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Three Options for Starting a New Document
by Tim Campbell, editor —
S
o you've got this really great program called Word. But, where do you begin? What's to know? Here are three ways to start a new document.

Where'd This Come From?
When you first open Word, as part of Word's default settings, a new document will automatically be opened. If you want to start a document from scratch, you can just start typing. Depending on what you're planning to do, you can select the document view that makes sense for you. If you want to customize the orientation, size or margins of your page, simply go to File > Page Layout to do that (if you make a mistake, you can always go back and revise these settings). If you want to base your document on another document, you can choose to close this one.

Based on . . .
If you want to use another document as a starting point (perhaps a previous newsletter or a similar letter), then you can go to File > Open to navigate your way to that document. Once you open it (and before you make any changes) go to File > Save As to save it as a new document. This will prevent you from accidentally deleting any important information in the old document.

Templates
Templates are documents that have particular designs or elements that can be used as a starting point to create other similar documents. They can save a lot of time and energy. Word comes with some basic templates that you can customize (go to File > New). This site also offers a variety of professionally-designed templates as well. Templates have been saved specifically as templates (named with the ".dot" extension rather than the usual ".doc" extension). When you use the "New" command, Word starts a new document but bases it on the template you've chosen.

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