3, as many as you need over and over and over again, and coming back up here, clicking that shape one more time will turn that drawing mode off. Now let me just back up here and undo those shapes. Another way if you want to draw multiple shapes over and over again, and especially if you want them spaced evenly, let me grab hold of that Oval tool, hold down my Shift key and draw that perfect circle. So now I have one circle, I can copy the circle and let's say I want to move it over just to the right of this one, I'm going to use a keyboard shortcut to copy this circle over, so holding down my Ctrl key this time, see how my cursor changes, I can click and drag this and that'll make a copy of that circle and move it over. And now when I do that, notice what happened to my Repeat button. It changed it, and now it is a Duplicate button. And I have a keyboard shortcut for that as well, Ctrl+Y. This is a wonderful shortcut, pressing Ctrl+Y or clicking this button will duplicate that shape over and over again, so if I need multiples of that shape, just press Ctrl+Y and look at that, many, many, many shapes. That is a wonderful shortcut as well. Now they're not perfectly aligned, and again it's just duplicating however I clicked and dragged that over, so however I spaced it it's just repeating that action, don't worry about spacing, and just go over here and select all of my shapes, and I can go up to the Drawing Tools Format tab to the Align menu and choose Align Top to align those circles all the way to the top of each other. But if you notice, they're not really spaced very evenly across here, so you know what, I'm going to try to move this over just a little bit, and this one over just a little bit, okay, and I'm going to select those one more time, and now let's move those to the top again in case those moved, and now I have another option here, Distribute Horizontally. So just you can see with a few clicks of a button in that Align group, you can arrange all of these shapes and positon them exactly where you want on the page. So not only can you draw shapes very quickly in Word, you can also positon and arrange them very quickly using some of these tools right from the Drawing Tools Format tab. Now once you have them drawn, once you have them positioned, you might as well make them look a little bit prettier. Going over to Shape Styles, you have a number of theme styles right here. Based on your documents, designs, whatever those theme colors are, you have some preset styles to choose from, as well as new to Word 2016 some transparent styles as well. Going down to Other Theme Fills, you've got some darker and lighter variations that you can choose from, or you can choose from any color in here, go to More Fill Colors to choose from any number of standard or custom colors. If your company uses a specific RGB color, you can type in that code here, or change the color model here as well, hue, saturation, whatever. You can also change the shape outline, or add any shape effects using this menu here as well. In addition to styling the shape itself, if you want to type in any text inside a shape, you can style that text by selecting it and going up to the WordArt Styles group and changing the text color, or adding any special effects here. You can change the outline or add any special effects like shadows, reflections, glows, bevels, or even transform it. You have a WordArt gallery, now that we'll be discussing more in a little bit, but you've got some preset styles that you can apply. And you can even change the text direction and the text alignment. Now if at any time you decide that you don't like the shape of a specific object, you can select that shape, and go back to that Insert Shapes group, click this button right here, and choose the option to Change the Shape. You can select any shape right here to quickly swap out that shape or choose the option Edit Points to add, or remove, or move any one of these points to modify the points yourself. Now this option does take a lot of finesse and practice to master, but it is a fun option to play with. And that is a quick tour of working with shapes in Word 2016.


26. Creating Screen Clippings A screenshot is a fabulous way to snap a picture on your computer, something that you're looking at on the internet or perhaps in a computer program that you're writing about, and import it, or stick it somewhere in that Word document so you can show your readers exactly what you're talking about. This is a newer feature to Word, not to 2016, it's been around I think since the last version, maybe 2 if memory serves, and to insert a screenshot you can do that right from your Insert tab from that Illustrations group. Now you will need that file or program open in order to insert that screenshot. So from inside Word, let's say I want to snap a screenshot of Bing here, the cute little elephants of today. So with that open in the background, going back to Microsoft Word to the Insert Screenshot button, now I should have a thumbnail of that window appear here. Now since I'm recording at a lower resolution that thumbnail is not going to appear here. At higher resolutions, I should see a thumbnail of that appear here, or if I want to do just a full screen screenshot I can choose that thumbnail and Word will insert that full screen image into my Word document. Or it I want to take what is known as a Screen Clipping, I can choose this option here, Word will then minimize and you'll see that kind of a grayed-out area and my cursor changed to this little crosshairs here where I can click and drag the area that I want to keep for my screenshot. So I'm just going to drag this area here, release my mouse, and there's my image, or rather my screen clipping. And that's really all there is to taking a screen clipping right from in Microsoft Word 2016. And now that it's in here, it's treated just like a regular picture. With that screen clipping selected, you'll see the Picture Tools Format tab, and you'll have all the same adjust options, picture styles, the borders, effects, the layout options, you'll even have all of the positioning and text wrap options, alignment tools, cropping, and resize options that you would do for any old picture in Microsoft Word. So there you go. That is how you insert a screenshot or a screen clipping in Word 2016.


27. Working with SmartArt So the next kind of visual element we'll be creating in Word in something called SmartArt. To insert SmartArt, go back up to your Insert tab to the Illustrations group and hovering your mouse over a button that looks kind of like this, now your button might look a little bit different, I'm recording at a somewhat smaller resolution so my button is a little bit smaller than perhaps yours, but your icon should look something like this. But this SmartArt graphic is a way to quickly illustrate visual information. Now clicking on this button will open a window that looks just like this, and you have a variety of categories to choose from. Now all of your SmartArt graphics are organized according to these different categories. You have List, Process, Cycle, Hierarchy, Relationship, Matrix, Pyramid, Picture, and a bunch available on Office.com. Now all of these categories mean something different, so you really do have to think about the information that you're trying to communicate, and this is the difficult part, probably the most difficult part. You have to stop thinking visually here and start thinking about the message that you're trying to deliver or trying to communicate. If you're trying to show non-sequential information, you want to use this type, List. Any graphic in this category will show that non-sequential information. You have Basic Block List, which maximizes both horizontal and vertical display space for shapes. Basically click on any one of these different list SmartArt graphics and you'll get a description in the lower right hand corner describing what that graphic was designed to communicate, or at least the types of information that it was designed for. Now Process, this category right here, that is designed to communicate or to show steps in a process or a timeline. Cycle, that's used to show a continual process, something that repeats over and over again. Hierarchy, that's used to show a couple of things. It's used to show things like organization charts or decision tree. Relationships, that's used to illustrate connections. Matrix, that will communicate parts and how it relates to a whole. Pyramid, kind of similar that is used to show grouped or related information. And just like before, you can click on any one these individual pyramids to show or display a description of how that message will be communicated based on that object's visual design. And finally this last category, Picture. This is a mixture of all of these other different categories, but the difference is, these graphics have built in picture frames where you can swap in an accented picture of your own, either stock photos, pictures you've taken yourself that are stored on your computer or cloud drive, or even online pictures, and little picture placeholders that you can incorporate into these various SmartArt graphics. Some of these will be lists, some of these might be matrixes, some of these might be pyramids, all you have to do is go through, click on some of these, read the description in the lower right hand corner to read what they are designed to communicate. Now if you've gone through all of these different SmartArt graphics and still can't find what exactly you're looking for, do check out the additional SmartArt graphics available on office.com. You can click on any one these, click OK to download one of these graphics here, and insert it into your Word document. Now I'm just going to go back to List and choose one of these basic SmartArt graphics here, just the basic block list, click OK, and that will insert that SmartArt graphic right wherever my insertion point was within my Word document. Now just so you can see the full SmartArt graphic, I'm going to zoom out of my Word document, there it is. You can resize a SmartArt graphic by grabbing hold of one these resize points in the corner of a SmartArt graphic and clicking and dragging to resize it. You can do the same thing with an individual shape to resize that one shape. You can add text to any one of these shapes by clicking inside the shape and begin typing. Or, you can even click on this little arrow here if you prefer, and type in your list in this bullet format instead. Now if you want to add additional shapes, you can take your mouse, click to add another bullet point, and that will add another shape to your diagram, or you can go up to your SmartArt Tools Design tab and click the Add Shape button here as well. Clicking this drop arrow next to it, you can add a shape after or before to change the order in which shapes are added. Likewise, you can use these buttons here to promote or demote any shape that you have selected. To delete any shapes that you no longer need or no longer want, simply select that shape and press Delete on your keyboard to delete that shape. To reorder shapes, simply select that shape and you can click your Move Up tools, or you can select the text either cut, copy, or move it up and down within this list here. Personally, I find it easier to use the Move Up and Down tools in the SmartArt Tools Design tab, but again, that's a personal preference depending on your workflow. For formatting, you have a few options to quickly change the formatting based on your document's style or design. You can go over to the SmartArt Styles and change the colors very quickly. You have some in the colorful group, again these are based on your design color scheme. You can choose several options here based on your color palette, or you can choose some more uniform ones based on your accent colors, Accent 1, Accent 2, scroll down to see those options. And you have several styles to choose from as well. Clicking on that SmartArt gallery you have some flat designs, as well as some 3D options as well. If at any time you choose an option and decide you know what, I really don't like, you can always go back over here to this Reset Graphic option to reset that graphic to its default settings. Now if you don't like anything that we've done formatting wise there, you can always jump over to the Format tab and really get granular with your formatting options and start styling those SmartArt shapes yourself just like you do with shapes. If you watched my video on how to format shapes, all of those same tools, all of those same features appear here for your SmartArt graphic. It's exactly the same. You can apply that formatting just by hovering your mouse over one of these styles here, apply a shape fill, and again all of these will apply individually to whatever shape you have selected at that time. And that is a very quick tour of creating SmartArt illustrations in Word 2016.


28. Creating WordArt In this next clip we'll be talking about WordArt. Now, WordArt is something that is definitely more on the decorative side. In fact, in all my years in business I don't think I have ever found a need to use WordArt in a business document. It is definitely more decorative, not very professional looking. In fact, I have yet to find a marketing department that has allowed me to use WordArt, as most of the time it doesn't really coincide with a lot of brand guidelines. Regardless, to insert WordArt, just as before any of those decorative elements, those illustrative elements, they will appear on your Insert tab. So jumping over to that Insert tab, all the way over this time to the Text group there is a little button for WordArt, and there it is. Now all of the sample WordArt will be based on whatever design you have selected for your document. So all of these styles here based on whatever theme you have chosen here. So if I choose a different theme and go back to the Insert tab, back to WordArt, you can see they've changed ever so slightly. I go back here, choose a different theme, go back to Insert, a little bit different. Now to insert WordArt, this is an important step, you do need to select some text, so I'm going to select this WordArt here, go back to this drop-down menu, and I can select any one of these options here by hovering my mouse over that option, and clicking once to apply that WordArt. Now this is the interesting part of WordArt. Once you apply WordArt to text, Word kind of considers it both a drawn shape and text. If you ever want to make changes to the text you can click anywhere inside that text and just sort of hit Backspace and edit it just like text. So hit Delete, you can again retype just like you would normal text, but once you select anywhere on that object or its border, you can resize it just like it is a text box, or create a shape fill, border, outline, etc., and really style it just like it is a shape or text box. So it really is a strange hybrid of objects. Kind of a shape, kind of a text box, and kind of its own thing. So, if you want to change anything about the WordArt itself, or at least the shape itself, treat it just like a shape. Over here on the Drawing Tools Format tab in the Shape Styles group, all of the same formatting options that we discussed in that earlier shapes video, they apply here as well, and everything we discussed or we will discuss in that text box video, or clip, they will apply here as well. But what is unique here is in this group right here, WordArt Styles. Now in this gallery all of those same WordArt options, you can change them just with the click of a button. You can hover your mouse over any one of these to see what any one of those predefined styles look like, or if you want to make some individual modifications you can change that here. You can change the fill color with this button, swapping it out for any one of the other theme colors. You can change the outline of that WordArt here, or you can change any one of the WordArt effects using this drop-down here. You can add a shadow, you can change the reflection style, add a glow or change a glow, change the bevel, the 3D rotation, or the transform effect. And since Word considers it a shape, you can even change how Word wraps text around that object, just like a shape or a text box. So those are some cool things with WordArt, but what is even cooler is if you were to go ahead and change the theme of your document, look at that, the WordArt will automatically change with your theme. So that is one of the advantages to using WordArt, it will update with the design of your document if you swap that out. And that is a quick overview of WordArt in Word 2016.


29. Adding a Text Box Our next visual element is not as visual as some of our previous illustrations. It is a text box. So from our Insert tab in the Text group to insert a text box click on this Text box button and you'll see a number of built in text boxes from which to choose. There are simple text boxes, text boxes that are styled to fit quotes or pull quotes, and text boxes that are fancy little sidebars. You can scroll through this gallery to see a number of text boxes styled a number of different ways. Once you find one that you like, simply hover your mouse over that specific text box and click once to apply that text box to your document. And just to show you what this one looks like, let me zoom out of the document, and there it is. It will be applied to that one page wherever that insertion point was. Now since I've chosen a sidebar, it will appear to the side of whatever page my insertion point was in. Now this sidebar, that text box, whichever one you've chosen, will have a placeholder for sample text. Simply click your mouse anywhere inside that text box or that sidebar, and let me zoom in here so you can see this a little bit better, and you can click and drag and just begin typing to replace that text with any text that you like. Some text boxes will even have placeholders for titles like this one. So just click on whatever placeholder is there and begin typing. Simple as that. Now that is one way to insert a text box. Let me skip down to the next blank page and show you another way to insert a text box. So let's go back to that Insert tab, down to Text Box, and another way is to draw a text box. This will draw just a very simple text box just by clicking and dragging your mouse. And this will create a very plain text box wherever you click and drag that mouse. Now as you can see, it's covering up the text that I have on the page, but don't worry, just like a drawn shape you can adjust the text wrapping options, you can give it a fixed position on the page, or you can have it move with the text. You can have it wrap squarely, or tight, or through, or top and bottom, have it be behind the text, or in front of the text, whichever you like. I'm going to change this to square, and then move my text box over to the right hand side, and then just like a shape you can begin typing inside that text box. Now with any text box, you can format this text to make it look different from your body text. Just select that text and you can either use the format options on your Format tab, giving it WordArt styles, or use the simple tools from your Home tab. You can bump up the font, give it a different color, even adjust the paragraph alignment. Likewise, you can adjust the shape, background fill, and border. So if you don't like the way the background is looking, you can give the background some color or you can go to your Drawing Tools Format tab and adjust the shape fill color from here, or use the tools off to the side to give it a different look. If at any time you lose those formatting options from your text box that probably means that you've deselected that text box. Just take your mouse, click on that text box again, and the Drawing Tools Format tab will come back. And that is a quick overview of some of the tools that you have for creating text boxes in Word 2016. Feel free to play around with these options here, give it some WordArt styles, some shape styles, play around with those options here, you can align the text, you can change the text direction, you can even create links between multiple text boxes. That is a cool feature to play with. So if you have multiple text boxes, in fact, let me show you that real quick, you can create a link here, have that text flow over and spill over to this one right here, so if I continue typing, there you can see it. It will go from one text box to the other. So I know these text boxes aren't the prettiest, but you get the idea of some of the things you can do to create your own custom text boxes on the fly to create some very interesting looking documents in Word.


30. Inserting a Chart And no discussion on visual elements would be complete unless we talked about charts. Inserting charts in Word is a very simple task now. It used to be a little bit more complicated, they've now made it incredibly easy. Just go up to your Insert tab and from the Illustrations group, simply click on Chart. That will open a window that looks a lot like this, and if you have an Office 365 subscription, ever so often you will find a new chart type added to this window, chart types like Waterfall, Box and Whisker, Histograms, Sunburst, etc. So ever so often make sure you keep your Word 2016 copy up to date, download those updates as soon as possible, check back here, and you might be met with a brand new chart type that you can create. But clicking on any one of these charts types if you want to see a preview of what that chart looks like, simply hover your mouse over the sample that it includes right here to see a larger preview of what that chart looks like. Many of these chart types will include variations, such as the column chart, a very popular chart type, simply select that chart and up top you'll see variations. Clicking on any one of these variations you'll see a preview of that below. So choosing a chart type has about two steps. You choose the chart type and its variation above, and then to create that chart, simply click OK. Wherever your insertion point is in that Word document, two things will happen, a sample chart will be created and inserted wherever that insertion point was in your Word document, and Word will open an Excel document inside Word, complete with sample data. And from here it's just like Excel. You can copy and paste any data that you might have elsewhere, like in Excel, into this spreadsheet. If you like, if you just want to edit that data in Microsoft Excel, you have a handy dandy button right here to open that data in Excel. So if you are comfortable with Excel, click that button and it'll take you right over to Excel, and then you can make those changes here, type in that data, make any changes you like, and then when you're finished typing in that data, simply close that spreadsheet, and then those changes will be reflected in your chart in Word. As for formatting that data in Word, you have all of these tools from the Chart Tools Design and Format tab. On the Design tab, you have in your Chart Layouts group, the ability to quickly add any chart element. You have your Axes, your titles, Chart Titles, Data Labels, Data Tables, Error Bars, Gridlines, Legends, all of these options are exactly the same options that you'll find in Excel and in PowerPoint. They've done a really good job making these options consistent across the Office suite. You'll also have these Quick Layout options, layouts that are pre-created that you can simply and quickly apply just with the click of a button. You can also choose a variety of different color palettes based on whatever your document theme is, as well as a variety of chart styles. Simply hover your mouse over any one of these to gain a quick sneak peek at what that particular style looks like. If you see a style you like, click your mouse and that style will be applied to your chart. In addition to the tools up here, you'll also find a lot of these options available right next to your chart. Simply click one of these quick links, there's your styles, there's your colors. Simply scroll through and click to apply just at a glance. Now like many other Word objects, you'll also find options for text wrapping right on the chart itself. So if you'd like to adjust how text flows around this object, just like a shape, just like a picture, you can adjust how text flows around this object just with the click of a button. So right now text will flow in line with text, but you can change it to square, tight, through, or top and bottom. Now since this is a chart and it is connected with data, from your Chart Tools Design tab you can adjust your data very easily from this data group. To edit your data, click on this Edit Data button to edit the data from Word, or if you prefer, hit that drop-down arrow and choose Edit Data in Excel to open that exact same spreadsheet in Excel like we did before. Or if you decide that this particular chart type isn't really fitting for our data, you can at a glance, or with just the click of a button, change that chart type to something else just by clicking the Change Chart Type button. On the Format tab, you'll see additional options for quick formatting. Most of these options you've already seen, they are identical to options you've seen with shapes, here are shape styles, so if you want to apply a quick border around anything you have selected. You can see I've got that chart area selected, if I want to add a border around that I can, or a shape fill, you can do that as well. And that is a quick overview of inserting charts in Word 2016.


31. Grouping and Positioning Objects In this next clip we're going to be talking about grouping and positioning objects. Now, this is a topic that often is neglected in a Word course, and it's usually a topic saved for a subject like PowerPoint or Publisher, which makes sense because usually in those other programs that's where you really arrange objects. But we're not going to do that here, we're power users and we work with objects. So let's really get used to working with shapes and objects in Word, because anything goes here. So here in this document we have four simple rectangles and we are really going to be playing around with moving these objects on our page. But we're going to do it some fancy ways using some tools that are often buried within the interface. So going up to our Drawing Tools Format tab and we're going to be using a lot of options in our Arrange group, most namely starting with our Align option here. Now in our Align menu we have a lot of options here, there's Align Left, Center, Right, Top, Middle, Bottom, Distribute Horizontally, and Distribute Vertically. Now all of these commands depend on what you have selected right here, Align to Page and Align to Margin. Or if you have more than one object selected, so if I go here and select more than one object like say this one, this one, and this one, and now go up here, now we have a third option selected, Align Selected Objects. So now if I were choose one of these options, Align Left, notice all of them are aligned to the left most object. Interesting. Let me hit undo real quick. Now if I go back to here, that option still selected, now if I choose Align Bottom, now they're all aligned to the bottom most object. Now let's see what happens, let me undo that real quick, if I instead choose the option Align to Margin. Let's choose Align and Align Right. Oh look at that, they've all moved over and now they are perfectly aligned with that right margin. Interesting. You see where I'm going with this? All of these wonderful align options and tools are all contingent upon these three checked options, Align to Page, Align to Margin, and Align Selected Objects. So between all of these options here and these three options, you really have a lot of wonderful ways to align your objects, very quickly without having to use your arrow keys or your mouse and basically your eyeball to try and line objects up. So now if I wanted these objects to look like let's say a window, well, I can move those here, select these two, choose Align, Top, move those here, and then choose Align Right, Align Top one more time, and Align Bottom, and we can nudge these up, you get the idea. Now also in this Arrange group is another wonderful tool called the Selection Pane. The Selection Pane will show you all of the objects on this particular page, and just like in Photoshop, it will show you the Z Order, the layers that you have on this page, and you can use this to hide your objects or show your objects. You can also use this to rename objects, so I could call this Rectangle the top left, top right, and so on. Now in other Microsoft Office programs if you want to group objects, you might be familiar with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+G. Now if you hit Ctrl+G here you notice it's not going to work, it's going to bring up the Find and Replace Go to pane. That's not going to work. Now you could go through and reprogram your keyboard shortcuts, but we're not going to do that. If you want to group objects in Word 2016, you can go up to your Drawing Tools Format tab in the Arrange group and there's your little Group button. That's what it looks like. Or, perhaps the quicker way is to right-click on all of these selected objects and halfway through that shortcut menu is your Group option. Either way will work. Group will group all of those objects as one. And you can see what that's done in our Selection pane, it's grouped them all together. They still have their each individual unique names that we created, and now we can go through and create a unique name for that group if we so choose. But now we can go through and move that group around as one, and even choose how we'd like to wrap text around that grouped object. We can adjust text wrapping as we would just a simple old shape, or we can even choose fixed positioning on this one page. But we're just going to make this one object square, and move it around like so. And that is a quick tour of your grouping and positioning objects options in Word 2016.


32. Working with Headers, Footers, and Page Numbers In this next clip we're going to be talking about headers, footers, and page numbers, all things that you can insert from the Insert tab in the Header and Footer group. But before we talk about the tools that you can insert directly from this group right here, I'm going to talk about the simplest way to edit your header or footer, and that is directly from the page. There's this invisible area right up here that you can double- click on to access either your header or your footer, just take your mouse and double-click right at that invisible top area and you can see that it kind of opened up and there you are, you have your Header and Footer tools right at your fingertips. That's the simplest way to get to them. And by default, as soon as you open up your header or your footer, you have things that are already preprogrammed into a blank document. In fact, if you look on your ruler if you have that displayed, you'll see that you have some tab stops preprogrammed in. You'll have a center tab halfway through your document, and a right tab all the way over at the right. So without even doing anything you can use tabs to jump to the center of a document, and type something out like the document title, and go all the way over to the right by pressing another tab and typing out, say today's date or maybe your last name, what have you. Or you can even use tools from this Header and Footer Tools Design tab to insert elements, oh I don't know, like the page number. Now can tell Word where to place this page number, and there are specific positions, like the top of the page, the bottom of the page, inside the page margins, or wherever your cursor insertion point is, or the current positon. In addition to things like the page number, you could also insert a variety of other document information. For example, if you go to this Document Info drop-down, there are things like the author of the document, and all of this information is pulled from the properties of that document. Now over here I manually typed in the title of the document, but you can have Word act a little smarter and pull that information from the title of the document, so if instead of me manually typing this document title, I can insert that property right here. You also have the option to insert quick parts. There's Auto Text, Document Property, just like I showed you before, and various fields. Also on that Header and Footer Tools Design tab in the Options group, you'll see the option that you can check for a different first page. Choosing this option will allow you to create a separate header for the very first page pf your document, one that is completely different from every other subsequent page that follows. Likewise, you can also create different odd and even pages. So if you're creating a document that will be bound, that will have facing pages for example, just like a book, you can have them have different facing pages. And like I said, that is one way that you can access that header and footer by going up to the very top of the page and double-clicking to access that header or that footer. Now another way once again is to go to that Insert tab to the Header and Footer group and choose one of these options here. From Header you'll see a variety of built in templates that you can choose from. There's a variety of blank templates, there's one where there's just a simple type here, placeholder in the upper left hand corner, choosing that option opens that exact same Header and Footer Tools Design tab that we were working with earlier and opens up that header area. Let me close that real quick, back to Insert, and back to the Header drop-down. There's also a variety of styled headers and footers from which you can choose. Many of these correspond to some of the style options that we've been working with before, things that correspond to themes, those styled text boxes and charts that we've been working with in previous clips. So you can really go through and create a very cohesive looking document. So jumping down to the footer real quick, most of these same tools are also available for the footer, it just depends on what information you'd like to stick where. You can have the page numbers up top, you can have the page numbers at the bottom, it's really up to you. So let's remove the page numbers from our entire document, and let's play with this option right here, Format Page Numbers. Now if you really want to get granular with your page numbers, you can choose very specific number formats. You can choose the 1, 2, 3, you can choose the little hyphen before and after the number, you can choose the Roman numerals, the ABCs, you can even choose whether or not you want to include a chapter number, whether or not it wants to have a style associated with it, a specific separator, and whether or not you want to continue from a previous section or start the numbering at a specific point. If you're collaborating with another author, or doing a specific chapter of a book, you can pick up where one author left off and start your number really anywhere by choosing your page number here. And that is the quick tour of working with headers, footers, and page numbers in Word 2016.


33. Inserting a Drop Cap, Signature, Date and Time In this next clip, we're going to be learning about how to create a drop cap, a signature, and a date time stamp. Now if you think all three of those topics are completely separate and kind of random, well, that's because they are. In fact, the only thing that those three different topics have in common is that they appear together on the Insert tab in the Text group, so that's why they're together in this clip. They are three short topics all related because they share one group on the Insert tab together. Short but sweet text topics. To create that drop cap, have your insertion point somewhere in your paragraph where you want to create that drop cap, doesn't matter where. Then on that Insert tab in that Text group you'll see an icon that looks just like that, a paragraph with that drop cap. Hovering your mouse over that button will give you a brief description of what exactly is happening when you choose this option, and it says create a large capital letter at the beginning of a paragraph, that's what that drop cap means. So clicking on that menu you have two options here, you can create a simple dropped cap within that paragraph, or the option to create it within the margin, which will bump that letter out and place that letter in the margin itself. You also have the option to choose Drop Cap Options, which will open up the menu and give you a little bit more control over how many lines to drop that cap, and how much distance or space you want to place between that letter and the text itself. And clicking OK it will create that letter separate from that text. And that's how you create a drop cap in Word 2016. It's very similar to previous versions of Word, hasn't changed that much. Now as for signatures. Now as far as signatures go, there's a couple of different options. Now if you're wanting a hand-written signature, there aren't any really good tools yet in Microsoft Word to create that hand-drawn signature unfortunately. So you kind of have to go old school by handwriting that signature out, scanning it in, or you using some kind of third party app. As far as built in tools, you can go up to this Text group and right here hit this drop-down button and you have the option to create a signature line. Clicking on this button you can fill in some information here, such as the Suggested Signer, that's the name of the person. So let me just type in my name real quick. If you like you can then type in the title like Manager or Author. You can also add things like the signer's email address, or phone number, or whatever other information you like here as well, or leave that blank, and even include instructions to the signer. If you choose, you can allow the signer to add comments in the sign dialog, or leave that option blank, and you can also show the sign date in the signature line if you like. Now I'm going to leave that option checked and click OK, and what that does is add a nice little signature line wherever your insertion point was in Word. And as you can see as we click on this, it creates a little picture. Now we can resize this as much as we like, or minimize it, it's an actual picture. Now there's another kind of signature that you can add to a Word document, and that is a digital signature. That's not the kind of signature that people typically think of when they think of signatures. A digital signature is a little different. In fact, if we go and click on Add Signature Services, that will take us a to a web page that explains this a little bit more. Now depending on when you're viewing this clip, this article might look a little bit different. Microsoft does update their support articles from time to time, but right now it looks like this and it states that digital IDs, also known as digital certificates or digital signatures, help to validate your identity and they can be used to sign important documents electronically. Now this is something that doesn't really come from Microsoft. This is a third party service that you can sign up for, services, third party services such as DocuSign or GlobalSign, and if you scroll down the page you'll see a list of suggested services. Now this in not a comprehensive list, this is just some of the services that you can integrate in with Microsoft Word. So if this is something you are interested in, I strongly suggest you click on and read this article through Microsoft Word as this information does update and is very specific to the specific service your company uses. So if your company does use something like DocuSign, I do suggest talking to your IT department about how they use these services and how to integrate that into Word, but for right now let's jump back to Word and talk about how to insert date and time. So finally, from that Insert tab in the Text group, we have one more button here, Insert Date and Time. Clicking on that button, you'll see this huge window appear with a lot of different available formats for the date and time. You can choose any one these formats, click OK, and that will insert the date. Now this may not look all that impressive at a glance, you might say hey, I just could've typed that myself, but what's really cool about this, especially if you had this checkbox checked, Update Automatically. Yeah that's right, if you had that checkbox checked, this isn't just something that was typed in, this is a field that will update automatically. Every time you print or open this document, this date will change to reflect whatever date, whatever time it currently is, so you don't have to keep manually updating this field, it's not text anymore, it's an actual field that will automatically update to reflect the current date and time. Now if you want to manually update the date and time right now, you can actually refresh by hitting the keyboard shortcut F9, or by manually clicking this button right here and Word will then update that field for you. And that's all there is to it. So once again, from your Insert tab, click that Date and Time button, make sure that Update automatically checkbox is checked, select the format you wish to enter, and then click OK to insert that field into your box. To update that field, simply select that field and click Update to refresh that timestamp. And that's all there is to it. And that is inserting a drop cap, a signature line, and a date/time stamp.


34. Adding Symbols In an earlier clip, we talked about a variety of different ways to insert symbols using your AutoCorrect options. For example, typing open parenthesis, c, closed parenthesis makes that copyright symbol. That's just one way to insert special symbols into Microsoft Word, but that takes a lot of memorization. For those of you who are not really great at memorizing a lot of keyboard shortcuts, this is the old school way to insert symbols into Microsoft Word. Basically, you go up to your Insert tab, all the way over to Symbols, and click on that Symbol drop-down. And here are your most commonly used symbols right here. There's that copyright symbol, but here are some other ones as well, including your registered sign, your trademark sign, as well as some other ones, the plus/minus sign, the not equal to sign, the greater than or equal to sign, and so on. If you do not see the particular symbol you are looking for in this little quick menu, you can of course click on More Symbols to open on the grand master list of those symbols and special characters. Symbols are organized a variety of different ways, by fonts, and by their subset. Now clicking on the Subset menu, you'll have General Punctuation selected by default, but you can of course select any one of these other subsets. Scrolling through the list you'll see currency symbols, you'll see number forms, you'll see arrows, and scrolling through, you'll see a lot of other ones, including my fun favorite word to say, Dingbats, Box Drawing, and so on. You'll also see another tab here called Special Characters. Now this is my favorite tab to use and the one I quite frankly reference a lot. It's a nice clean list, very pleasing to the eye I might add, and it lists my favorite ones right up top, Em Dash, En Dash, Nonbreaking Hyphen, right up top. These three ones are kind of my pet peeves, people confuse them all the time, and right next to them, they list all the keyboard shortcuts for these special characters. And you can scroll down the list and see all of them right there. You even have shortcut buttons for those AutoCorrect options. So if you want to quickly program in, or change those AutoCorrect options, you can do so right there just with that quick click of a button. So there are your symbols, you have also references to your character code from here, your ASCII decimal codes will appear here as well, and your hex codes, and a very handy recently used symbols list below as well. So scrolling through the list there are a lot of symbols from which to choose. To insert any one of these symbols simply select the symbol and then click Insert to insert that symbol into your document. When you're done inserting symbols, simply click Close, and that's really all there is to it. There's your symbol.


35. Inserting an Equation In this next and final clip, we're going to be talking about how to insert equations into Word 2016. Like a lot of the previous clips, we are going to insert that equation by going up to our Insert tab, to our Symbols group, and click on the Equation drop-down menu. Now Word has a variety of built in equations here. These you can view by scrolling down and glancing at the equations available, like the quadratic equation. To insert any of these predefined equations, simply hover your mouse over one these equations and click to insert that equation here. That equation will be inserted into a little quick parts box, but if you don't want it in that little box, you can hit this drop-down equation options button there and choose the option Change to Inline. If you don't want that equation to appear in the center of your document, you can click on this drop-down arrow here and choose the option Change to Inline, there we go, to nudge that equation over to the left and appear in line with your text. Otherwise, most equations will appear centered as a group by default in your document. But you can change that justification to left, or to right, or to center. Now let me delete that equation and go back to this Insert tab and show you a few other methods for inserting equations. In addition to choosing one of the built in equation options, you can also choose from more equations from office.com, or if none of the built in equations here, or the ones on office.com suit your needs, you can write your own new equation using this option here, Insert New Equation. That will bring up a blank quick parts box right here, and also bring up the Equation Tools Design tab. To build your own custom equation, you can choose from a variety of symbols in this window right here. This gallery can be expanded or minimized just by dragging this corner of the gallery like so. You can also choose from a variety of groups, there's Basic Math, and a lot of symbols here from which to choose. You also have Greek Letters, Letter-Like Symbols, Operators, Arrows, Negated Relations, Scripts, and of course Geometry. To choose any one of these symbols, simply select the category that you'd like to start with, select the symbol, and click to insert that symbol into the box. You can also choose from a variety of structures. For example, if you'd like to create some kind of a script, you can create your own subscripts and superscripts here by selecting that format, or choose from some stock common subscripts and superscripts here. So if I want to create a superscript to this symbol right here, I can choose this option, and as you can see, it's added a little placeholder for each part of that. Now, I don't want this box right here, I want the superscript to appear over the symbol, so what I want to do instead is to select this symbol, go back up to that Script option, select it again, and now I can then select that, and then type in my number. And there are a variety of other structures from which to choose. You have Fraction, so If I want to create a stacked fraction, I can hover my mouse here, click that, and continue building my equation. (Working) And that is one way to create an equation. Now as you can tell, or see, that can take some time. Clicking on each individual structure here, selecting each individual symbol, that all takes some time to point and click. Not the most efficient way to write an equation, which is why I am oh so happy that in Word 2016 they've added the ability to ink your own equation. So if you have a tablet or some kind of drawing tablet that you can connect to your desktop computer, you can insert mathematical equations using your own handwriting. So let me just click out of here, go back to Insert Equation, Ink Equation, and that will open up this Math Input Control window. And now, with my tablet and my finger, or some kind of stylus, I can try and recreate that exact same equation using my own handwriting. (Working) Now, as you can see, it didn't exactly create that equation perfectly, but there are some tools down below to help me correct portions that are not exactly perfect, like this Mu here, I can select and choose from a menu of options, things that aren't quite right about the equation. Now if there aren't any options that quite are correct, I always can go back and erase what I've done and try again. So as you can see, it's not perfect, and quite frankly if I had better handwriting it would be a lot better, but you get the idea.