Word Processing

Word Processing 

Your school principal has informed you that this year’s Art Festival is going to be celebrated. The assigned task of your team is preparing necessary documents for the arts festival.

These documents should be well prepared and printed. After drafting the above documents, you now want to find out the best method of document preparation.

“We will prepare hand written invitations”, was one of the suggestions.

“Good idea, but it’s difficult to write in a similar size and a similar way. So we’ll use the type writer in the library”, was another suggestion. “We should find attractive types of letters and add pictures. A border will give a good finish. A typewriter won’t provide such facilities, will it?”

Everybody isconfused. You need to find a solution for this problem. We often use different types of documents in our day-to-day activities and preparing these documents in different styles is called word processing. In order to avoid the shortcomings of preparation of pen or pencil in based documents,typewrites were used in the early days. Even though such typed documents were better than the hand written documents, manual typewriters do not allow functions such as formatting, saving, printing in required sizes. 

The computer is the best machine for such an activity. A word processing software can provide the following faclities;

• Creation and editing
• Insert objects such as images
• Saving and retrieving
• Print preview and printing
• Spell checking and grammar
• Find and replace
• Mail merge

Word Processing Software

Several popular word processing software are available. Some need to be purchased and some are Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).Given below are some of the word processing softwares. You can find more information about those softwares from their websites.

The user can create documents using internet as well if the computer does not have a Word Processing software. For this the user can use cloud computing.

There are many advantages of using cloud computing such as;

• The user does not have to install a word processing software on the computer
• The user does not have to allocate space to install software in the hard disk
• To save the document, internet itself provides facilities for space.
• The user can open or edit the document from any computer which has internetfacility

Example - Google Docs, Office 365 Word, Microsoft OneDrive Word

In addition, smart phones and tablet PC’s are used for Word Processingtoday and word processing software is available for this purpose.

Eg: Documents To Go, Google Docs, Kingsoft Office, Polaris Office etc.

Now we will learn how to use a word processing software to prepare documents. This chapter explains two word processing software which are commonly used today. Further, some topics and tools which are common to other software are also discussed.