When you first start a new blank doc, it should look like the screenshot below.

At the top of the screen is the name of the document – when you first create the doc, it will say Untitled Document. Below this is the formatting bar. If you have use earlier versions Word or other free word processing documents, this may look familiar. 

We also have a Navigation Pane on the left hand side, with a large white space for us to write our text.

Clicking on the white space will activate it, and make the three prompts at the top disappear – this is normal.

You should now have a flashing black line I appearing on the screen. This is called the INSERTION POINT. Any keys you press on the keyboard will cause the letter to be added to the document and the Insertion Point will move one space to the right.

At the top of your page, there could be a ruler, this is where you can adjust the margins if you need to, If you look at the ruler at the top if the page, you will see it has blue line above a blue downwards pointing triangle. This is your left indent. You can adjust this to adjust your text to add indents if you wish.

Try it out

Try typing some text onto the document – the easiest thing to type hasn’t changed since school – it’s the phrase “The quick brown dog jumps over the lazy fox,”

This phrase is used, because it is easy to remember and shows how every letter of the alphabet appears on the page.

Red & Green Wavy Lines

You may have some green or red coloured lines on the screen. 

As you can see from the screenshot – this text has a red line showing a miss-spelled word. In this case, it is missing the space between “quick” and “brown”. To fix this, simply click  the mouse (left click) to place the Insertion Point to the right of the word “QUICK” and press the space bar to add a space. Or you can also use the arrow keys <- and -> to move the Insertion Point.