iCheck Express Series - Microsoft Word 2003

These articles allow you to further explore various computing topics and include a quiz for review.

Introduction Learn about how organizations use advanced features of word processing applications.

Directions Read the information below and apply what you learn to answer the questions. Check your work carefully, and click Check Answers.

How Businesses Use Advanced Features of Microsoft Word

You already know how businesses use many of Word’s more basic features. For example, employees use templates to create memos, they use AutoText to insert repeated text into business correspondence such as business letters, they insert headers and footers and create tables for business reports, and they use AutoCorrect and the Spell and Grammar Check to correct common errors. But there are several advanced uses of Word that are important to businesses as well.

Businesses often expect their employees to create effective, eye-catching documents under tight deadlines—Word styles, graphics, and charts help employees meet this expectation. Employees often work on a team that reviews each other’s work, so they also need to be familiar with Word’s features that allow collaborating.

Advanced Word features and common applications of each are explained in more detail below:

• Styles. When you create a document, the text you key is automatically formatted in Normal style, which includes a font size of 12, a font style of Times New Roman, left alignment, and single spacing. Word also includes several predefined styles that can be applied to an entire document, such as Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3. In addition, you can create a custom style in which you set the formatting for fonts, paragraphs, lists, and tables. Employees can create custom styles to match the style of their company’s business reports. For example, they could set table borders and shading, text alignment in paragraphs, and font style for headings to quickly create a report in the company’s style.

• Graphics and Charts. Many business reports include graphics and charts. Graphics make a report more eye-catching, and charts make data easier to understand and compare. Word includes features to rotate and crop pictures, as well as to increase or decrease their contrast or brightness. An employee might want to include in a business report a picture of the company’s president, cropping out unnecessary information and increasing the photo’s brightness. The employee could also create a link to or embed a chart from another Word document or even from another application, without needing to recreate the table for the report.

• Advanced Table Formatting. Word includes features to merge cells to create headings across a row, to rotate cells by 90 degrees to create special effects, to center text within cells vertically, to adjust row height and column width in order to reduce white space, and to align tables horizontally on a page. All of these features allow the user to create tables with a more professional look to be used in important business documents such as a business report.

• Mail Merge. Word’s mail merge feature, if nothing else, is an amazing time saver. In the past, each individual name and address needed to be typed into a form letter, quite a time-consuming task if a company’s mailing list included thousands of addresses. The mail merge feature allows the user to merge all of the addresses from an address list into the form letter and then print each letter separately in a few steps. Companies often have several address lists, such as a list of employees, customers, potential customers, and investors. With a mail merge, employees can draft a letter to a specific audience and then use the appropriate address list to send the letters off quickly.

• Forms. Companies often use electronic forms to obtain data about their employees or customers. Frequently, these forms are Word documents that have been e-mailed to a target audience. A Word form includes areas in which users enter information into text fields, select check boxes, or choose an option from a list.

• Collaborating with Others. Important business documents are often created by a team. These documents could be saved on a server or e-mailed to other team members so that they can collaborate. Team members can use Word’s reviewer options to make changes electronically without deleting the original text. The final reviewer can then choose to accept or reject these changes. Using Word’s reviewer options eliminates the need to print a document and mark changes on hard copy, which is easily lost or can be difficult to read. This tool is especially useful for important business letters that need to be reviewed by several people before they are sent.

1			Name one way that businesses use custom styles.
2			Which advanced Word feature would you use to obtain data about a company’s employees?
3			How does the mail merge feature save time?
4			Identify one advantage of using Word’s reviewer options instead of marking changes on hard copy.