How to make a formal business letter in Microsoft Word

Course contents
SECTION: 5
How to create a company template 2:20
SECTION: 8
How to make an interactive form 10:13
SECTION: 9
Creating personalized letters using Mail merge 4:34
SECTION: 11
Cheat sheet & shortcuts 3:23

Questions

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Course info

52 lessons / 3 hours

Overview

Hi there, in this Word tutorial course we’re going to learn Microsoft Word together. This is a project based course.

We’ll work through real world documents such as a formal business letter, monthly newsletter, a really long business report, a timetable and a visually exciting interactive PDF product document.

Projects included:

  • Creating a formal business letter

  • Creating a monthly company newsletter

  • Formatting a long business report, adding charts & graphs from Excel

  • Creating a timetable schedule using tables

  • Creating a company template using corporate fonts, colours & images

  • Creating a product overview PDF with basic interactivity

  • Creating a business form

  • Printing personalised letterheads & envelopes for client lists

This course is for beginners. You don’t need any previous knowledge of Word or any desktop publishing experience. We will start right at the basics but quickly get into working with up to date modern features.

You’ll work with images, logos & specific company colours. You’ll create corporate templates and reusable styles - automatically personalizing them using Mail Merge.

You’ll learn to make a monthly newsletter with links & videos ready for sharing & commenting. You’ll learn how to take charge of long documents; cleaning them up and adding professional graphs, infographics, tables and much more including exercise files. We will give you a printable 'cheat sheet'.

I will be around to help.If you get lost you can drop a comment on the video 'Questions and Answers' section that is below every video & I'll be sure to get back to you.

So my friend, now is your time to go from Word Zero, to Word Hero and for you to become the Microsoft Word professional in your office.


What are the requirements?

  • This course is for absolute beginners

  • You'll need a copy of Microsoft Word 2016.

  • No previous Word or desktop publishing skills are necessary.

What am I going to learn from this course?

  • How to work with your specific company fonts & colours.

  • Format text like a professional.

  • Work with various images, styles and implementations.

  • Save documents to older versions of Word.

  • How to save as a PDF.

  • How to make an interactive form.

  • Where to get inspiration for your design.

  • How to install new fonts.

  • Work with multiple column layouts.

  • How to personalise letters & envelopes from a list.

  • Adjust heading styles.

  • Work with really long text documents.

  • How to create a table of contents automatically.

  • How to work with bullets & numbering.

  • How to master tabs.

  • Create beautiful graphics & diagrams.

  • How to make an infographic.

  • How to work closely with Microsoft Excel.

  • How to work with comments & changes.

  • How to share you documents with others.

  • How to build your own company templates.

  • How to work with tables.

  • How to add videos to you documents.

  • You’ll get a cheat sheet, shortcuts and much, much more…

Who is the target audience?

  • Yes: This course is for people who need to learn Microsoft Word for work.

  • Yes: This course is perfect for people who need to upgrade their skills for their CV and job applications.

  • Yes: This course is for complete beginners and for people who know the basics of Word already.

  • No: This course is NOT for people who have advanced knowledge of Microsoft Word.

  • No:This is for PC version of Word 2016. (While 90% of this course will work on a Mac and in early versions of Word no guarantees can be made.)

Course duration 3 hours 18 mins

 

Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files Download Completed Files

Transcript

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.

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