Microsoft Word 2007 is a powerful and popular program, yet most people use only a fraction of its features. In this course, you'll learn Microsoft Word's more advanced features, which can make writing easier, faster, and more fun. You'll improve your creativity and efficiency at the same time!

In the first part of the course, you'll see how to perform a mail merge, and we'll explore macros, styles, and templates. Macros let you type repetitive words and phrases quickly and accurately at the touch of a button. Styles let you save text formatting. Templates let you create documents that contain predefined formatting and text, making it a snap to create documents that look right every time.

In the second part of the course, we'll cover how to use Word as a simple desktop publishing program to create signs, flyers, menus, brochures, and even newsletters. You'll learn how to insert different types of graphics in a document including digital photographs from your own camera, clip art images provided by Microsoft, and different types of charts such as bar, line, or pie charts.

Next, you'll find out how to wrap text around graphic images and divide a page into columns and text boxes. Both columns and text boxes give you different ways to display text beyond the traditional appearance of text that fills an entire page.

Finally, in the last part of this course, you'll learn about printing labels, making form letters, and creating an index, table of contents, and list of figures automatically. If you need to create long documents, you'll appreciate Word's ability to keep track of page numbers for your chapter headings or index entries.

Whether you need to produce a short letter, flyer, report, or book-length manuscript, this course will teach you how to get the most out of Microsoft Word 2007!

Recommended Courses:

Students who enrolled in Intermediate Microsoft Word 2007 were also interested in the following courses:

Syllabus:

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when the lesson is released, but you must complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

A new section of each course starts on the second or third Wednesday of each month. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week One

Wednesday - Lesson 01

We've come a long way since the days of the typewriter. What used to take hours can now be done in seconds with Microsoft Word 2007. 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.

Friday - Lesson 02

What you write is half the battle 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 today 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.

Week Two

Wednesday - Lesson 03

If you've ever baked cookies, or even just watched someone else do it, you know how difficult it can be to make cookies 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.

Friday - Lesson 04

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so what better way to spice up your documents than by adding pictures? Today, 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!

Week Three

Wednesday - Lesson 05

Digital photographs and clip art are just the beginning of what you can do with graphics in Word. Today, you'll discover how to add a variety of informational graphics, including charts, graphs, and WordArt, which allows 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. We'll finish off the lesson by seeing how Word allows us to format documents with multiple columns--a handy skill for creating newsletters and publications!

Friday - Lesson 06

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! We'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!

Week Four

Wednesday - Lesson 07

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! We'll 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!

Friday - Lesson 08

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!

Week Five

Wednesday - Lesson 09

As you've probably already figured out, Word can do more than write letters. It can also function as a simple desktop publishing program for creating greeting cards, calendars, or newsletters. Today, you'll find out how text boxes are the key to simple desktop publishing, and you'll see how other elements come into play in customized documents. Along the way, we'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.

Friday - Lesson 10

With the basics down, it's time to take our desktop publishing skills to the next level. 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.

Week Six

Wednesday - Lesson 11

Did you ever get 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 merging. 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.

Friday - Lesson 12

Look in most books, and you'll find a 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 a table of contents a snap, and we'll 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!

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Wallace Wang.

Wallace Wang is the author of over 40 computer books including "Microsoft Office 2007 For Dummies." In addition to writing computer books, he has also co-authored "Breaking Into Acting for Dummies" and ghost written several books about investing in real estate, day trading stocks, and becoming an entrepreneur. Some of his past jobs have included teaching computer science courses at the University of Zimbabwe, performing stand-up comedy, and appearing on a weekly radio show.

Requirements:

Microsoft Word 2007 or Microsoft Office 2007 (any edition) are all acceptable (software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins); Microsoft Windows XP or Vista; Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser, and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader). Note: this course is not suitable for Macintosh users.

Student Reviews:

Reviews coming soon! Please check back next month.