Office 2016 For Seniors For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Media and software compilation copyright © 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015950349
ISBN 978-1-119-07749-7 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-07752-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-07738-1 (ebk)
Microsoft Office 2016 is by far the most popular suite of productivity applications in the world, and with good reason. Its applications are powerful enough for business and professional use, and yet easy enough that a beginner can catch on to the basics with just a few simple lessons.
If you’re new to Office 2016, this book can help you separate the essential features you need from the obscure and more sophisticated ones you don’t. For the four major Office applications I cover in this book — Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint — I walk you through the most important and common features, showing you how to put them to work for projects in your job, everyday life, and home.
This book is written specifically for mature people like you, who are relatively new to using Office applications and want to master the basics. In this book, I tried to take into account the types of activities that might interest you, such as investment planning, personal finance, email, and documents and presentations that you might need to prepare for work, clubs, volunteer opportunities, or other organizations that you participate in.
This book assumes that you can start your computer and use the keyboard and mouse (or whatever device moves the pointer onscreen).
If you’re using a computer for the first time, Computers For Seniors For Dummies shows you the essential skills that all computer applications use.
Office 2016 runs on Windows 10 (the newest version of Windows), Windows 8, and Windows 7 computer operating systems, so I assume you’re using one of these. The examples in this book show Office 2016 running in Windows 10, but Office works mostly the same on all operating systems.
This book is divided into several handy parts to help you find what you need and skip stuff you don’t use.
In this first part of the book, I explain some basics that apply to all the Office 2016 applications generically, such as saving, opening, and printing files. I also show you some features that all Office 2016 applications have in common, such as selecting and formatting text, using the Clipboard, and applying formatting themes.
This part explores the most popular application in the Office suite, Microsoft Word. This word processing program helps you create letters, reports, envelopes, and myriad other text-based documents. You’ll see how to format text, change page size and orientation, insert graphics, and more.
In this part of the book, you can read about Excel, the Office spreadsheet application. See how to enter text and numbers in a worksheet, write formulas and functions that perform calculations, and format worksheets attractively. You can also find out how to create charts and use Excel to store simple databases.
Outlook is the email, contact management, and calendar application in Office. In this part of the book, discover how to send and receive email in Outlook, and also how to use Outlook to track appointments and store your personal address book.
In this part of the book, I show you the basics of PowerPoint, the Office presentation application. You can read how to create presentations that include text and graphics; create cool animation and transition effects; add a musical soundtrack; and share your presentation with others, either in a live-action show or on CD.
The Appendix shows some simple ways to customize how Office applications work when you start them.
This book uses certain conventions to help you find your way:
Tip icons point out extra features, special insights and helps, or things to look out for.
Warning icons indicate potential problems to avoid, problems that are difficult to fix or make bad things happen.
This is your book; use it how you want. You can start at the beginning and read it straight through, or you can hop to whatever chapter or topic you want. For those of you who are pretty new to computers, you might want to start at the beginning. If you’re new to Office, the beginning part will give you a good foundation on what features work similarly in all the programs.
Part I
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Chapter 1
Get ready to . . .
Start an Office Application
Start a New Document
Explore the Office Ribbon and Tabs
Understand the File Menu (Backstage View)
Create a Document
Type Text
Insert a Picture
Move Around in a Document
Select Content
Zoom In and Out
Change the View
Step right up for a tour of Microsoft Office, the most popular suite of applications in the world!
Here are some of the things you can do with Office:
The Office suite consists of several very powerful applications (programs), each with its own features and interface, but the applications also have a lot in common with one another. Learning about one application gives you a head start in learning the others.
In this chapter (and Chapter 2), I take you on a quick tour of some of the features that multiple Office applications have in common, including the tabbed Ribbon area. I also show you how to insert text and graphics in the various applications, and how to move around and zoom in and out.
In these first few chapters, I use Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel as the example applications because all of them work more or less the same way: They let you open and save data files that contain your work on various projects. Microsoft Outlook works a bit differently, as I show you in Chapters 11 through 13.
This book shows Microsoft Office in the Windows 10 operating system. Office works the same way in Windows 7 and Windows 8 except for minor differences in opening the applications and working with files. I’ll explain any differences as we go along.
The steps for starting an Office application differ depending on which version of Windows you have:
When you open Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, a Start screen appears, containing a list of recently used documents and thumbnail images of templates you can use to start new documents. To start a new blank document (which you’ll want to do in order to follow along with this chapter), you can press the Esc key, or you can click the Blank template. The template has a slightly different name depending on the application; in Word it is called Blank document, in Excel it’s Blank workbook, and so on. Figure 1-1 shows the Start screen for Microsoft Word, for example.
Figure 1-1
To create an additional new blank document after the application is already up-and-running, press Ctrl+N at any time.
Office 2010 and earlier started a blank document automatically in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, without having to go through a Start screen. If you want that old-style behavior back, click File and then click Options. On the General page, scroll down to the bottom and clear the Show the Start Screen When This Application Starts check box.