Saving Microsoft Word documents (Word 2007, 2010)

Saving Microsoft Word documents

• You have typed in some text but this has not been saved.  If your computer lost power now then everything you have just typed in could be lost.  Saving your Microsoft Word document to disk means that the information will be safely stored as a file on your hard disk and then at a later date you can reopen this file from your hard disk.

• To save your file, click on the Save icon (next to the Microsoft Office button)

• This will display the Save As dialog box as illustrated.  

TIP:  By default the Microsoft Word document will be saved into a folder called My Documents.  If you wanted to change the folder in which the file is saved you would click on the down arrow to the right of the Save in section of the dialog box and navigate to the required folder.  By default Microsoft Word will attempt to create a file name taken from the text at the start of the document.

• Click on the Save button and the document will be saved to disk as a file using the file name suggested by Microsoft Word (probably your name).

Opening and closing documents

• Now that you have saved your document, you can close the file.  To do this click on the Office Button and select the Close command.

• The screen will now look like this.  As you can see, most of the commands are now greyed out as they will not be available until you create a new document or open an existing document. 

• To open a document, click on the Office Button and select the Open command.    This will display the Open dialog box.  Within this dialog box select the file that you saved and click on the Open button.  Your file will be copied from your hard disk into your computer memory.  You will now see your document displayed on the screen again.

Saving your file using a different file name

• Sometimes you might want to save different versions of a document.  Once you have opened the document that you typed in earlier, click on the page at the end of your text and press the Enter key a few times to insert a few empty lines.  Type in the following text:   Please also inform the rest of your team that they need to attend this meeting. 

• If we were to click on the Save icon that we originally used to save the document, it would overwrite the old version of the file with the contents of the amended document.  To save the file using a different file name, click on

the Microsoft Office button and from the menu displayed, click on the Save As command.  This will display the Save As dialog box.  Use the file name:   Important Meeting.  Then save the file by clicking on the Save button.  You now have two versions of this file saved to your hard disk. 

• Close the document before continuing.