Introduction
The objective of this week is to be able to:

• Launch WORD, know the basics of character and paragraph formatting and be able to manage your document files.
• Improve your speed and accuracy of keyboarding.

Resources

• Students' Word.
• WORD has its own tutorial package, accessed through Help from its main menu.
• Computing Service documentation, including Getting started with Word for Windows.
• Open Learning Centre, Computer based tutorials; also other materials which are particularly useful if your keyboarding is still slow and error-prone.

Exercise 1: WORD fundamentals
If you are a complete novice with WORD use the Resources above. Then launch WORD, and start typing in text, paying particular attention to:

• Opening and closing of files. NB you are only able to store files on your floppy disk, and you should get into the habit of putting your disk into drive A: before launching an application and leaving it in situ until, at the end of a session, y ou have saved your files and exited from the program. If you take your disk out of the A: drive before closing down WORD you risk corrupting your disk and loosing your data. That data will not be recoverable, but nor will your loss of data be accepted by the department as a legitimate reason for late delivery of an essay, etc. It is, of course, an added reason for having an up-to-date backup of your master file.
• Selecting characters, words and paragraphs with the mouse, and how to format them.

Exercise 2: working with a pre-existing document
Open the files with the following filespec:

d:\teaching\it97\data\esh01d.doc

d:\teaching\it97\data\esh02d.doc

The first is an unformatted version of the second, both written by the unit leader a few years back and published as Middleton (1988). Your task is to format the first two pages of esh01d.doc so that it is identical to esh02d.doc.

Remember that if you want to save your revisions to esh01d.doc, you will need to use File/Save As to set the drive to A: rather than to d: and the \teaching\it97\data\ directory, because otherwise you would be altering the base fil e which is meant to be available for all to use. Were the next person to use that PC, without it having been re-booted in the interim, they would in effect have to work with a different file from that intended for this exercise. This advice applies for al l subsequent exercises which use the datasets in that directory. You may, as a matter of course, want to click on the Restore Settings icon in the program main group to re-boot the PC before starting each of your work sessions.

Conclusions
By the end of this session you should have enough experience of using WORD to contemplate writing your first essay with a word processor. This means that you have mastered not only the program but have acquired a decent enough speed of keyboarding that yo u could contemplate writing your ideas directly onto the screen without being handicapped by low speed and high errors in your typing.

References
Middleton, R. (1988) 'The public sector: optimal scope and size', in A.C. Darnell and J.L. Evans (eds) Contemporary economics. Oxford: Philip Allen, pp. 103-17.

To IT-MA home page
To Department of Historical Studies home page.

(c)R. Middleton 1997. Last modified 4 September 2000.