File tab/backstage
Rather than making changes within a document, this area lets you work with a document and Word overall. You’ll find common tasks such as opening, saving and printing a document, as well as special screens for managing the document, customizing Word and managing your Office account.
Home tab
This tab contains the most-used Word features, such as tools for changing fonts and font attributes, customizing paragraphs, using styles, and finding and replacing text.
Insert tab
Design tab
This tab lets you work with a document’s overall design, from choosing a pre-designed template or theme to customizing colors, fonts, paragraph spacing and more. It’s new to Office in 2013, and some of its commands are similar to those found on the Home tab and Page Layout tab. But there’s an overall difference: The Design tab is for changes affecting the entire document, and the other two tabs are generally for changes in individual parts of the document, like paragraphs.
Page Layout tab
Here’s where you change margins and page size and orientation, set up columns, align objects, add effects and so on. There are some gray areas between this tab, the Home tab and the Design tab. For example, on the Page Layout tab you set indents and spacing between paragraphs, while on the Home tab you set paragraph alignment and spacing between lines.
And while some commands are shared with the Design tab, the changes you make on the Page Layout tab generally affect individual paragraphs or sections of the document you’ve selected, whereas changes you make on the Design tab affect the entire document.
References tab
This tab handles tables of contents, footnotes, bibliographies, indexes and similar material. It also lets you insert a “Table of Authorities,” which sounds like something straight out of a Soviet bureaucracy but in fact is a list of references used in legal documents.
Mailings tab
As the name says, this is where you’ll go for anything to do with mailings, from something as simple as creating labels to the more daunting task of mail merges.
Review tab
Need to check spelling and grammar, look up a word in a thesaurus, work in markup mode, review other people’s markups or compare documents? This is the tab for you.
View tab
Here’s where to go when you want to change the view in any way, including displaying a ruler and grid lines, zooming in and out, splitting a window in two and so on.
Contextual tabs
Some tabs are not part of the basic Ribbon but appear only in certain contexts. For instance, the Picture Tools/Format tab appears only when you’ve inserted an image into your document and your cursor is positioned in the image area. It lets you do everything from cropping the image to positioning it on the page.
When you insert a table into your document and position your cursor in it, two new tabs appear: Table Tools/Design and Table Tools/Layout. The Design tab lets you control the table’s style, including borders and shading, while the Layout tab lets you specify the number of rows and columns, merge and split cells, sort the table’s data and more.
Similarly, when you insert a chart into your document and position your cursor in it, you see the Chart Tools/Design and Chart Tools/Format tabs. The Design tab lets you set what the chart looks like and what data appears in it, and the Format tab lets you control how it integrates with the page and do things such as change the styles of the shapes and lines in the chart.
Following are some of the most commonly used commands from these contextual tabs. Note that the keyboard shortcuts only work if your cursor is in the picture, table or chart.
See our Word 2013 cheat sheet to get the most out of Word 2013.
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