the Author
Eric Butow is the owner of Butow Communications Group (BCG) in Jackson, California. BCG offers website development, online marketing, and technical writing services. Eric is a native Californian who started working with his friend's Apple II Plus and Radio Shack TRS‐80 Model III in 1980 when he lived in Fresno, California. He learned about programming, graphic design, and desktop publishing in the Fresno PC Users Group in his professional career, and when he started BCG in 1994.
Eric has written 40 other technical books as an author, co‐author or, in one case, as a ghostwriter. Most of Eric's works were written for the general book market, but some were written for specific clients including HP and F5 Networks. Two of his books have been translated into Chinese and Italian. Eric's most recent books are Programming Interviews for Dummies (For Dummies, 2019) with John Sonmez, Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing (Entrepreneur Press, 2020) with Herman, Liu, Robinson, and Allton, and Instagram for Business for Dummies Second Edition (For Dummies, 2021) with Jennifer Herman and Corey Walker.
Upon his graduation from California State University, Fresno in 1996 with a master's degree in communication, Eric moved to Roseville, California, where he lived for 13 years. Eric continued to build his business and worked as a technical writer for a wide variety of businesses from startups to large companies including Intel, Wells Fargo Wachovia, TASQ Technology, Cisco Systems, and Hewlett‐Packard. Many of those clients required their technical writers to know Microsoft PowerPoint, which Eric has used since the early 1990s. From 1997–1999, during his off‐time, Eric produced 30 issues of Sacra Blue, the award‐winning monthly magazine of the Sacramento PC Users Group.
When Eric isn't working in (and on) his business or writing books, you can find him enjoying time with friends, walking around the historic Gold Rush town of Jackson, and helping his mother manage her infant and toddler daycare business.
About the Technical Editor
Kristen Merritt is an experienced technical editor who has reviewed books for several publishers, including Wiley and Microsoft Press. Kristen spent 12 years in technical sales, and she is currently employed as a digital marketer.
Introduction
Welcome to this book about becoming a Microsoft Certified Office Specialist for the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity applications to which you can subscribe. You can also use this book with the one‐time purchase version of Office, which Microsoft calls Office 2019.
Microsoft 365 allows you to use different versions on many platforms, including Windows, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and Android. You can even use the free online version of Microsoft 365. This book, however, talks about using the most popular version of Microsoft 365 on the most popular operating system, which happens to be the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications in Microsoft 365 running on Windows 10.
You may already know about a lot of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint features by working with it, but no matter if you use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for your regular documentation tasks, or if you're new to the application, you'll learn a lot about the power that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint gives you to create all kinds of documents.
Who Should Read This Book
If you want to prepare to take one or all the Microsoft Office Specialist exams, which will help you become a certified specialist in Word, Excel, and/or PowerPoint, and hopefully increase your stature, marketability, and income, then this is the book for you. Even if you're not going to take the exam, but you want to learn how to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint more effectively, this book will show you how to get the most out of using Word, Excel, and PowerPoint based on features that Microsoft believes are important for you to know.
What You'll Learn from this Book
What you learn in this book hews to the topics in the Microsoft Office Specialist exams, because this book is designed to help you learn about the topics in the exam and pass it on the first try.
After you finish reading the book and complete all the exercises, you'll have an in‐depth understanding of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that you can use to become more productive at work and at home (or in your home office).
Hardware and Software Requirements
You should be running a computer with Windows 10 installed, and you should have Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 or Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2019 installed and running too before you dive into this book. Either version of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint contains all of the features that are documented in this book so that you can pass the exam.
How to Use this Book
Start by taking the Assessment Test after this introduction to see how well you know Word, Excel, and PowerPoint already. Even if you've been using Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for a while, you may be surprised at how much you don't know about it.
Next, read each chapter and go through each of the exercises throughout the chapter to reinforce the concepts in each section. When you reach the end of the chapter, answer each of the 10 Review Questions to test what you learned. You can check your answers in the appendix at the back of the book.
If you're indeed taking the exam, then there are two other pedagogical tools that you can use: Flashcards and a Practice Exam. You may remember flashcards from when you were in school, and they're useful when you want to reinforce your knowledge. Use the Flashcards with a friend or relative if you like. (They might appreciate learning about Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, too.) The Practice Exam will help you further hone your ability to answer any question on the real exam with no worries.
How to Contact Wiley or the Author
If you believe you have found an error in this book, and it is not listed on the book's web page, you can report the issue to our customer technical support team at support.wiley.com.
You can email the author with your comments or questions at [email protected]. You can also visit Eric's website at www.butow.net.
How this Book Is Organized
Part I: Word Exam MO‐100
Chapter 1: Working with Documents This chapter introduces you to navigating within a document, how to format a document so that it looks the way you want, saving a document, sharing a document, and inspecting a document before you share it, so that all of your recipients can read it.
Chapter 2: Inserting and Formatting Text This chapter follows up by showing you how to add text into a document, how to format text and paragraphs in your document using Word tools, including Format Painter and styles, as well as how to create and
