How to make a formal business letter in Microsoft Word

Hi there, in the next couple of videos we're going to be building this formal business letter here, in Microsoft Word 2016, so, let's get started.

So first things first, let's open up Word, and I'm using Windows 10, and Microsoft Word 2016. To open it up, click on the little windows icon, I find it's just easier where it says, at the bottom it says, "Ask me anything". I'm going to click 'Word', there he is there. Open him up.

Great! This is our initial screen. You can start with a blank document, which is what we're going to do in this video, but what you can do, if you want to maybe save some time, work from a template. At the top here, there's 'Search for templates', you can put in, say, 'letterhead', hit 'Return'. You need to be connected to the net because there are lots of stuff that it downloads from the net while it's working. So sometimes internet connection is helpful. 

You can see, I've put in letterhead, and I've got a few options, there's not a huge amount. So when it comes to picking our template, often you're going to kind of play with the words that you use, so instead of 'letterhead' if you just put in 'letter', you get a big difference in terms of the results, can you see? This might be more what you're looking for, and this is what we're going to be aiming towards. 

So, have a look through this, this might be-- You might find something in here, and you're like, "Job done," skip this whole series of videos, and just start working from these letterheads here. I find these templates a little bit tough, because there's lots of automated bits in them, so if you're new, you might find them not as helpful as they kind of appear to be.

Now, even if you don't use these templates, because there's kind of bits of automation in them, I find the language in them is really useful. If you need to-- I don't know-- This one here, a letter confirming lost credit card, you need to have that pre-written, go in there, grab the text that you’ve been using for your own stuff. 

There's some useful stuff in there, and then there's some less than useful stuff, like this one here, it's not less than useful. Employee termination letter due to poor performance, it's kind of scripted, and written, and-- Yes, there's some good ones in there, some interesting ones. Anyway, we're not going to start with templates, what we're going to do is, we're going to click the word 'Home', and we're going to start with a blank document. 

So the first thing we do with any document is give it a 'Save'. You can see, up the top left hand corner is this little old diskette thing, click 'Save'. Where are we going to stick it? It's up to you where yours is going to go.  Probably the most common is, if you click on 'Browse', and if you go to your 'Documents' on the left, I'm going to make a new folder in here to put all my files, don't just dump them in here, you can, of course. 

At the top here, it says 'New Folder'. If you're using an old version of Windows, sometimes you can 'right click', and go to 'New', 'Folder'; they're all slightly different. So, with this new folder here-- Actually I'm going to rename it, so I'm going to 'right click' it, go to 'Rename', and this is going to be my 'Word Class Files'. So we're going to put everything today into that folder. When you've made a new folder, and you hit 'Save' now, it's actually not going to go inside until you click on it. Watch this, 'double click', and now I'm inside my 'Documents', inside 'World Class Files', I'm going to give this one a name. Now when it comes to naming conventions, you can give it anything you like, so in my case I'm going to call it 'BYOL', it's going to be the company, and this one's going to be a 'Credit Letter' that we’re writing.

At the end of these things, often, you can add a 'V1', 'V2', 'V3' for any adjustments you make, your comments that come back, never call if 'Final'. Final is the kiss of death. If you call it 'Final', you'll have 'Final2', 'Final Revisited', just a 'V1', 'V2' works great! Let's click 'Save'. That's the super easy stuff, out of the way. Let's move on to the next video.