Even though each application in the Office suite is designed to perform a specific task, all applications have some common interface elements and commands. Learning about the shared features of the applications—their common “look and feel”—reduces the time you need to master the entire Office suite.
In this module, you edit a travel agency flyer by using features common across several applications. When learning to open and save files, you work with an Excel sales workbook. You also learn to add images and illustrations to a document, giving it a professional look.
You learned to use Outlook and OneNote earlier in this book.
Access: All the bits of information a company gathers about its customers and suppliers can be stored in a database. You can query a database to find specific information, such as all customers who live in a certain city. You can also produce reports from the data.
Excel: Once data is entered, Excel can perform automatic calculations, such as adding numbers to get a total. Excel can also create graphs from the data. Organizations and individuals use spreadsheets to track inventory, manage budgets, balance checkbooks, and create income statements.
PowerPoint: The slides help the audience follow and understand the key points of the presentation. Photos and charts in the slides can add visual interest.
Word: Documents may include letters, resumes, reports, and much more.
Each Office application interface includes the Quick Access Toolbar and the ribbon.
The FILE tab includes file management options, such as opening, printing, and saving.
Some of the common interface elements are shown in the illustration in this slide.
Becoming familiar with common interface elements and commands now, before starting the skills in the Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint modules, will speed up your learning in each application.
Navigation Tip: In Slide Show view, click an underlined skill on this slide to navigate directly to the related slide. At any time in Slide Show view, you may navigate to the beginning of this presentation by clicking the left-most button at the bottom center of the slide. To navigate to the previous slide in this presentation, click the second button from the left. Click the SKILLS button to return to this slide. Click the button to the right of the SKILLS button to navigate to the next slide in this presentation, and click the right-most button to navigate to the end of this presentation.
The steps in this slide are for Excel 2013. Similar steps can be used to open other Microsoft Office applications.
See Module 2, Chapter 1, Skill 3 for illustrations showing the Charms bar and Search pane.
Another Way: From the Start screen, you can also type Excel.
Another Way: You may have an Excel 2013 tile on the Start screen. If you do, you can also click this tile to start Excel.
The Title bar displays the file and program name.
Another Way: You can also click the FILE tab to view the backstage area, click the New option, and then click Blank workbook to create a new blank workbook in the Excel window.
When you open an Office application, such as Excel or Word, you have various templates to choose from. Templates are predesigned files that contain basic content and layout information for specific types of documents, such as brochures, newsletters, budgets, and presentations. Templates are a quick way to create a professional-looking document. In the template list, you will also find options for creating a document from a blank slate, such as a blank workbook in Excel, as shown in the illustration in this slide, and a blank document in Word.
The visual in this slide displays the templates available in Excel.
The illustration in this slide displays the Save As dialog box in backstage area.
File names should be descriptive of the file’s contents so you can easily find the file you need. A valid file name cannot contain certain characters. Colons (:), asterisks (*), or question marks (?) are examples of these unacceptable characters.
The Save As function requires additional steps in Access.
By default, documents, workbooks, presentations, and databases are saved as files in their native format: .docx in Word, .xlsx in Excel, .pptx in PowerPoint, and .accdb in Access.
The ribbon is an interface element that is displayed in the application window. It is designed to help you quickly find the commands that you need to complete a task. The ribbon is organized into a series of tabs. Each tab relates to a type of activity, such as inserting objects or formatting the visual or text elements on a page. In a tab, commands are organized in logical groups. For example, the Bold, Italic, and Font Color buttons are in the Font group on the HOME tab.
The shortcut to collapse the ribbon is Ctrl + F1. When the ribbon is collapsed, you can still access commands by clicking a tab. The ribbon automatically collapses after the command is selected.
You can also click the Pin the ribbon button (looks like a stick pin) to redisplay the entire ribbon.
To help reduce screen clutter, some tabs, known as contextual tabs, are shown only when you select certain types of objects such as tables or pictures. The PICTURE TOOLS FORMAT tab, shown in the illustration in this slide, is an example of a contextual tab.
Depending on which letter you press, you may be shown additional KeyTips. To cancel the action and hide the KeyTips, press the Alt key.
Many files you create in each of the Office applications will be more than one page long. Your monitor is a fixed size and may not be able to display the contents of the entire file at once. To navigate, it helps to know how to scroll.
When you open a Word document, the insertion point is automatically at the beginning of the document.
The illustration in this slide shows the position of the down scroll arrow on the vertical scroll bar. Scrolling helps you quickly find information or reach a specific location in the file so that you can then make edits or apply additional formatting. You can use both the keyboard and the mouse to navigate to specific locations in a file. If your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can roll the wheel to scroll through the document.
Scrolling does not move the insertion point.
To redisplay the ribbon, tap the Ribbon Display Options button and then tap Show Tabs and Commands.
Press the F5 key in Word to display the Find and Replace dialog box with the Go To tab selected. Pressing F5 in Excel will open the Go To dialog box. In Word, you can type a page number in the Go To dialog box to move the insertion point to a specific page, and in Excel you can type a cell address to move quickly to that cell.
The Find feature enables you to search for specific characters or formatting. When the Find feature locates items that match your search terms, the results are displayed in the Navigation pane.
The shortcut for the Find command is Ctrl + F.
As shown in the illustration in this slide, matches are highlighted in the document and listed in the Navigation pane.
Similarly, the Find and Replace feature allows you to search for specific characters or formatting and replace them with other characters or formatting.
Clicking the Replace button will make one change at a time. Clicking the Replace All button changes all occurrences.
The illustration in this slide shows the Find and Replace dialog box as well as the Microsoft Word message that indicates how many replacements have been made.
The default font used by all of the Office applications is Calibri. Fonts in the All Fonts section of the gallery are listed in alphabetical order as shown in the illustration in this slide.
If you apply formatting and then decide to remove it, click the Clear Formatting button.
Print settings are accessed from the Print backstage area. A preview of the first page of the document appears in the preview area.
The shortcut command to print is Ctrl + P. To go back to your file and make changes before you print it, click the Back button in the upper left corner of the window.
The Print backstage area, as shown in the illustration in this slide, displays a preview of what your printed file will look like and also lets you change print options, such as the number of copies to print, page orientation, page size, and page margins. You can also zoom in on the preview image to make sure all settings are correct prior to printing a copy. Previewing your document carefully and printing only the final copy saves you time, money, and paper.
Try changing the paper size, the page orientation (e.g., portrait versus landscape), and the margins. Click the Print One Sided button to see an option for printing on both sides of the paper manually if your printer cannot perform that function automatically.
Each Microsoft Office application has its own Help window. The Help window functions similarly to a web browser. You can click links to view Help topics and use Navigation buttons to move among previously visited pages. You can also search for specific keywords.
The shortcut command for Help is F1.
The illustration in this slide shows the Excel Help window.
You can print Help topics by clicking the Print button on the Help window toolbar.
NOTE: Microsoft places certain restrictions on the use of templates, images, and other elements available from Office.com. To see the terms of use, go to office.microsoft.com, click the Legal link at the bottom of the page, and read the Microsoft Services Agreement.
