From the course: Word Essential Training (Microsoft 365)

Use the Tell Me assistant in Word

From the course: Word Essential Training (Microsoft 365)

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Use the Tell Me assistant in Word

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- [Instructor] Well, we're ready to start creating our very first document here in Microsoft Word. And before we go too far, there is a very cool feature I want to show you that's going to save you a lot of time and effort when it comes to learning Microsoft Word and completing your tasks. Let's start by going up to File and create a new blank document. So with Home selected here on the left, Blank document appears in the New section here of our home screen. Give it a click. Now, this is going to open up using the default blank document template, a blank page with some default settings. For example, if we go up here to the ribbon with the Home tab selected, in the Font group, you can see the default font, the default size. This is an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper that's going to be used by default with one inch margins all the way around. If you see the ruler across the top and down the left of your screen, you'll see that there are one inch margins there. If you don't see the rulers, you can turn them on by going to the View tab here and clicking Ruler. Make sure that you do see the rulers. Now, these are all settings that we can change if we know where to find them. If we don't, there's a cool feature that's going to help us find them and actually complete the tasks in a timely fashion. Let's start by adding some text though. Let's type in, "Red30's annual conference." Now, you can see some help showing up here. As you start to type, Word knows you're maybe considering typing a certain word, like in our case, conference. And you click your Tab key to finish typing that. "shines a light on," and let's put in a colon there and press Enter. So you can see everything using the default font and size and alignment. It's on the left-hand margin here, working its way out to the right. It's not centered on the page or anything. These are all things that we would have to make changes to on the fly or after the fact. Okay, let's get some more text in here. A faster way though is to go up to File and Open, and we'll open up a document from the Chapter1 folder of your Exercise Files called Red30Conference0103. You can see it has what we started to type here, plus, another paragraph underneath. So we have some content to work with. Now, let's say we did want to center this top line. Well, we could go searching on the ribbon for the Center command or just click anywhere on that first line and use something that used to be called the Tell Me assistant. It now just appears as a search field on the title bar. Up here where we see Search, you would think this is where I go to search for content in my document. And you would be right, but you can search for a whole lot more. For example, click in that field and type in center, or at least start to type in center. You'll see a best action at the top, Center. And as you hover over that, you can see it's going to center your content on the page. So let's go ahead and click it. And sure enough, our first line where our cursor was flashing is centered. Okay, well, we know we have those one inch margins all the way around, top, bottom, left, and right. What if we wanted different margins? Well, again, once you get used to Word, you'll know where to find these things, but until then, it could take a while to go through all these different ribbons to find margins. So let's instead go into the search field and start to type in margins. mar is all I need to see Adjust Margins. And as you hover over that, you're going to see some presets over here on the right. And that also includes at the bottom, Custom Margins where you can choose what your top, bottom, left, and right margins will be. For example, if we wanted left and right margins to be 3/4 of an inch, so we can get more width, we might choose Moderate, keeping the top and bottom at one inch. So let's go ahead and select it. It actually does it for us. So all we had to do is type in what we wanted to do to find those commands. Of course, we could have gone to Layout and Margins to see all those same options we just saw by using the search field, formally known as the Tell Me assistant. All right, let's click after Red30 conference and press Return or Enter on your keyboard to add an extra line. Now, we've made changes to this document. Just a few changes, but nonetheless, we need to save those changes. You can use the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl + S, or go up to the Save button up here on the title bar. Click there, and it will simply update the file, keeping it stored where we found it in the Chapter1 folder of our Exercise Files. Go ahead and save your document before we move on.

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