Learn What’s New in the Word 2013 Workspace

The Workspace in Microsoft Word 2013 is the layout of commands in the screen available to the user. The upper part of the Workspace contains elements like the Quick Access Toolbar, Ribbon, as well as the standard Windows Close, Minimize/Maximize and Help buttons. The bottom of the Workspace contains the Status Bar, which includes Zoom and Mode controls. The Backstage View contains information about documents in the Info Tab, Advanced Properties command, the Statistics Tab and a Show Documents panel. The view also contains various options such as New, Open, Save, Save As, Print, Share, Export and Close.

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Video transcripts:

Hello again and welcome back to our course on Word 2013. In this section, we’re going to carry on looking at some of the basics of the Word workspace and also I’m just going to show you one of the other ways of starting Word. If you’re on Windows 8 and you’re using the Start Screen, there will be a tile for Word 2013 like this one. If you’re using a touch screen, you just touch once on the tile and Word starts up in the usual way. And one of the things you’ll notice differently this time is that our Recent Files list now has one file in it. It says Hello World.docx. If I wanted to open that one again I just click on that, the file opens, and it’s ready for me to do some more work on it.

Now let’s take a look at some of the other features of the Word 2013 workspace. I’ve already mentioned the title bar at the top with the name of the document in it. On the left of that is a sequence of buttons, that’s called the Quick Access Toolbar and we’re going to be looking at that in detail in a couple of sections time. Below that across the width of the whole screen is the Ribbon. And again, the Ribbon we’re going to spend quite a bit of time on later on. The words you can see: Insert, Design, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review, View; these correspond to the tabs of the Ribbon. And if I click on one of those, like Insert, the Ribbon has a different appearance with that tab selected. And each of these tabs gives you different contents, a different appearance.

In the top right hand corner of the screen are a number of buttons, some of them we’re going to talk about in detail later on, like the Help button. But the three on the right are pretty much the standard Windows buttons: Close, Maximize, and Minimize. And of course, if you have the screen maximized this button, the button becomes a restore button which will put it back to the not maximized state, to the size it is at this time.

Right at the bottom of the screen is what’s called the status bar. And again, we’re going to talk about the status bar in some detail later on. The bottom right hand corner of the screen on the status bar there are a number of zoom controls and mode controls. And again, more on those later on.

So let’s now go back into Backstage View and look at some of the options there because some of those are extremely important. Many of these we’ll cover in a lot of detail later on, but let’s just look at the important ones. Info, the first tab, and to access each of these you either click or tap on the name of the page here, so the Info tab. There’s information there about document protection and document inspection, which we’ll look at later on. But over on the right, we have Document Properties and these give the properties of the document that we’re currently working on. There’s some technical information like the size of the document and the number of pages, the number of words in it, the total amount of editing time, and then dates to do with when it was created, when it was last modified. And then we have things like the author, that’s me, who last modified it, that’s me. And if you click down on Show all properties, you get a longer list of properties that includes things like the company name, the status of the document. This might say something like it’s a draft version. And right at the top next to the word Properties, if you click on the drop down, you can get a look at Advanced Properties. Now let’s look at Advanced Properties. Advanced Properties, note the name of the document, Hello World.docx, gives us a number of tabs. The general information is on the tab marked General, then we have Summary information where I can put in things like a title of my choosing. I can put in subject, my full name perhaps, who my manager is, which company I work for, many other pieces of information. The Statistics tab gives me more detailed information about the content of the document in the lower section. So how many pages, how many paragraphs, how many lines, how many words, how many characters, how many characters if I include the spaces. In the middle, again, who last saved it, which revision this is, how much time has been spent editing it so far. And then I have information about contents and I can setup custom fields as well. So the properties of a document are quite extensive in Word 2013.

So let me just cancel that. I’m going to go back up to this Properties button here, click on the drop down, and this time I’m going to click on Show document panel because with Show document panel what happens is you have a selection of those properties. The properties are generally referred to as metadata. They’re information about a document rather than the information that is in the document. So it’s information about a document. Some of the metadata is shown here on a panel above the document itself. This includes things like the author’s name, title of the document, subject, some key words. So I might use something like if this was about wildlife, I might put the word Wildlife here as a keyword and then you can actually search a document on those keywords. I might put it in a category, I might use a status like draft or reviewed or final, and then I can put some comments about the document as well.

Now sometimes it’s very useful to be able to put in the properties of a document with the panel above the document itself. When you finish with the panel, there’s a little close of the document information panel button there.
Let’s go back into Backstage View and look at some of the other options. New is the option we use to create a new document. So if I click on New, I get that list of templates again and we’ll come back to that later on. Open; let’s me open an existing document. This is the option where I’m not necessarily looking for a recent document. In this case, the only document I’ve accessed is that one so that’s the only one on the recent documents list. But if I wanted to browse to find a document on my computer, for instance, I could click on Computer and browse from there. Or if I wanted to get it from the Cloud, from SkyDrive, I could get it from there. Save is the option to save a document that’s currently open when I don’t need to specify or change the name. Save As we’ve used already. So that’s when I want to save a document for the first time and give it a name or save it with a different name. I use that. Print option probably speaks for itself; we’ll look at printing later on. Then we have a Share button. Now Share we’re going to look at in some detail later on. This is a set of options where we can share a document with other people either for instance just sending it to them by email as an attachment to an email, but also letting people share the document online, share it in the Cloud on SkyDrive. Export, another very important option where we can export a document in a different format such as PDF format. And then we have the Close option that we’ve already used. Now right at the bottom we have a button that says Options and Options is the Word options. That’s an important topic that we’re going to come to in a couple of sections time. When you finish with Backstage View, you just use the button at the top, the left arrow to take you back into your document.

And now it’s time to give you your first little exercise to do if you’re going to try and work along with these exercises during the course. You should have a document like Hello World. You may have called it something different; you may indeed have typed something different into it. But whatever way you’ve got a document. That’s your first exercise document. What I’d like you to do is to setup some of the document properties, at least make sure that you’re author name is right and it’s in there. Give it a title, give it a subject, maybe some comments, and then I want you to close that document, open it again, and just make sure that you can see all of the information that you’ve added as metadata. Note that in the top left of the Document Information panel, Document Properties, there’s a drop down here and one of the options there, Advanced Properties, gets you back into the Advanced Properties dialog as well.

So there you are. I’m going to put some more properties on this document and save it as example-01. I’ll see you in the next section.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!