Project 1, Microsoft Word Capstone

CS 0131, Software for Personal Computing

Timothy J Parenti

Assigned: Friday 25 January 2013 Due: Tuesday 5 February 2013, 11:59pm EST

Introduction
This is the first project of the term, covering the features of Microsoft Word 2010. The project is split
into three distinct parts, each with a distinct purpose, and each beginning with a ‘P’:

1. Paying the Bills — Send out a simple form letter with mail merge.

2. Posting an Advertisement — Create a flyer with pull-tabs using tables.

3. Publishing a Book — Leverage our knowledge of Word to format a book for publication.

You may notice that each successive part allows you more creative latitude than the last — this is intentional!
Following a list of steps to create a specifically prescribed document is one thing, but actually using your
own judgment to create a professional-looking document is quite another. And that’s really the goal, isn’t
it? (This is where you politely nod in agreement.)
At the time this project is assigned, we won’t yet have finished covering Word, so there will probably be
a few things you won’t know how to do from the outset. Don’t fret! We’ll cover everything you need in
time. In the meantime, work on another part of the project or, if you’re really itching to get a head-start,
use Word’s Help feature to explore these new topics a bit before we cover them in class.
All of the documents you need for this project can be found on the “Projects” page of the course website
at http://people.cs.pitt.edu/~timparenti/teaching/cs0131/. The exact grading breakdown is to be
determined, but each successive part will be worth a greater proportion than the last. Submission instructions
are at the end of this document. All submissions are due Tuesday 5 February 2013, 11:59pm EST.

1 Paying the Bills

Here’s the scenario: You’re the manager of Mimi’s Steak and Seafood Restaurant in Richmond, Virginia.
Yours is a new business, and your first month has been a successful one, but now it’s time to pay the bills
to all the suppliers who delivered goods to you all month to keep your restaurant running.
Thankfully, your assistant has kept an up-to-date spreadsheet of your suppliers in Excel with contact infor-
mation and your running balance for each. Now, you just need to use Word to get some letters together so
you can thank them and send them their money.
You’d like to get these letters and payments out quickly, though, because you’ve got a lot on your plate
today: Acme Co. is having a corporate dinner with lots of important bigwigs in your banquet room tonight!
Fortunately, you’re familiar with Word’s Mail Merge features, so you’ll be back from the post office before
you know it and ready to tackle kitchen prep.

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 1. Download suppliers-letter.docx and suppliers.xlsx from the “Projects” page of the course web-
site.

2. Open the Word document and save it as suppliers-letter-main.docx.

3. Start a mail merge. You’re making letters, so select “Letters” as the merge type.

4. Select the recipients using an existing list. Find the suppliers.xlsx file, click Open , and make sure
to select the Sheet1$ table.

5. Insert the following merge fields:

a. In the blank paragraph below the date, insert an Address Block for the supplier’s address. Use
the default format.
b. In the salutation, after “Dear” but before the comma, insert the FirstName and LastName fields
so that the salutation will read something like, “Dear Deborah Smith,”.
c. After the first dollar sign in the second paragraph, insert the Balance field, which represents your
current balance with each supplier. Do the same after the second dollar sign as well.
d. After the word “of” in the first sentence of the second paragraph, insert the Specialty field, which
represents the type of good that each supplier delivers to you. The text will end up reading
something like, “...you delivered $955 of meat to our restaurant...”.

6. Click Preview Results to preview the merged letters. Make the following things bold, so they catch your
suppliers’ attention:

a. The date at the top of the letter,

b. The first dollar amount in the second paragraph, and
c. The words “January 2013”.

7. Fully justify the alignment of the three body paragraphs.

8. Position and format the lobster clip-art as follows:

a. Start by dragging it to the beginning of the first body paragraph, before “At”.
b. Set the text wrapping around the image to “Square”.
c. Horizontally position the image to be right-aligned relative to the margins, while leaving its
vertical position where it is.
Hint: The default choices under Picture Tools Format Position will affect the horizontal
and vertical positioning, which isn’t what you want. Instead, you’ll need more fine-
grained control of the positioning options. Where can you find it?

9. You only need to send payments to suppliers with a positive balance, so filter the recipient list based
on the criterion Balance > 0.

10. Replace “Student Name” in the signature of the letter with your own name.

11. Save the changes to your main document so you don’t have to do this again next month!

12. Merge all of the letters into a new file using Mailings Finish & Merge Edit Individual Documents and save
the resulting merge as suppliers-letter-merged.docx.

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2 Posting an Advertisement
What’s that? You’re not all aspiring restaurateurs? Alright; let’s do something more college-y, then.
One of the great things about college is all of the clubs and organizations you can join to experience different
cultures, meet like-minded friends, meet people from different backgrounds, or just have fun playing games!
Most of the time, you’ll hear about these events through word-of-mouth or some sort of advertisement.
Although nowadays, we could send out a Facebook blast, we’re learning Word, so we’ll go “old-school” and
create a poster for our event. The only problem is that once people see the poster, they might forget the
details. The solution: Pull-tabs!
Each of you is unique, so be creative and make this your poster for your event; just make sure to meet all
of the requirements. It doesn’t have to be a real event, but it doesn’t hurt if it is! Who knows? Maybe I’ll
be seeing your beautiful posters around campus!

1. Create a blank document in Word and save it as poster.docx.

2. Set the page margins to be 0.5” on all sides.
3. Create a table with three columns and five rows (that is, a 3 × 5 table), and adjust the sizes of the
cells as follows:
a. Give the first row a height of 1”.
b. Drag the bottom of the last row down as close to the bottom of the page as you can without
starting a new page.
c. Distribute the vertical space of the second through fifth rows. (Leave the first row alone!)
4. Select the entire table, and remove all borders from the all cells.
5. Set the alignment of all cells to be centered both horizontally and vertically.
6. Merge the cells in the first row, and type the name of your event. Format it as follows:
a. Use a bold, sans-serif font that’s readable from a distance (but not Calibri or Arial).
b. Make the font size as big as you can without increasing the height of the cell. (If the name of
your event is long, consider shortening it so you can use a roughly 50- or 60-point font.)
7. Find three pieces of clipart which are at least somewhat relevant to your event. Place them in the
table as follows:
a. Place your first image in either the leftmost or the rightmost cell of the second row. (Your choice!)
b. Place your second image in the opposing cell of the third row. That is, if you chose the leftmost
cell the first time, use the rightmost cell this time.
c. Place your third image in the fourth row on the same side as you placed the first image.
8. Resize your clipart so that each image fits in its cell.
Hint: By default, the cells will automatically resize to fit clipart that’s too large. We don’t
want this! In general, this means no dimension should be larger than 2” on any of your
clipart.
9. Now, let’s work on the body of the poster:
a. Merge the two empty cells in the second row and type a few words describing your event and
encouraging people to attend, like “Come join us at the annual student picnic!”
b. Merge the two empty cells in the third row and create a bulleted list with three things people will
do or see at the event, like “Eat good food”, “Have good fun”, and “Lots of games”.

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 c. Merge the two empty cells in the fourth row and type the location, date, and time of your event,
like “SENSQ 5502”, “Friday 30 August”, and “1:00 – 4:00pm”. Put a line break between each of
these three things.
10. Now, select those three rows, and format them as follows:
a. Use a different sans-serif font than your title (but still not Calibri or Arial).
b. Make the date bold so that it stands out from the location and the time.
c. Make the font size big enough to be readable, but not as big as your title. Again, you still want
your text to fit nicely in the cells, so choose your font size appropriately and rewrite your text as
necessary.
11. Notice that the bulleted list in the third row is centered horizontally. This isn’t good form, so let’s
correct that:
a. Make the horizontal alignment of that cell left-aligned.
b. Increase the left indent on your bulleted list until the list seems “visually centered” within the
cell. (You can eyeball this. For our purposes, it’s not important to get this positioning exactly
right, only that we maintain the visual appeal.)
12. Lastly, let’s make some pull-tabs:
a. Select the cells of the last row and split them into a total of 12 cells.
b. Change the text direction in the first cell of that row so that the text starts at the bottom of the
cell and continues up.
c. Type a very concise summary of the important information on your poster: The event name,
location, and the date/time. Use abbreviations to shorten the date if you need to. Put a line
break between each of these three things.
d. Choose a 10-point serif font for this cell (but not Times New Roman or Cambria). Underline the
event name and make it bold.
e. Copy this cell into the other eleven cells in the last row.
f. Select the entire last row and create a dashed border on the inside verticals so that you’ll know
where to cut the pull-tabs.
13. Save all changes to your document.

3 Publishing a Book
Guess what, class? We’re starting our own publishing company! . . . Okay, not really, but we’ll pretend
we are, and we’re pretty serious when it comes to pretending! We want our first publication to be something
fun, so why not Lewis Carroll’s 1865 nonsense classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ? After all, if we’re
playing pretend, we might as well go all out, and what better novel to choose than Alice, right? (Plus, it’s
in the public domain!)
It has been decided by your boss instructor that everyone should submit their own idea for how to format
the text of this book for its eventual publication. It would be a daunting task . . . were it not for your extensive
experience with Word!
As far as novels go, Alice is short, but it’s still a bit long to work with for this project, so we’ll work with some
excerpted chapters instead — but it’s still enough to gain an appreciation for all that goes into formatting
books. Here’s what you need to do to impress your boss instructor:

1. Download alice.docx from the “Projects” page of the course website and save the document as
alice-formatted.docx.

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 2. The very first thing you notice is that the text is given to you in 11-point Calibri. While that font is
suitable for the screen, it’s terrible for print. Change the Normal style accordingly:
a. Use a serif font at a size suitable for reading (but not Times New Roman or Cambria).
b. Make sure the alignment is fully justified.
c. The first line of each paragraph should be indented a moderate amount. (0.5” is probably too
much.)
d. Format the paragraphs to have a little more breathing room between the lines than the standard
1.15-spacing (but not so much space as to use 1.5-line or double-spacing).
e. Remove any extra spacing between individual paragraphs.
3. Choose a built-in color set for your styles (but not Office or Grayscale).
4. You notice that your headings are indented and fully justified, too. It must have been that those styles
were based on Normal. Change the Title and Subtitle styles so that each is left-aligned, and change
the Heading 1 style so that it’s centered. Make sure that none of these has a first-line indent.
5. Add some space after the paragraph in the Heading 1 style to set the chapter headings apart visually
from the text. Leave about enough space for a whole line of normal text.
Hint: There is a right way and a wrong way to do this, and unfortunately, they’re often
found right next to each other. Think carefully about what this step is and is not asking
for. In particular, think about what your heading would look like if a chapter title were long
enough to require two lines.
6. Make the Heading 1 style start a new page each time it’s used to start a new chapter. From the Modify
Style menu, go to Format Paragraph Line and Page Breaks and select “Page break before”.
7. While you’re here, customize the Title, Subtitle, and Heading 1 styles further with your selection of
suitable fonts and colors from your chosen color set. In particular, make sure these styles look good
together and with your Normal style. (Obviously, this is somewhat subjective, so be creative but
reasonable. Keep in mind the style priniciples we’ve learned in class.) Whatever you do, though, make
sure the alignment, indentation, and pagination changes you made above stay as they are.
8. A few pages into the document, you see some poetry that looks weird. The Poetry style must have
also been based on Normal. Let’s fix it up:
a. Left-justify the paragraph and indent from both margins by 0.75”.
b. Switch the first-line indent to a hanging indent of the same amount, since that’s more common
for poetry.
c. Add about half a line’s worth of space before and after paragraphs in this style.
d. Finish off by making the text italic, but keep the font the same as Normal.
9. Typically, we don’t print novels on 8.5” × 11” paper, so let’s change the size accordingly:
a. Go to Page Layout Margins Custom Margins .

b. Under “Multiple Pages”, select “Book Fold” so that we can print two pages per sheet.
c. Set the margins to be 0.5” on each side, except on the “inside”, where it should be 0.75” so the
text doesn’t disappear into the fold.
10. Insert page numbers in the footer of the document. Put a line break before the page number so that
the main text doesn’t get too close to it.
11. Insert a table of contents under the subtitle using an appropriate built-in format.
12. After Lewis Carroll’s name in the subtitle, insert a footnote that reads “Typeset especially for
CS 0131 by ” followed by your name.

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 13. Create a cover page using one of the built-in styles. Make sure the title reads “Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland”, the subtitle reads “Excerpts from Lewis Carroll’s Classic Novel”, and the author
field says “Typeset by ” followed by your name. If there are any other fields on your chosen cover
page style, delete them or make them blank.
14. Next, let’s add some artwork:

a. Go to the first chapter heading and press Enter to start a new paragraph below it.
b. Create a new paragraph style there called Artwork based on Normal. Change it to be centered
with no indentation of any kind, and add a couple line’s worth of space both before and after the
paragraph. The style for the following paragraph should be Normal.
c. Modify the Heading 1 style so that the style for the following paragraph is Artwork.
d. For each chapter, find one picture on the Internet that is at least somewhat related to the text.
Don’t forget where you found them!
e. Paste each image into the document right under the corresponding chapter heading. Note that,
since you’ve already defined the Artwork style to follow Heading 1, you’re automatically given a
properly-formatted, centered paragraph to paste the image into when you press Enter to start a
new paragraph below the heading.
15. We can’t just steal the artwork, though; after all, getting sued is a pretty bad way to start off your
work for a publishing company. Since this is only an educational exercise, we don’t have to worry
about securing the actual copyrights, but we should at least cite our sources:

a. Go to References Manage Sources and create a source of type “Web site” for each of the images you
found. Fill in as many of the bibliography fields as you can, but you must have at least Name of
Web Site, URL, and Date Accessed (year, month, day).
b. Go to the end of the document and add a bibliography in MLA Seventh Edition format.
c. Change the title of the bibliography to read “Artwork Sources”.

16. Save all changes to your document.

17. Create a blank document in Word. Type a 100- to 150-word justification for the particular stylistic
choices you made while formatting the book and save it as alice-justification.docx.

Submission
Use the “Assignment Submission” section in CourseWeb to submit your files for Project 1 by the deadline.
Please make sure you attach all of the following files to the same submission in CourseWeb:

1. suppliers-letter-main.docx

2. suppliers-letter-merged.docx
3. poster.docx
4. alice-formatted.docx
5. alice-justification.docx

If you need to resubmit for any reason, you must attach all files again. All submissions are due Tuesday
5 February 2013, 11:59pm EST.