Word processors are software tools used to create, edit, and format text-based documents such as letters, notes, and resumes. This content covers Microsoft Word and Google Docs as two widely used examples of word processing applications.
Word Processors
You want to write a letter, you can use a word processor. Want to type out some notes? You can use a word processor. Creating a resume? You can use a word processor. A word processor helps us create documents.
Let's first take a look at Microsoft Word and see what it looks like. It's a great classic example of what a word processor is.
What I have up here is Microsoft Office. This is Microsoft 365, so it's the suite of applications. We see document, presentation, workbook. So this is Microsoft Word right here — in fact you see the name of the program here is Word, so that's Microsoft Word right there.
I don't actually have the client installed right now, because this is the free version that's out there, so what I'm going to do is just open this up using a web browser. All I have to do to open up a new document is click on this, and it's going to open up in a browser, so now we can get into it via our Chrome browser here.
There are a couple of ways that we can go about doing this. We could use the templates over here — looks like we've got resumes, letters, cover letters, general — so there are different things that we can pull up and get started with. Or we can just come in here and start typing something out, so that's the other way that we can go about doing this.
I'm going to just pull up a resume just so we can take a look and see what a resume looks like on here. This is what's called a template, so it's got just a general resume that we can start filling in and adding the details to here.
Then across the top here we've got a lot of different ways that we can manipulate and change the text, if we want to change the font, or make it bold, underline, or bulleted list, or whatever the case may be. So all the tools that we would want to use to edit a document — and that's Microsoft Word.
As you can see up here there are a lot of features, there are a lot of buttons right here, and then if we go through the menu items we see a lot of other buttons that we can change and manipulate. Especially if you have the client installed, then you have even more options for editing, and then we can even add more buttons to it when we have that set up. So this is a good example of Microsoft Word and what it looks like.
Next let's jump over to Google Docs. If I click on Google Docs, it's online as well, and so I have it right here. If you see across the top there, we don't have the same level of — we don't have those ribbons. We just have one set of buttons across here at the top, of the most commonly used buttons here, and then we use files for everything else. But if you notice, there aren't as many options with Google Docs here.
Same type of thing: if I wanted to type in my notes on here — I'm just going to type in a few things here — and there we go. And then same thing, we've got our ways that we can manipulate it and change the text to do what we want it to do.
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