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Humanity has come a long way since the days of the typewriter. What used to take hours can now be done in seconds with Microsoft Word 2013. And the less time you spend typing, the more time you can spend being creative and having fun. In this lesson, you'll learn shortcuts in Word that can help you create documents faster and more accurately than ever before. Not only will these shortcuts save you time, but they'll help you create letters and reports more easily than you might have thought possible.

What you write is half of communication. The other half is getting people to read what you write. One way to make your writing more appealing is to make it look presentable with formatting. Of course, formatting text is easy, but applying different types of formatting over and over again can get tedious. That's why, in this lesson, you'll learn a fast and easy way to format chunks of text quickly and consistently using something called styles. You'll find out what a style is, how to apply it, and more important, how to create and save your own styles to use in any document. By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to make any document look presentable with just the click of your mouse.

If you've ever baked cookies, or even just watched someone else do it, you know how difficult it can be to make all the cookies in a batch look exactly alike. Some turn out big, some small, some gooey, and some burned! However, if you use a cookie cutter, you can make identically shaped cookies every time. That's the same principle you'll learn in this lesson, instead of using a cookie cutter, though, you'll use something called a template. A template stores the formatting of a document so you can apply it to another document. Templates let you format entire documents as easily as formatting a single word. Word offers lots of convenient templates stored right on your computer or available over the Internet, and you'll also find out how you can create your own.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so what better way to spice up your documents than by adding pictures? In this lesson, you'll learn how to add your own digital photographs to a document so you can show everyone your vacation pictures, family holidays, or just interesting sights you've captured with your own camera. In addition to adding your own photos, you can also add clip art from Word's massive library of free graphics. And you'll find out how to resize, rotate, and style your pictures, as well as wrap your document text around them. By the end of this lesson, you'll see why Word documents are about much more than words!

Digital photographs and clip art are just the beginning of what you can do with graphics in Word. In this lesson, you'll discover how to add a variety of informational graphics, including charts, graphs, and WordArt, which allow you to display text as a graphic image. Not only will you learn how to add these graphics, but you'll also find out how to edit them when your data changes. You'll finish off the lesson by seeing how Word allows you to format documents with multiple columns—a handy skill for creating newsletters and publications!

Do you often create long documents? If so, you'll appreciate this lesson, which shows you how to divide a large document into parts called sections. Sections allow you to format part of a document a certain way without that formatting affecting the rest of your text. For example, you may want headers and footers to appear on some pages but not others. Sections make this easy! You'll also spend some time inserting footnotes and endnotes in a document. If you need to write research papers or other academic content, Word makes it a snap to add and format these previously pesky notes!

If you've ever seen a spreadsheet, you know how rows and columns let you organize numbers and text on the screen. Well, tables do the same thing in Word. In this lesson, you'll see how to create tables of all different sizes right in a Word document! The lesson will cover how to modify tables, too. And don't think Excel users get to have all the fun—you can even enter formulas to perform calculations in your tables, sort them, and style them for a customized look. Your data has never looked so appealing!

You probably print most of your documents on standard letter-size paper. While this is great for ordinary letters or business reports, sometimes you may want to get creative with your paper sizes. But then there's the trouble of printing. In this lesson, you'll see how you can define the dimensions of the paper you're using so Word will print everything correctly. You'll also learn how to print names and addresses directly on envelopes of any size. After this lesson, you won't feel confined to boring 8 1/2 x 11-inch paper anymore!

As you've probably already figured out, Word can do more than write letters. It also functions as a simple desktop publishing program for creating greeting cards, calendars, or newsletters. In this lesson, you'll find out how text boxes are the key to simple desktop publishing and see how other elements come into play in customized documents. Along the way, you'll look at business cards and greeting cards to get a feel for how desktop publishing works. If you've always wanted to create a document that combines text and graphics in an artistic or visually appealing way, you'll find out how to do that and much more.

With the basics down, it's time to take your desktop publishing skills to the next level. In this lesson, you'll discover the magic of linked text boxes that give you the power to move your text anywhere you want on the page and keep it flowing. You'll see how to create, position, resize, and group text boxes so you have total control over your text.

Have you ever received one of those "personalized" letters from a company in the mail? You can be sure that nobody typed the entire sales letter from scratch. Instead, the company used a form letter and something called mail merge. In this lesson, you'll learn how to store long lists of names and addresses that you can use over and over again in a form letter. Just create a document once, leave blanks for inserting information, such as names and addresses, and let Word personalize each letter for you. Now you, too, can create personalized letters for business or personal use, such as sending out holiday greetings to family members and friends.

Look in most books, and you'll find the table of contents at the beginning and an index in the back. Often, these are the last components added to a document, since they need to have accurate titles and page numbers. But Word takes a lot of the tedious work out of creating these components. In this final lesson, you'll see how you can use Styles to make creating the table of contents a snap, and then explore how to tag index terms so Word knows what page they're on, even if they move later. Word can also help you keep track of any figures, such as charts, illustrations, or graphs, in your document. By letting Word worry about the details, you can create an accurate table of contents, index, or list of figures with very little extra effort on your part. These finishing touches will make your most important documents shine!