The text offers numerous simple home improvement strategies to reduce stress. It suggests decluttering, organizing, and refreshing various areas, such as the kitchen, bedroom, and wardrobe. Specific actions include using a label maker, optimizing lighting, and incorporating calming scents. The overall goal is to create a more peaceful and organized home environment that promotes mental well-being. This is achieved through both practical tasks and mindful adjustments to one’s surroundings.
Stress Reduction at Home: A Study Guide
Quiz
Instructions: Answer each question in 2-3 sentences.
How can using scents like vanilla and lavender benefit someone trying to reduce stress in their home?
What is the connection between natural light and sleep regulation, according to the article?
Why might decluttering your mug collection reduce stress, even if the mugs are fun and festive?
What is the science behind why the scent of clean linen can trigger a calming effect?
In what ways does completing odd jobs around the house help to lower stress levels?
How can a label maker promote a sense of calm and clarity?
How does clutter or mess trigger the stress hormone cortisol, according to the text?
Why is it beneficial to switch to ambient lighting in living spaces and bedrooms?
Besides getting rid of the clutter, how does organizing a pantry boost your mental state?
How can a simple task like making a to-do list help with stress reduction?
Quiz Answer Key
Scents like vanilla and lavender have soothing properties that help calm the mind, ease stress, and promote relaxation. Additionally, they may evoke a sense of tranquility, creating a serene atmosphere within the home.
Natural light boosts serotonin production, which is important for regulating the body clock and ensuring better sleep at night. Without natural light, our body’s rhythms can be disrupted, which can lead to sleep issues.
An overabundance of mismatched mugs can cause visual stress and create a sense of disorder. Streamlining the collection simplifies daily decisions, which reduces mental clutter and can create a more organized and peaceful environment.
The scent of clean linen triggers a calming effect by evoking memories of cleanliness and order, which prompts the release of serotonin. This hormone enhances mood and reduces stress by lowering cortisol levels, creating a sense of well-being.
Completing tasks provides a sense of accomplishment, which boosts self-esteem and counters feelings of stress. Engaging in physical work releases endorphins, which are natural mood elevators, and controlling tasks gives a sense of control over one’s environment.
A label maker helps foster a sense of order and clarity by allowing individuals to organize their spaces efficiently and mark where things belong. This reduces daily frustrations caused by misplaced items, which creates a psychological lift.
Clutter and mess can trigger the release of the stress hormone cortisol, which leads to feelings of anxiety and being overwhelmed. Conversely, organized, clean spaces promote calmness and control, which lowers stress levels.
Soft, warm lighting promotes relaxation by creating a more calming atmosphere, while also reducing exposure to bright light that suppresses melatonin production. Creating a calm space can aid in better sleep and de-stressing.
Organizing the pantry not only gets rid of expired or unwanted items but also reduces stress by creating a sense of control and order. This simple act can release feel-good hormones, making the space and user feel more calm and in charge.
Making a to-do list allows you to exorcise stressors from your mind, which helps to manage them. Completing tasks and checking them off triggers a release of dopamine, a feel-good hormone that boosts productivity and motivation.
Essay Questions
Instructions: Answer each question in essay format, using information from the text and providing supporting details.
Discuss how multiple elements of home organization, such as decluttering, labeling, and completing odd jobs, contribute to reducing overall stress levels. How do these actions influence both the physical environment and mental well-being?
The article highlights the importance of sensory experiences, such as scent, light, and touch, in creating a relaxing home environment. Analyze how specific sensory elements can be used to actively promote a sense of calm and reduce stress levels.
Explain the psychological impact of maintaining order and organization in one’s home environment, citing specific examples from the text. How does creating a sense of control over one’s space contribute to emotional well-being?
The article emphasizes the value of not just physical decluttering, but also letting go of emotional attachments to objects. Discuss the role of both physical and sentimental decluttering in creating a more relaxed home environment.
Compare and contrast the various ways that changes to one’s home can address different stress triggers. How can implementing changes in areas like lighting, sound, and organization be used to target specific sources of anxiety?
Glossary of Key Terms
Cortisol: A stress hormone released by the body in response to stress, often associated with feelings of anxiety and being overwhelmed.
Serotonin: A neurotransmitter that regulates mood, sleep, and appetite; often referred to as the “happy” chemical.
Melatonin: A hormone that regulates the sleep-wake cycle and is essential for good sleep; its production is suppressed by bright light exposure.
Dopamine: A neurotransmitter that plays a role in pleasure and reward, motivating individuals to pursue activities that bring satisfaction.
Endorphins: Natural pain relievers and mood elevators produced by the body, often triggered by physical activity.
Ambient Lighting: Soft, warm lighting, typically used to create a relaxing atmosphere in a space; often uses lower lumen outputs.
Feng Shui: An ancient Chinese practice that involves arranging your surroundings to balance the natural world’s energies and promote health, happiness, and prosperity in your home.
Visual Stress: The mental fatigue or anxiety caused by an environment with too much visual clutter, disorganization, or distraction.
Tactile Comfort: The feeling of physical ease and pleasure that is derived from touching soft, cuddly, or comforting items.
Chi: According to Feng Shui, the positive energy that can flow through a space if it is organized appropriately.
Stress-Free Home: A Guide to Tranquility
Okay, here is a detailed briefing document summarizing the main themes and important ideas from the provided source, “Simple things you can change in your home right now to reduce stress.”
Briefing Document: Reducing Stress Through Home Transformation
Introduction:
This document summarizes key themes and actionable recommendations from the source text, which focuses on transforming a home environment to reduce stress and promote mental well-being. The central idea is that small, purposeful changes within the home can significantly impact mental state, creating a “sanctuary where you can recharge, breathe deeply, and feel at peace.” The article emphasizes that these changes are not just about tidiness, but about actively managing stress through environmental adjustments.
Main Themes and Key Ideas:
The Home as a Reflection of the Mind:
The document repeatedly draws a parallel between the state of one’s home and one’s mental state. Clutter, disorganization, and unfinished tasks are linked to increased stress and anxiety.
Quote: “Think of it as not just changing or tidying your home – but also changing and tidying your mind…”
The goal is to create a home environment that promotes calm and order, mirroring a more tranquil mental state.
The concept emphasizes that actively organizing and improving the home has an active and direct effect on mental health.
Stress Reduction Through Decluttering and Organization:
Decluttering is a recurring theme, encompassing various areas like mugs, surfaces, drawers, pantries, and sentimental items.
Quote: “Sorting out your mug selection not only declutters your space but also reduces visual stress, creating a more organised and pleasing environment.”
The act of sorting and organizing leads to a reduction in visual and mental clutter, thereby lowering stress levels.
Specific suggestions include streamlining collections, using label makers, and discarding expired or unwanted items.
The Power of Sensory Experiences:
The document highlights the impact of sensory elements on mood and relaxation. These include:
Scent: Using candles, incense, and diffusers with calming scents like vanilla and lavender, or invigorating scents like neroli and bergamot.
Quote: “…the scent of clean linen is proven to do wonders for the brain, as it instantly triggers a calming effect…”
Light: Switching from bright white to softer, warmer lighting to create a more relaxing atmosphere and promote better sleep.
Quote: “Swap bright white bulbs and fluorescent strips for softer, warmer lighting options with lower lumen output…”
Touch: Utilizing soft materials like plush blankets and pillows to reduce muscle tension and evoke a sense of comfort.
Quote: “…tactile comfort dramatically reduces muscle tension, and lowers stress hormones like cortisol…”
These elements are not just for aesthetics but are scientifically backed as being triggers for positive mental states.
The Importance of Physical Action and Completion:
Engaging in physical tasks, like cleaning, mending, and organizing, can be a stress reliever in several ways:
Completing tasks provides a sense of accomplishment.
Physical work increases endorphin production, boosting mood.
Taking control of household tasks offers a sense of stability.
Focusing on physical activities can promote mindfulness.
Quote: “…finishing tasks provides a sense of accomplishment which boosts self-esteem and counters feelings of stress.”
Creating Dedicated Spaces for Relaxation:
The concept of creating a “cosy corner” as a personal retreat is emphasized, providing a dedicated space for relaxation and unwinding.
This space can be tailored with comfortable seating, soft textures, greenery, and other elements that encourage tranquility.
It is suggested these spaces are not just physical but also psychological “sanctuaries.”
The Impact of Specific Objects and Areas:
The document provides specific recommendations for various areas of the house:
Bed Linen: Changing to clean linens can trigger positive responses through scent and associated memories of order.
Pantry: Organizing and decluttering the pantry reduces stress through visual order.
Entranceway: Streamlining the entranceway removes clutter, making for a welcoming environment, removing trip hazards, and improving mental state.
Bedroom: Removing the TV is a crucial step to improve sleep quality.
Surfaces & Drawers: Decluttering these areas removes visual and mental stressors.
Specific items like old tech and gym equipment are highlighted as potential sources of stress, advocating for their removal or repurposing.
Harnessing the Power of Time Management and Planning:
Using tools like clocks, calendars, and to-do lists are essential to reduce the stress caused by rushing and forgetting important tasks.
Creating a breakfast station is mentioned as a way of streamlining a stressful morning routine.
Quote: “Exorcising all these stresses from your mind by writing down a list of tasks is an effective way to work out what needs to be done.”
The benefits of Nature:
The article repeatedly notes the benefits of nature both in colour and the literal presence of plantlife.
Quote: “Greenery – literally the colour green – is perfect for calming an anxious mind…”
Quote: “Whether it’s reading, meditating, practising yoga, or simply watching the world go by, dial it down and let everything else fade away.” – Here the author is suggesting the presence of green plants are ideal in a space designed for calming activities.
Actionable Recommendations:
Start Small: Begin with small, manageable tasks to avoid feeling overwhelmed.
Prioritize: Focus on decluttering and organizing areas that cause the most stress.
Sensory Awareness: Be mindful of the impact of scents, lighting, and textures on your mood.
Regular Maintenance: Make decluttering and organizing a regular part of your routine.
Personalize: Tailor changes to reflect your preferences and create spaces that feel uniquely yours.
Conclusion:
The source text provides a comprehensive guide to transforming a home into a stress-reducing sanctuary. By focusing on decluttering, organization, sensory experiences, and physical action, individuals can actively shape their living environment to promote mental well-being. The key message is that small, consistent changes can have a significant positive impact on stress levels and overall quality of life, resulting in a space that promotes and assists relaxation and mindfulness.
Transforming Your Home into a Stress-Free Sanctuary
FAQ: Transforming Your Home into a Stress-Free Sanctuary
How can simply changing my home environment impact my stress levels?
Small changes in your home, such as decluttering, organizing, and creating a more aesthetically pleasing space, can significantly reduce stress. These actions create a sense of control and order, counteracting the chaos and overwhelm that often contribute to stress. A well-organized home also reduces visual stress, simplifies decision-making, and provides a sanctuary for relaxation, ultimately improving your mental well-being. By making these changes, you are not just changing your home, but also improving your mental state by creating an environment that is conducive to calmness.
What role do scents and lighting play in creating a calming home atmosphere?
Scents and lighting are powerful tools for influencing mood and reducing stress. Calming scents like vanilla and lavender promote relaxation, while invigorating scents such as neroli and bergamot can energize. The soft glow of candlelight or the gentle stream from a diffuser further enhances the ambiance, soothing the mind and promoting tranquility. Moreover, natural light boosts serotonin, which regulates your sleep cycle. Switching to softer, warmer lighting, especially in the evening, encourages melatonin production, aiding sleep and reducing stress by creating a calming atmosphere.
Why is decluttering and organizing so crucial for stress reduction, and what are some specific areas to focus on?
Clutter and disorganization trigger the release of cortisol, the stress hormone. Decluttering, on the other hand, promotes a sense of control and calmness. Focusing on areas such as mismatched mugs, surfaces, junk drawers, pantries, and even digital spaces can have a significant impact. A tidy environment creates a sense of order, reduces visual overwhelm, and can even simplify daily decisions. Organizing your pantry, for example, not only eliminates expired items but can also give you a feeling of accomplishment and control. The act of decluttering surfaces, like a workspace or desk, frees up mental space and improves productivity.
What are some simple home improvement tasks or ‘odd jobs’ that can reduce stress?
Completing household tasks, even small ones, can have a big impact on stress levels. Firstly, finishing tasks provides a sense of accomplishment and increases self-esteem. Secondly, engaging in physical activities involved in many odd jobs releases endorphins, natural mood elevators. Taking control of your home environment in this way creates a feeling of stability. Moreover, focusing on these tasks promotes present-mindedness and can be a form of mindfulness which can dramatically improve overall mental health. Just completing one task a day will noticeably improve your mood.
How does the use of tools like label makers and to-do lists help in managing stress at home?
Label makers help organize spaces and foster a sense of order and clarity, turning chaos into calmness. The act of labeling helps save time, reduces daily frustrations, and can be a mindful activity, offering a mental reprieve from stressors. Creating and using to-do lists to manage a long list of tasks is also a simple yet powerful way to alleviate stress, by helping to organize your thoughts and prioritize responsibilities. Checking items off a to-do list also releases dopamine, a feel-good hormone that further motivates you.
Beyond organizing and cleaning, what elements of home design can contribute to a more relaxing environment?
Elements like ambient lighting, greenery, soft textures, and cozy corners are vital in creating a more relaxing environment. Switching from harsh bright lights to softer, warmer light, especially in bedrooms, promotes a calmer atmosphere. Adding houseplants not only enhances air quality but the color green is soothing and promotes a sense of calm. Surrounding yourself with soft, plush textures such as pillows and blankets reduces muscle tension and evokes a sense of comfort and security. Creating a designated “cozy corner” provides a quiet retreat, perfect for relaxing, reading, or meditating. Feng Shui can also be applied to maximize your home’s energy flow and improve your sense of calm.
How can I address tech and digital clutter to reduce stress?
Outdated and noisy technology can contribute to stress. Recycling old tech helps reduce clutter, while quieter models promote peace. Managing cables and cords is essential, and doing this helps reduce visual clutter. Additionally, being mindful of where technology is used in the house helps alleviate stress, with bedrooms being spaces free of screens so you can wind down before bed.
How can I manage sentimental items and create a balance between holding onto memories and keeping a clutter-free environment?
It’s important to acknowledge the emotional attachments to items while still ensuring your home environment is free from unnecessary clutter. A good approach is to take photos of sentimental items that you are ready to let go of and then donate or sell them. The memories will remain without the physical clutter. It’s also beneficial to regularly refresh your living space to introduce new and stimulating elements. This helps to avoid having an environment that makes you feel stuck. Similarly, books that you have read, but will likely not return to, can be moved from your home, so they can be enjoyed by other readers.
Stress-Free Home: Declutter, Clean, and Calm
To reduce stress in your home, the sources suggest several actions you can take involving organization, cleanliness, and creating a calming atmosphere [1].
Here are some ways you can reduce stress in your home:
Declutter and organize [1]:
Donate mismatched mugs [2].
Declutter surfaces and clean out drawers [3].
Organize your pantry [4].
Let go of sentimental nicknacks by taking photos of them and then donating or selling the physical items [5].
Mend holey clothes and organize your wardrobe [6].
Streamline your entrance [7].
Clean your home [8]:
Clean your windows with a mixture of white vinegar and lemon [9].
Do a deep clean any time of year [8].
Discard expired items from your pantry [4].
Create a calming atmosphere [1]:
Light candles or use a diffuser with calming scents like vanilla and lavender [10].
Open windows to allow fresh air and natural light into your home [9].
Switch to ambient lighting, using softer, warmer light [11].
Create a cozy corner with soft pillows and blankets [12].
Surround yourself with soft and cuddly things [13].
Bask in the greenery of houseplants [14].
Swap loud machines for quieter tech [15].
Organize and label [16]:
Use a label maker to organize spaces [8, 16].
Control cables by using clips, holders, and ties [17].
Complete tasks [18]:
Finish odd jobs [18].
Start a to-do list [19].
Make changes to routines and spaces [20, 21]:
Create a breakfast station [20].
Put up a clock and calendar [21].
Move the TV out of the bedroom [22].
Feng shui your living spaces [23].
Sell unused gym equipment [24].
Refresh your wall art [25].
Recycle old tech [26].
These actions can help you transform your home into a more peaceful and stress-free environment by creating a sanctuary where you can recharge [1].
Decluttering for a Peaceful Home
To declutter your space, the sources suggest several actions that can help reduce stress and create a more organized and peaceful home environment [1].
Strategies for Decluttering:
Mismatched mugs: Streamline your mug collection by donating those that don’t fit your preferred style [2]. You can choose mugs that have a consistent color or design to add style without clutter [2].
Surfaces and drawers: Decluttering surfaces and drawers can improve mental clarity and reduce stress by lowering cortisol levels and triggering the release of dopamine [3].
Pantry: Empty your pantry, discard expired items, and donate unwanted but still usable food [4]. Organize the remaining items by shape, size, or use [4].
Sentimental items: If you have sentimental items that you no longer need or want, take photos of them and then donate or sell them [5]. This way you can keep the memories without keeping the physical clutter [5].
Wardrobe: Mend holey clothes, replace missing buttons, and polish shoes [6, 7]. Sell or donate clothes that no longer fit or make you happy [6]. Upcycle stained or damaged linens into pillowcases or cleaning rags [7].
Entrance: Remove everything from your entrance and only return essential items after cleaning. Donate or sell broken or unused items and invest in storage solutions like shoe racks and coat hooks .
Old books: Clearing out old books you won’t read again helps release dopamine, creating a serene space. Consider joining a local book swap to refresh your collection [8].
Cables: Use cable clips, holders, and ties to organize cords. Store less-used cables on hooks or in repurposed toilet paper rolls [9, 10].
Gym equipment: If you have gym equipment you do not use, sell it, rather than letting it take up space and cause stress [11].
Decluttering not only helps to create a more organized space but also reduces visual stress and simplifies daily decisions [2, 12]. It can provide a sense of accomplishment, which boosts self-esteem and counters feelings of stress [13]. The act of decluttering can also promote mindfulness and reduce the impact of stress [14].
Creating a Calming Home Ambience
To improve the ambience of your home, the sources suggest several strategies that focus on sensory experiences, lighting, and creating a comfortable and calming environment. Here are some ways you can enhance your home’s ambience:
Use Scents:Light candles, use incense sticks, a wax melt burner, or a scented air diffuser to fill your space with calming or invigorating scents [1].
Soothing scents like vanilla and lavender can help calm you, while invigorating scents such as neroli and bergamot can energize [1].
The soft flicker of candlelight or the steam from a diffuser can also enhance the atmosphere and promote tranquility [1].
Incorporate Fresh Air and Natural Light:Open windows to allow fresh air to rejuvenate you and boost your mood [2].
Natural light is important for boosting serotonin, which helps regulate your body clock and improve sleep [2].
Clean windows to enhance the effect of natural light [2].
Adjust Lighting:Switch from bright white or fluorescent lights to softer, warmer lighting with lower lumen output, especially in living spaces and bedrooms [3].
This type of lighting can create a more relaxing atmosphere for unwinding and soothing the mind [3].
Using softer light in the evening can help promote melatonin release, aiding in sleep [4].
Create a Cozy Corner:Designate a comfortable spot with soft pillows, plush blankets, green plants, and scented flowers to create a peaceful retreat [5].
This space can be used for reading, meditating, or simply relaxing [5].
Add Soft and Cuddly Items:Surround yourself with soft and cuddly items, as tactile comfort reduces muscle tension and lowers stress hormones [6].
These items can create a psychological sense of security and promote relaxation [6].
Incorporate Greenery:Add houseplants to your home to help calm an anxious mind, reduce cortisol, and promote serotonin [7].
Plants can also boost air quality [7].
Choose low-maintenance plants like peace lilies or snake plants [8].
Control Noise:Replace noisy appliances with quieter, more energy-efficient models [9].
Reducing auditory stress enhances overall well-being, creating a more peaceful living space [9].
Use Clean Linen
The scent of clean linen can trigger a calming effect and enhance mood [10].
This is because the aroma evokes memories of cleanliness and order and it also sets off a release of serotonin [10].
By incorporating these elements, you can create a home environment that is more relaxing and conducive to reducing stress.
Home and Mind: Creating a Calming Sanctuary
To boost your mental well-being, the sources suggest several interconnected strategies that focus on creating a calm, organized, and comfortable home environment, as well as engaging in mindful activities and completing tasks [1]. These strategies can positively affect your mood, reduce stress, and enhance your overall mental health.
Here’s how you can boost your mental well-being, drawing on the information in the sources and our previous discussion:
Create a calming and organized space:
Decluttering is essential for reducing stress and promoting mental clarity. This can involve donating mismatched mugs [2], decluttering surfaces and drawers [3], organizing your pantry [4], letting go of sentimental items [5], mending and organizing your wardrobe [6], and streamlining your entrance [7]. Decluttering can reduce visual stress and simplify daily decisions [2, 3, 8].
Organizing your space can create a sense of order and clarity. The sources suggest using a label maker to organize various spaces [9, 10] and controlling cables to reduce visual clutter [11, 12].
A clean home can promote calmness and control, as clutter and mess can trigger cortisol, the stress hormone [10]. Cleaning windows [13], doing a deep clean [10] and discarding expired items from the pantry are all recommended [4].
Enhance your home’s ambience:
Incorporate calming scents by lighting candles, using incense, or a diffuser with scents like vanilla and lavender, which can soothe and promote relaxation [14].
Maximize natural light by opening windows, which also brings in fresh air that can boost your mood. Cleaning windows will further enhance this effect [13].
Adjust lighting by switching to softer, warmer light, particularly in living spaces and bedrooms. This can help promote relaxation and better sleep [3, 15].
Create a cozy corner with soft pillows, blankets, plants, and flowers where you can relax [16].
Surround yourself with soft and cuddly items, as tactile comfort can reduce muscle tension and lower stress [17].
Add plants to your home as greenery has a calming effect, and can reduce cortisol while promoting serotonin [12].
Control noise by swapping out loud appliances for quieter models [18].
Use clean linen which has a calming effect due to the scent and the association with order [8].
Engage in mindful activities:
Completing tasks, such as finishing odd jobs, provides a sense of accomplishment and boosts self-esteem [19].
Making a to-do list can help you organize your tasks and provides a sense of achievement when you check things off, releasing dopamine [20, 21].
Creating labels can be a mindful activity that helps you to divert your attention from stressors [9].
Make changes to routines and spaces:Create a breakfast station to streamline your mornings [22].
Put up a clock and calendar to help manage time and reduce stress from rushing [23].
Move the TV out of the bedroom to improve sleep quality by preventing exposure to blue light and stimulating content [21].
Use Feng Shui to arrange your living spaces to optimize energy flow and promote health and happiness [24].
Sell unused gym equipment to remove reminders of what you have not done and to reduce clutter [25].
Refresh wall art by changing out old or dated pictures to rejuvenate your space [26].
Recycle old tech [27].
Focus on personal well-beingMend clothes and organize your wardrobe [6].
Streamline your entrance so it is more welcoming [7].
Swap read books for unread ones [28].
By incorporating these strategies, you can create a home environment that supports mental well-being, promotes relaxation, and helps you feel more in control of your life and surroundings. These changes work to not only organize your space but also improve your mood and reduce stress levels [1, 3].
Time Management and Stress Reduction Strategies
To effectively manage your time and reduce stress, the sources suggest several strategies that focus on organization, planning, and creating a structured environment. Here’s how you can better manage your time, drawing from the sources and our previous discussions:
Use a to-do list [1, 2]:
Writing down tasks helps to organize what needs to be done [2].
Organize your to-do list by priority or into categories like “Today,” “This Week,” “This Month,” and “This Year” to tackle tasks systematically [2].
Completing tasks and checking them off releases dopamine, a feel-good hormone, which can boost productivity [3].
Establish routines:
Creating a breakfast station can streamline your morning routine, making it easier to start the day without added stress [4]. This helps you to be more efficient at the start of the day [4].
Streamlining your entrance also ensures that you’re not spending time searching for items as you leave the house [5].
Use time-management tools:
Put up a clock and a calendar to help you manage your time and avoid being late or forgetting engagements [6].
Set alarms for important events and tasks, and sync your calendar with family members’ schedules to streamline coordination [6].
Complete tasks:
Finishing odd jobs provides a sense of accomplishment, boosting self-esteem and reducing stress [1].
Mending clothes and organizing your wardrobe also offers a sense of productivity, and can lead to extra cash if you sell unwanted items [7].
Reduce visual clutter:
Decluttering your home and work spaces can improve mental clarity and reduce stress [8, 9]. This can involve donating mismatched mugs, decluttering surfaces and drawers, and organizing your pantry [8-10].
Using a label maker to organize spaces can also save time and reduce frustration from misplaced items [11].
Controlling cables by using clips, holders, and ties helps to organize your space, reducing stress [12].
Create a calming environment:
A calm and organized space can help you feel more in control of your surroundings, reducing feelings of being overwhelmed [11, 13, 14].
Lighting can have a big impact on your mood and sense of well-being, so swap bright lights for warmer, softer options, especially in living and sleeping areas [15].
Make a cozy corner for relaxation with soft pillows, plush blankets, and plants, where you can spend some time unwinding [16].
Adding greenery to your home can reduce stress and promote calmness [17].
Prioritize well-being:
Move the TV out of the bedroom to improve sleep, which is essential for managing stress [3].
Feng Shui your living spaces to optimize energy flow and create a more harmonious environment [18].
Sell unused gym equipment to eliminate reminders of uncompleted goals [19].
Swap read books for unread ones [20] and refresh your wall art [21] to avoid feelings of stagnation and stress.
Recycle old tech, which is often cumbersome and less energy efficient [22].
By incorporating these time management strategies, you can create a more structured, efficient, and stress-free daily life that promotes overall well-being.
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This text recounts the life of Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism, emphasizing his early life, work as an accountant, and spiritual journey. It highlights his emphasis on the unity of all humans, regardless of religious affiliation, and his travels across vast distances to spread this message. The text details his rejection of caste systems and traditional religious practices, advocating for a life of service and love for all creation. His final years in Kartarpur are described, along with the lasting impact of his teachings on Hindu-Muslim relations and the establishment of the Kartarpur Corridor. Finally, the text posits that Guru Nanak’s primary mission was fostering unity between Hindus and Muslims.
The Life and Teachings of Guru Nanak: A Study Guide
Quiz
Answer the following questions in 2-3 sentences each:
What is the significance of Nankana Sahib in relation to Guru Nanak?
According to the text, what does Guru Nanak say about the true meaning of religion?
Describe Guru Nanak’s childhood education and its influence on his perspectives.
What significant event led to the establishment of Sachya Sauda?
What role did Nanaki play in Guru Nanak’s life, and how did she help him find employment?
Describe the incident when Guru Nanak was counting to thirteen, and how this relates to his views on God.
How did Guru Nanak’s views on religion differ from the prevailing traditions of his time, as evidenced by his actions at the mosque?
What are some of the key teachings of Guru Nanak concerning the human condition and spiritual growth?
Explain the significance of Guru Nanak’s extensive travels and the areas he covered.
How did Guru Nanak’s approach to religious unity contrast with the Deen Ilahi proposed by Emperor Akbar, and who did he name as his successor?
Quiz Answer Key
Nankana Sahib is significant because it is the birthplace of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. It is revered as a sacred site, and the text mentions that Nankana holds the pride of being the place where Guru Nanak was born.
Guru Nanak believes that the true meaning of religion lies not in rituals or outward appearances but in living a life of service, caring for all human beings, and recognizing the divine within oneself. He rejects the superficial aspects of religious practice.
Guru Nanak’s initial education was according to traditional Hindu religion, but he questioned the norms from a young age. He surprised his teacher with philosophical and Sufi insights, indicating an early inclination towards a more universal understanding of the divine.
The Sachya Sauda event occurred when Guru Nanak spent money given to him by his father on hungry sadhus. When confronted for returning empty-handed, he described this act as a true deal in the name of God, and now, a Gurdwara named Sachya Sauda exists at that location.
Nanaki was Guru Nanak’s elder sister who loved him deeply. She played a crucial role in getting him a government job in Sultanpur, recognizing his capabilities and wanting to help him find employment to please her father.
The incident of counting to 13 illustrates Guru Nanak’s belief that God is everywhere. He repeatedly said “Tera” (which means 13), referring to all as “thine.” This caused confusion but ultimately demonstrates his belief in the ubiquity of the divine.
Guru Nanak challenged prevailing religious traditions by asserting that there is neither Hindu nor Muslim, but only human beings. This is shown when he went to a Mosque to pray, emphasizing the core message that God is for all and does not require religious labels or practices.
Guru Nanak teaches to overcome the five weaknesses (anger, greed, attachment, ego, and lust), control desires, remain calm in adversity, and realize that God resides within every human being. He emphasized love, service, and truth as essential aspects of spiritual growth.
Guru Nanak’s travels were extensive and spanned across India, Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka, and parts of the Middle East. These journeys aimed to spread his message of unity and love, and exposed him to diverse cultures and religious beliefs, thus contributing to his worldview.
Guru Nanak’s approach to religious unity differed from Deen Ilahi in that it focused on a more grassroots, spiritual unity rather than a syncretic, state-sponsored religion. He emphasized a faith of love and service, rather than royal decree and tradition. He named Bhai Lahna as his successor, renaming him Guru Angad, before his passing.
Essay Questions
Analyze the ways in which Guru Nanak’s life experiences, both within and outside of traditional religious structures, shaped his philosophical and theological views.
Discuss the key elements of Guru Nanak’s teachings that emphasize social equality and unity, and examine how these concepts challenge the social hierarchies and religious divisions of his time.
Compare and contrast Guru Nanak’s approach to spiritual enlightenment with other religious and philosophical traditions discussed in the text.
Explore the significance of Guru Nanak’s extensive travels and assess their impact on the development and spread of his teachings.
Evaluate the contemporary relevance of Guru Nanak’s message of unity and humanism in a world still grappling with religious and cultural conflict.
Glossary of Key Terms
Bani: The divine word or teachings in Sikhism, specifically referring to the hymns and verses composed by the Sikh Gurus.
Guru Granth Sahib: The central religious scripture of Sikhism, regarded as the living Guru, and containing the teachings and writings of the Sikh Gurus and other saints.
Khalsa: The collective body of initiated Sikhs, committed to upholding the values of Sikhism.
Langar: The community kitchen in a Gurdwara, which provides free meals to all, regardless of background, exemplifying the principle of selfless service.
Murshad: A spiritual guide or teacher, especially in Sufism.
Nafs: The ego, the lower self or desires of an individual.
Sadhus: Wandering ascetics, often associated with Hinduism, who have renounced worldly life in pursuit of spiritual liberation.
Sachya Sauda: A term meaning “true bargain”, referring to a place where Guru Nanak spent money to feed others, considered a true deal in the name of God and thus a sacred place.
Sufi/Sufism: A mystical form of Islam that emphasizes the inner, spiritual dimensions of faith and the love for God.
Yogi: A practitioner of yoga, a spiritual discipline aimed at achieving union with the divine.
Baba Guru Nanak Dev Ji: Life, Teachings, and Legacy
Okay, here is a briefing document summarizing the key themes and ideas from the provided text about Baba Guru Nanak Dev Ji:
Briefing Document: Baba Guru Nanak Dev Ji
Date: October 26, 2023
Subject: Analysis of the life, teachings, and legacy of Baba Guru Nanak Dev Ji, drawing from the provided text.
1. Introduction:
This document analyzes the provided text focusing on the life, philosophy, and impact of Baba Guru Nanak Dev Ji, the founder of Sikhism. The text highlights his birth, upbringing, spiritual journey, and his core message of unity and love, emphasizing his role as a bridge between Hindu and Muslim traditions.
2. Early Life and Influences:
Birth and Family: Baba Nanak was born on April 15, 1469, in a Hindu Khatri family in Talwandi, Shivpura (now Nankana Sahib). His parents were Mehta Kalyan Chand Ramdas Bedi Khatri (also known as Kaluram) and Mata Tripat. He had an elder sister, Bibi Nanaki, who played a significant role in his life.
“This beautiful flower named Nanak bloomed on 15 April 1469 14 69 in a Hindu Khatri clan of Moza Rai Talwandi of Shivpura.”
Early Education and Spirituality: Nanak’s early education was rooted in Hindu tradition, but he demonstrated an unconventional understanding from a young age. He questioned rituals and emphasized the unity of all creation. His philosophical insights even surprised his teachers.
“Then little Nanak He said to his master Pandit Gopal ji, quoting the unity of the universe, that there is God’s light in every part of it, every bit of the universe is connected to the other, love is the name of this object, this is history, development is calculated, number from one, universe is one unity.”
Exposure to Sufism: Nanak was also influenced by Sufi teachings. He learned Persian from a Maulvi Syed Hasan, which facilitated his understanding and translation of Sufi texts.
“Nanak’s language skills increased so much that he started translating Sufi’s Kalam into literary Punjabi and adapting it into poetry…”
3. Spiritual Journey and Key Teachings:
Rejection of Rituals: Baba Nanak rejected the notion that religion is defined by external symbols or practices like yoga attire, sacred threads, or pilgrimages. He emphasized the importance of a life dedicated to service and compassion.
“There is no religion in wearing the sacred clothes of yoga, nor is there religion in holding on to it…The secret of religion lies in living a life of service without making things the purpose of life.”
Equality and Unity: He taught that all human beings are equal and children of God, regardless of caste, religion, or social status. He stressed the importance of inner purification by overcoming weaknesses like anger and greed, rather than focusing on outward appearance.
“All human beings are children of God. There is no high caste or low caste…The one who wants to recognize God should first identify himself because God or God resides within every human being.”
“Neither Hindu nor Muslim”: A pivotal moment came after his disappearance while bathing in the river. Upon his return, he declared that there is no difference between Hindus and Muslims; humanity is one. This core idea emphasizes the unity of all people in the eyes of God.
“He said amazing things, no one is a Hindu or a Muslim, everyone is only a human being, God is only a human being, God is neither a Hindu nor a Muslim…”
Emphasis on True Worship: Nanak stressed that true worship is not about rituals but about having a kind heart, a pure spirit, and living truthfully. He said mosques are sacred only when God’s mercy is felt there, and prayers are valid only when they are offered with genuine devotion.
“A mosque is a mosque only when God’s mercy actually descends there. Namaz is a prayer only when God’s permission is worshiped and Therefore, the Quran is included in it only when your morals and thoughts understand it.”
Love and Service: The essence of his message is service to humanity motivated by love, echoing Sufi ideals of devotion and transcending religious boundaries.
“Everyone’s good and bad qualities will be examined. This beautiful flower named Nanak bloomed on 15 April 1469.”
4. Life in Sultanpur and Beyond:
Employment and “Sachya Sauda”: Nanak worked as an accountant in Sultanpur Lodia for about 20 years, and during this period, his practice of giving away his earnings led to the establishment of a “Sachya Sauda” (true deal) a place where people could receive help. He also continued his spiritual practice of teaching and singing hymns.
“When Baap asked Shitabi the reason for his return, he said, Bapu, I have made a true deal in the name of God. Today, at this very place, a Gurudwara in the name of Sachya Sauda exists till the end of the world.”
Extensive Travels (Udasis): After leaving his job, Nanak traveled extensively throughout India and beyond, spreading his message. The text mentions his travels from Assam to Sri Lanka, and to various regions in the Middle East, including Mecca and Baghdad, covering an estimated 28,000 kilometers on foot.
“They traveled long distances all over India, from Assam to Ayodhya, to Nepal and Tibet, from there to the border of Sri Lanka, from Multan to the fall of Pakistan, in which fields these men, the dervishes, reaped the fruits of their journeys, from Tashkent, to Shamo, Canaan, to Shalam, Jordan, to Egypt. Reached Makama from Mecca, Medina to Baghdad, Arak Najaf, Karbala.”
5. Kartarpur and Final Years:
Settlement in Kartarpur: Baba Nanak spent his last 18 years in Kartarpur (present-day Pakistan), living with his family, farming, and continuing his spiritual guidance. He established a community based on his teachings.
“You spent the last 18 years of your life in Mauza Kartarpur in the present district of Narowal, where you settled down with your wife and children and along with farming, followed your religious beliefs and thoughts and beliefs.”
Langars (Community Kitchens): He initiated the concept of “langar” (community kitchen) to serve all, without any discrimination, reflecting his commitment to equality and service.
“Baba Ji had built two big langar mines in Kartarpur and Dera Nanak. In which closed songs were used to serve God.”
Succession: Before his death, Baba Nanak appointed Bhai Lahna (Guru Angad) as his successor, symbolizing spiritual unity instead of a bloodline or caste.
“He considered Guru Anga as his body not in a racial sense but in a spiritual or spiritual sense…”
6. Legacy and Impact:
Unifying Figure: Baba Nanak is portrayed as a unifying force between Hindu and Muslim traditions. He is seen as a bridge between these religions, promoting love and understanding.
“Baba Nanak’s Sikhism or Aqidah. In the eyes of the dervish, the bridge over the Ravi that has been constructed between Kartarpur and Dera Baba Nanak is not worthy of being called slow. Symbolically, it should be named Baba Nanak Love Bridge.”
Enduring Relevance: His message of universal love and service continues to resonate. The Kartarpur Corridor, allowing visa-free access to his shrine, is presented as a symbol of this enduring message, promoting peace and unity between India and Pakistan.
“The peace plan through the Kartarpur road has become a part of the Srini of love despite all the recent tensions between Pakistan and India. This is the road to peace from where 5000 passengers travel on a daily basis without any VJ fee of one dollar to the government of Pakistan.”
Influence on Sikhism: He laid the foundation of Sikhism, emphasizing a formless God, selfless service, and equality for all. His teachings continue to inspire millions across the world.
7. Conclusion:
Baba Guru Nanak Dev Ji emerges as a figure of profound spiritual insight, whose life was dedicated to the promotion of unity, love, and service. He challenged religious dogma and emphasized the importance of inner transformation and compassion as the core of a meaningful life. The text presents him not just as the founder of Sikhism but also as a unifying figure for humanity, whose teachings remain deeply relevant today. He left an impact on many people across diverse traditions and continues to inspire through his message of love and understanding.
Baba Nanak Dev Ji: Life, Teachings, and Legacy
Frequently Asked Questions about Baba Guru Nanak Dev Ji Maharaj
What is the significance of Baba Nanak’s birthplace, Nankana Sahib? Nankana Sahib is revered as the birthplace of Baba Guru Nanak Dev Ji Maharaj, the founder of Sikhism. This location holds immense importance as it was the starting point of his spiritual journey and teachings of peace, brotherhood, friendship, and love. It is a symbol of the origins of his mission.
What were some of Baba Nanak’s core teachings about religion? Baba Nanak emphasized that true religion lies not in rituals, attire, or outward practices, but in living a life of service to humanity. He rejected the notion that religion is found in specific places, acts, or symbols, like wearing religious garb or taking baths in holy places. Instead, he preached that the essence of religion is in caring for all human beings, treating everyone equally, and performing good deeds.
How did Baba Nanak’s early life and education influence his philosophy? Baba Nanak’s early education began within traditional Hindu customs, but he quickly questioned these norms, suggesting a unity in the universe at a very young age. He also learned from a Maulvi, which broadened his linguistic skills and exposed him to Sufi teachings, which he translated and adapted into Punjabi poetry. His experiences and studies across different traditions helped shape his inclusive philosophy.
What does the “Sachya Sauda” incident reveal about Baba Nanak’s values? The “Sachya Sauda” (True Deal) incident, where young Nanak spent money given to him for business on hungry saints instead, illustrates his deep compassion and emphasis on selfless service. He regarded this act of generosity as a true trade with God, showing his commitment to serving others over worldly gain. The place where the incident occurred is now a Gurudwara with the same name.
What was the significance of Baba Nanak’s time in Sultanpur? During his approximately 20 years in Sultanpur, where he worked as an accountant, Baba Nanak continued his spiritual pursuits while learning and teaching. He is said to have expanded his understanding of many languages, developed relationships with both Hindus and Muslims, and had many non-ordinary experiences. Most importantly, it was during his time in Sultanpur that he experienced a deep spiritual revelation which led to his statement “There is no Hindu, no Muslim”.
What was the meaning of his declaration, “There is no Hindu, no Muslim”? This statement, made after a spiritual experience, emphasized that all human beings are equal, regardless of their religious background. It highlighted his belief that God is not confined to a single religion but is for all of humanity. It urged people to look beyond the boundaries of religious labels and seek a path of devotion and service to God.
What kind of journeys did Baba Nanak undertake and what impact did they have? Baba Nanak traveled extensively, walking an estimated 28,000 kilometers, throughout India and beyond, including travels to the Middle East. These travels were a mission to share his message of unity and love with people of all faiths. His journeys exposed him to various cultures and beliefs, and solidified his reputation as a selfless sage, dervish, and teacher and also spread his message of love to all the people he met on these journies.
Why did Baba Nanak choose Bhai Lahna as his successor instead of his sons? Baba Nanak appointed Bhai Lahna as his successor (Guru Angad) not based on family ties but on his spiritual merit. He considered Guru Angad to be a part of his own body, emphasizing the spiritual over the physical lineage, setting a precedent that highlighted the focus on religious leadership rather than familial succession. This emphasizes the deep focus on the teachings and legacy rather than family.
Guru Nanak: Life and Legacy
Okay, here’s the timeline and cast of characters based on the provided text:
Timeline of Events
1469, April 15: Nanak is born in Moza Rai Talwandi (Nankana Sahib) to Mehta Kalyan Chand (Kaluram) and Mata Tripat, a Hindu Khatri family. His elder sister, Bibi Nanaki, is already 5 years old.
c. 1475: Nanaki marries and moves to Sultanpur Lodhi.
Age 7: Nanak is enrolled in village school but demonstrates advanced philosophical thinking, questioning the master.
Age 9: Nanak begins showing trouble with his peers due to his philosophical outlook.
Around Age 9: Nanak is taught Persian by Maulvi Syed Hasan at the suggestion of Balaj Rai, the landlord. He becomes proficient and begins translating Sufi poetry.
Late Childhood/Early Teens: Nanak spends the money given to him for business on hungry sadhus and returns home empty-handed, declaring it a “true deal in the name of God.” This event leads to the founding of Gurudwara Sachya Sauda.
Age 16: Nanak moves to Sultanpur Lodhi at the urging of his sister, Nanaki.
Age 16-36 He works as an accountant for Nawab Daulat Khan Lodi, where he is known for his honesty, but also shows non-traditional behavior and beliefs.
1487, September 24 (Age 18): Nanak marries Sulakhni, the daughter of Khana Abadi Mil Chand and Chandu Rani, and they have two sons.
1494, September 8: Nanak’s first son, Srichand, is born.
1497, February 12: Nanak’s second son, Lakhmi Chand, is born.
Approx. Age 36 Nanak quits his job in Sultanpur Lodi after a transformative experience by the river, during which he had gone missing for three days, then declares that “there is no Hindu, no Muslim.”
After Age 36 Nanak travels widely, visiting various religious sites and engaging with many religious leaders of different traditions.
Later Life: Nanak settles in Kartarpur with his family and engages in farming while continuing his religious work.
Age 70, September 22, 1539 Nanak passes away in Kartarpur. Before his death, he appoints Bhai Lehna as his successor, who becomes Guru Angad.
Cast of Characters
Nanak (Baba Guru Nanak Dev Ji Maharaj): The central figure; founder of Sikhism. Born a Hindu Khatri, he is portrayed as a philosopher, poet, mystic, and religious innovator who advocates for the unity of all people and the worship of one God, beyond religious distinctions. He rejects ritualism and emphasizes love, service, and truth. He traveled widely to spread his message and engaged with both Hindu and Muslim religious leaders.
Mehta Kalyan Chand (Kaluram): Nanak’s father, a Patwari (land record keeper). He is a Hindu Khatri, and concerned for Nanak’s education and career.
Mata Tripat: Nanak’s mother, a Hindu Khatri.
Bibi Nanaki: Nanak’s elder sister. She is five years older than Nanak and married in Sultanpur Lodhi. She is very loving towards Nanak and facilitates his employment in Sultanpur.
Shobharam: Nanak’s grandfather.
Laluram: Nanak’s uncle.
Pandit Gopal: Nanak’s first school teacher, whom Nanak surprises with his philosophical knowledge at the age of seven.
Balaj Rai: The landlord of Talwandi who, impressed by Nanak’s talents, recommends he learn Persian from a Muslim Maulvi.
Maulvi Syed Hasan: A childless Maulvi who teaches Nanak Persian.
Nawab Daulat Khan Lodi: The Governor or representative of the Delhi Sultanate in Sultanpur Lodhi, where Nanak is employed as an accountant. He is tolerant of Nanak’s unorthodox views.
Sulakhni (Mata Sulakhni): Nanak’s wife. They marry in 1487 and have two sons.
Srichand: Nanak’s elder son, born in 1494
Lakhmi Chand: Nanak’s younger son, born in 1497.
Mardana: A Muslim friend of Nanak, who accompanies him in his travels and in religious activities.
Bhai Lehna (Guru Angad): Nanak’s successor, who becomes the second Guru.
Akbar (Jalaluddin Mohammad Akbar): Mughal emperor who, like Nanak, attempted to promote unity among religions, though through political means with his Deen Ilahi, which ultimately was not successful.
Iqbal: A national poet who called Nanak “Noor Ibrahim” and “Marde Kamal”.
Bala: Mentioned as a companion to Nanak with whom he sang love songs
This information should provide a good understanding of the key events and people discussed in the text. Let me know if you have any other questions!
The Life and Teachings of Baba Nanak
Baba Nanak was born on April 15, 1469, in Moza Rai Talwandi of Shivpura, to a Hindu Khatri family [1]. His father, Mehta Kalyan Chand Ramdas Bedi Khatri, also known as Kaluram, was a Patwari, and his mother was Mata Tripat, who was also a Hindu Khatri [1]. Baba Nanak had an older sister named Bibi Nanaki, who was five years older than him [1].
Early Life and Education:
Nanak’s early education was based on traditional Hindu teachings [2].
At the age of seven, Nanak surprised his teacher, Pandit Gopal, with his philosophical views on the unity of the universe [2].
He was then taught Farsi by a Maulvi Syed Hasan, which enhanced his language skills and allowed him to translate Sufi poetry into Punjabi [2].
Marriage and Employment:
In 1475, his sister Nanaki married and moved to Sultanpur Lodhi [2].
At the age of 16, Nanak moved to Sultanpur on the instructions of his father and was employed as an accountant for Nawab Daulat Khan Lodi [3].
Nanak’s brother-in-law was already employed there [3].
Nanak married Sulakhni, daughter of Khana Abadi Mil Chand and Chandu Rani, on September 24, 1487, at the age of 18 [3]. She is known as Mata Sulakhni in Sikhism [3].
Nanak and Sulakhni had two sons, Srichand, born in 1494, and Lakhmi Chand, born in 1497 [3].
Nanak spent about 20 years in Sultanpur, continuing his educational activities and learning various languages [3].
Religious and Philosophical Development:
Nanak questioned traditional religious practices from a young age, asserting that true religion lies in serving others rather than rituals [1].
He believed that God is neither Hindu nor Muslim, but a universal being, and that all humans are children of God [4, 5].
Nanak emphasized that the essence of religion is in living a life of service and equality [1].
He was influenced by both Hindu and Muslim traditions, particularly the teachings of Muslim Sufis and Dervishes [4, 5].
Nanak’s teachings focused on overcoming the five weaknesses of anger, greed, attachment, ego and desire, and finding God within oneself [5, 6].
He emphasized the importance of truthfulness, good deeds, and a kind heart [4, 5].
He believed that all creatures worship God, and that God is present everywhere [6].
Travels and Teachings:
Nanak traveled extensively throughout India, including Assam, Ayodhya, Nepal, Tibet, and Sri Lanka [7].
He also visited various religious sites in the Middle East, such as Tashkent, Canaan, Jordan, Egypt, Mecca, Medina, Baghdad, Arak Najaf and Karbala [7].
It is estimated that he traveled about 28,000 kilometers on foot [7].
Nanak’s travels helped him spread his message of peace, brotherhood, and love [1, 8].
He engaged with people from various religions and backgrounds, promoting unity and understanding [4, 5].
Final Years:
Nanak spent the last 18 years of his life in Kartarpur, where he farmed and continued his religious activities [1, 7].
He established a community and a Langar (free kitchen) in Kartarpur [9].
Nanak did not appoint his sons as his successors; instead, he chose Bhai Lahna, who became Guru Angad [10].
He considered Guru Angad as a part of his own body in a spiritual sense [10].
Baba Nanak died in Kartarpur on September 22, 1539, at the age of 70 [10].
Legacy:
Baba Nanak’s teachings emphasize the unity of humanity, regardless of religion or caste [5, 8].
His message continues to inspire people worldwide, promoting peace, love, and service to others [8].
He is considered a bridge between Hinduism and Islam [9].
The Kartarpur corridor, which allows pilgrims to visit his shrine without a visa, is a testament to his message of unity and peace [8].
His life and teachings are central to Sikhism, and he is revered as the first Guru [10].
Baba Nanak: A Bridge Between Religions
Baba Nanak’s life and teachings emphasized the unity of humanity, aiming to bridge the divide between Hindus and Muslims [1, 2]. He believed that God is neither Hindu nor Muslim, but a universal being [3].
Key aspects of Baba Nanak’s approach to Hindu-Muslim unity include:
Rejection of Rituals: Nanak rejected the rituals and outward practices of both religions, stating that true religion lies in serving others and living a life of service [3, 4]. He believed that the essence of religion was not in sacred clothes, ashes, or pilgrimages, but in caring for all human beings [4].
Equality of All: Nanak taught that all humans are children of God, regardless of their religion or caste [5]. He emphasized that there is no high or low caste and that everyone is equal in the eyes of God [5].
Emphasis on Good Deeds: He advocated for living a life of truthfulness and good deeds, with a kind heart [5, 6]. He stressed that good deeds and morals are the true measures of faith, not religious labels or rituals [3].
Influence of Sufism: Nanak was influenced by Sufi teachings, and his interactions with Muslim Sufis and Dervishes enriched his understanding of faith [5]. He translated Sufi poetry into Punjabi, which further spread the message of love and unity [7].
Respect for Both Faiths: Nanak respected both Hindus and Muslims and engaged with both communities [3]. He did not seek to create a new religion but to foster love and human friendship between the existing faiths [1].
Practical Examples: There are several examples in the sources of Nanak’s practical approach to unifying Hindus and Muslims, such as:
When Nanak was a child, he spoke of the unity of the universe to his Hindu teacher [7].
When Nanak was accused of being neither Hindu nor Muslim, he defended the faith of Muslims as well as Hindus [3].
He visited mosques and religious places of both religions [5].
He famously stated that there is “no Hindu, no Muslim” [3].
He had close relationships with both Hindus and Muslims, such as his companions Bala and Mardana [6].
Travels: Nanak’s extensive travels across India and the Middle East were part of his mission to spread his message of unity, peace and brotherhood [8].
Legacy of Unity: Nanak’s message of Hindu-Muslim unity continues to be relevant today. The Kartarpur Corridor, which allows pilgrims to visit his shrine, is seen as a symbol of peace and unity [1, 2]. This corridor is referred to as the “Baba Nanak Love Bridge,” symbolizing his role as a bridge between religions [2].
Baba Nanak’s approach to unity wasn’t about creating a new religion, but about fostering understanding and love between different faiths [1]. His life serves as an example of how people from different backgrounds can coexist peacefully with mutual respect and understanding. His teachings continue to inspire millions around the world [1, 2].
Baba Nanak and the Sikh Mission
Sikhism’s mission, as understood through the teachings and life of Baba Nanak, focuses on humanity’s unity, service to others, and devotion to God, transcending religious and social barriers [1, 2]. It is not about establishing a new religion but about destroying the barriers between existing religions [2].
Key aspects of Sikhism’s mission, according to the sources, include:
Unity of Humanity: Sikhism’s core mission is to unite people, emphasizing that all humans are children of God, and that there is neither Hindu nor Muslim [2-4]. This unity is meant to transcend religious and social divisions, promoting love and brotherhood [1, 2].
Service to Others (Seva): A central tenet of Sikhism is selfless service [1]. True religion is not found in rituals or outward displays of piety but in caring for all human beings and living a life of service [1, 3]. This concept is embodied in the practice of Langar, a free community kitchen that serves everyone regardless of their background [5].
Devotion to One God: Sikhism advocates for the worship of one formless God [6]. God is considered neither Hindu nor Muslim, but a universal being, and all paths lead to the divine [2, 3]. The focus should be on remembering God, loving God’s creation, and adopting an attitude of service [7].
Rejection of Ritualism: Sikhism rejects empty rituals and traditions, emphasizing instead the importance of inner transformation and moral conduct [1, 4]. It discourages practices such as wearing sacred clothes, applying ashes, or performing pilgrimages if they do not lead to genuine spiritual growth [1]. The emphasis is on living a life of truthfulness, good deeds, and kindness [4].
Overcoming Weaknesses: Sikhism calls for individuals to overcome the five weaknesses: anger, greed, attachment, ego, and desire [4]. By controlling these desires and maintaining inner peace, one can achieve a closer relationship with God [7].
Inner Transformation: The path to realizing God is through self-awareness. Sikhism teaches that God resides within every human being, so to recognize God, one must first understand oneself [7]. This involves introspection, self-discipline, and a commitment to living a virtuous life.
Equality and Social Justice: Sikhism promotes equality and rejects the caste system [2, 4]. The mission is to eliminate social hierarchies and ensure that everyone is treated with respect and dignity. This is reflected in the practice of Langar, where people of all backgrounds sit together to share a meal.
Emphasis on Love and Friendship: Sikhism seeks to foster love and human friendship between all people [2]. By promoting understanding and respect, people of all backgrounds can coexist peacefully [2]. Baba Nanak’s message was to spread love and peace [1, 8].
Spiritual Guidance: The teachings of the Guru are meant to guide individuals toward a deeper understanding of their relationship with God and with the rest of humanity [1, 9]. This includes the teachings of Baba Nanak as well as the nine Gurus who followed him and the Guru Granth Sahib [9].
Baba Nanak’s life and travels were instrumental in spreading this message of unity, peace and love [2, 8]. His travels helped him engage with people of various backgrounds, promoting understanding and goodwill [8]. The establishment of Kartarpur and the Kartarpur corridor are examples of his mission being put into action, with the corridor being called the “Baba Nanak Love Bridge” [5].
Baba Nanak’s Legacy of Religious Tolerance
Religious tolerance is a central theme in the life and teachings of Baba Nanak, emphasizing the importance of understanding, respect, and unity among different faiths. Here’s how the sources describe his approach to religious tolerance:
Rejection of Religious Exclusivity: Baba Nanak did not believe that any one religion held a monopoly on truth. He stated that God is neither Hindu nor Muslim but is a universal being [1]. This idea challenged the notion that only one religion is correct, and it promoted the idea that all paths can lead to the divine. He often said there was “no Hindu, no Muslim” [1], emphasizing the shared humanity beyond religious labels.
Emphasis on Inner Faith Over Ritual: Baba Nanak emphasized that true religion lies in serving others and living a life of service, not in rituals [2]. He rejected the idea that sacred clothes, ashes, pilgrimages, or other external religious practices are necessary for spiritual fulfillment [2]. He believed that the secret of religion is in living a life of service without making things the purpose of life [2].
Respect for All Faiths: Although he was born into a Hindu family and had close relationships with Sufis and Dervishes [3], Baba Nanak respected both Hindus and Muslims [1]. He engaged with both communities [1] and visited their religious sites [4], demonstrating a willingness to understand and learn from different traditions. This is reflected in his interactions with both Hindu and Muslim religious figures, such as his teachers, Pandit Gopal and Maulvi Syed Hasan [5].
Promotion of Universal Brotherhood: Baba Nanak taught that all humans are children of God [4], and that there is no high or low caste [4]. His mission was to unite people beyond religious and social divisions, fostering love and friendship [6]. He advocated for equality and respect for all individuals, regardless of their background or beliefs [4].
Practical Examples of Tolerance: The sources contain various examples of Baba Nanak’s tolerance:
As a child, he spoke about the unity of the universe, transcending religious differences [5].
He defended the faith of Muslims when he was accused of being neither Hindu nor Muslim [1].
He participated in prayers in mosques [4] and engaged in dialogues with people of different faiths [7].
He had close relationships with both Hindus and Muslims, as seen with his companions, Bala and Mardana [8].
Influence of Sufism: Baba Nanak was influenced by Sufi teachings, which also emphasize love, tolerance, and unity [1]. He translated Sufi poetry into Punjabi, further spreading the message of love and understanding [5].
Legacy of Unity: Baba Nanak’s legacy is one of unity and peace. The Kartarpur Corridor is seen as a symbol of his message, promoting religious tolerance and allowing pilgrims to visit his shrine [6]. This corridor has even been referred to as the “Baba Nanak Love Bridge” [9], symbolizing his role in connecting people of different faiths.
Condemnation of Hatred: Baba Nanak stood against those who incited hatred between religions. He is seen as a bridge between Hindus and Muslims [9], and his teachings directly contradict any form of religious animosity [9].
In summary, Baba Nanak’s approach to religious tolerance was about promoting understanding, respect, and unity by focusing on the shared humanity of all people. His message was not about creating a new religion but about removing the barriers between existing faiths and fostering love and human friendship [6]. His life and teachings continue to inspire people to embrace religious tolerance and work towards a world where different faiths can coexist peacefully.
Baba Nanak’s Journeys: A Legacy of Unity
Baba Nanak’s travels were a significant part of his mission to spread his message of unity, peace, and love, and they played a key role in shaping his teachings and legacy [1].
Here’s a summary of his travels, drawing from the sources:
Extensive Journeys: Baba Nanak traveled extensively across India and the Middle East, covering an estimated 28,000 kilometers on foot [1]. His journeys took him from Assam to Ayodhya, Nepal, Tibet, and as far south as Sri Lanka. He also traveled through the Middle East, visiting places such as Tashkent, Canaan, Jerusalem, Jordan, Egypt, Mecca, Medina, Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala [1]. These travels are a testament to his dedication to spreading his message to a wide audience.
Purpose of Travel: The primary purpose of Nanak’s travels was to spread his message of human unity, devotion to God, and service to others [1]. He aimed to break down barriers between religions and social groups, fostering understanding and respect between people of all backgrounds [2]. By traveling, he engaged with people from different cultures and religions, enriching his own understanding of faith and conveying his message of love and tolerance.
Long Periods of Travel: Nanak spent long periods of his life traveling. After living in Rai Talwandi (Nankana Saheb) for about 16 years, he spent about 20 years in Sultanpur Lodia [1]. After leaving his job, he undertook extensive travels, and then spent the last 18 years of his life in Kartarpur [1].
Method of Travel: Nanak traveled mainly on foot, which emphasizes his dedication and commitment to his mission [1]. This also allowed him to interact directly with people along the way, sharing his message of peace, love, and unity.
Key Locations and Their Significance:
Nankana Sahib (Rai Talwandi): This was his birthplace, and he lived there for approximately 16 years [1].
Sultanpur Lodia: He worked as an accountant in Sultanpur for about 20 years and continued his educational activities there [3]. He had a transformative experience in Sultanpur, where he proclaimed “There is no Hindu, no Muslim” [4].
Kartarpur: Nanak spent the last 18 years of his life in Kartarpur [1]. There, he established a community and practiced his religious beliefs along with farming [1].
Other locations: Nanak’s travels included visits to many other significant locations that include but are not limited to Assam, Ayodhya, Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Multan, Tashkent, Canaan, Jerusalem, Jordan, Egypt, Mecca, Medina and Baghdad [1]. These travels are a testimony of his commitment to spreading his message.
Impact of his travels:
Spread of Teachings: Nanak’s travels allowed him to share his message of unity and equality with people of diverse backgrounds [4]. Through his interactions and teachings, he left a lasting impact on those he met [5].
Dialogue and Understanding: His travels facilitated dialogues with people of different faiths and helped foster mutual understanding and respect [5].
Legacy of Unity: Nanak’s message of unity and peace continues to resonate with millions around the world [2]. The establishment of the Kartarpur Corridor is one example of his legacy and is called the “Baba Nanak Love Bridge,” symbolizing his role as a bridge between religions [6].
In summary, Baba Nanak’s travels were central to his mission of promoting unity and understanding. His extensive journeys helped spread his teachings and established his legacy as a spiritual leader who sought to unite humanity. His dedication to his mission is evident in the vast distances he covered on foot, the diverse communities he engaged with, and the profound impact he had on the people he encountered [1].
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This compilation of articles covers a wide array of topics related to Saudi Arabia. Several articles celebrate the Kingdom’s “Founding Day” through various cultural events and artistic expressions, highlighting its rich history and heritage. Another set of articles focuses on the Kingdom’s economic initiatives, including advancements in automotive manufacturing, digital transformation, and tourism, as well as global trade and investment. Other pieces report on regional politics, specifically addressing the Palestinian issue, prisoner exchanges with Israel, and Saudi Arabia’s role in promoting peace. Lastly, some articles cover sports and community initiatives, including local football leagues, support for community projects, and recognition of achievements in international competitions.
The Kingdom’s Vision: A Comprehensive Study Guide
Quiz (Short Answer)
What are the main goals of the official forum for humanitarian aid mentioned in the text?
How does Saudi Arabia aim to integrate modern technologies and social innovation into humanitarian work?
What is the focus of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 in relation to social work and the charitable sector?
According to Haifa Abu Ghazaleh, what is the primary goal of the “Palestine and the Role of Civil Society” conference?
What is Saudi Arabia’s vision for becoming a global leader in the automotive industry?
What are some of the innovative features of the electric vehicles being developed through the partnership between the Saudi Investment Fund and “Sir”?
According to the text, what actions has Israel taken in relation to the conflict in Gaza and the West Bank?
What percentage of readiness has the government achieved in adopting emerging technologies, according to the Digital Government Authority?
What does Donald Trump claim he is trying to do with the financial aid provided to Ukraine?
What initiative did the Saudi Ministry of Interior launch to celebrate Foundation Day?
Quiz Answer Key
The forum aims to develop a comprehensive plan for responding to health emergencies worldwide, improve the efficiency of artificial intelligence in humanitarian action, and combat polio while strengthening health systems amid increasing humanitarian crises.
Saudi Arabia aims to build a new concept that aligns with challenges, utilizes modern technology, encourages social innovation, and focuses on strategies ensuring the sustainability of charitable projects and community partnerships.
Vision 2030 focuses on strengthening social work and encouraging government and private entities to enhance voluntary initiatives through the National Center for the Development of the Non-Profit Sector.
The primary goal of the conference is to evaluate and analyze the current situation in Gaza following the destructive Israeli bombardment and to formulate proposals for rebuilding the social fabric of Gaza and providing essential social services.
Saudi Arabia envisions transforming its automotive industry into a global leader by establishing a strong base for manufacturing vehicles, supported by Vision 2030, strategic investments, and efforts to localize production.
The electric vehicles feature innovative technologies in electronic mobility, communication, and autonomous driving, reflecting the Kingdom’s focus on advanced and sustainable transportation.
Israel has stated its readiness to resume fighting in Gaza at any moment, either through negotiations or other means, and announced the expansion of military operations in the occupied West Bank.
The government has achieved a 74.69% readiness rate in adopting emerging technologies.
Donald Trump claims he is trying to recover the financial aid that the United States provided to Ukraine, exploring potential agreements related to Kyiv’s mineral resources.
The Saudi Ministry of Interior launched a stamp for Foundation Day to enhance national belonging and pride in the Kingdom’s deep-rooted history.
Essay Format Questions
Discuss the role of Saudi Arabia as a humanitarian leader, referencing specific initiatives and its vision for the future of humanitarian work.
Analyze Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and its impact on technological advancement and economic diversification within the Kingdom.
Evaluate the challenges and opportunities for Saudi Arabia in becoming a global leader in the automotive industry, including its focus on electric vehicles.
Examine the complexities of international relations in the Middle East, focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the role of Saudi Arabia in promoting peace and stability.
Discuss the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the labor market and the strategies countries can adopt to navigate these changes, referencing examples from the provided texts.
Glossary of Key Terms
Vision 2030: Saudi Arabia’s strategic framework to reduce the country’s dependence on oil, diversify its economy, and develop public service sectors such as health, education, infrastructure, recreation, and tourism.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
Social Innovation: Developing and deploying effective, efficient, sustainable, and just solutions to social and environmental challenges.
EGDI (E-Government Development Index): A composite index measuring the willingness and capacity of national governments to use information and communication technologies to deliver public services.
OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer): A company that produces parts and equipment that may be marketed by another manufacturer.
Electric Vehicle (EV): A vehicle that uses one or more electric motors or traction motors for propulsion.
Sustainable Development: Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Humanitarian Aid: Material and logistical assistance to people who need help, usually during a humanitarian crisis.
Digital Transformation: The integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers.
Foundation Day: A Saudi national holiday commemorating the establishment of the first Saudi state in 1727.
Saudi Arabia: Transformation, Global Role, and Key Themes
Okay, here’s a detailed briefing document summarizing the main themes and ideas from the provided sources:
Briefing Document
Subject: Review of Key Themes and Ideas from Recent News Sources
Overview:
This briefing document summarizes the key themes and important facts emerging from a collection of news articles and reports. The sources cover a wide range of topics, including Saudi Arabia’s evolving role in humanitarian aid and global industries, the Palestinian issue, international relations, economic developments, and cultural celebrations.
Key Themes and Ideas:
Saudi Arabia’s Evolving Role in Humanitarian Aid and Philanthropy:
Modernizing Humanitarian Efforts: Saudi Arabia is building a new concept for humanitarian work that embraces innovation and modern technology. It aims to utilize technology and innovation, focusing on social innovation, strategic partnerships, and sustainable solutions for societal problems, while also promoting good governance.
Vision 2030 Alignment: This approach is rooted in Vision 2030, which emphasizes social work, volunteerism, and the development of the non-profit sector. The goal is to build a sustainable future that includes all aspects of life, integrating social, health, and educational initiatives.
“Innovative Giving”: The documents emphasize an innovative approach to giving, incorporating sustainability and social impact.“ (“The Kingdom is heading towards building a new concept for humanitarian work that keeps pace with challenges and employs modern technology and social innovation.”)
The Palestinian Issue:
Rejection of Displacement: The Arab League emphasizes that the Palestinian issue is a matter of land and people, rejecting attempts to displace Palestinians or expand settlements, considering such actions ethnic cleansing and a liquidation of the Palestinian cause.
Reconstruction of Gaza: A conference is focused on rebuilding Gaza’s social fabric after extensive damage, emphasizing the role of civil society in providing essential services and developing proposals for reconstruction.“ (“The Arab League affirmed that the just Palestinian cause is a matter of land and people, and that attempts to uproot the Palestinian people from their land, or to expand settlements, have proven unsuccessful over decades or to engage in displacement, which is rejected and violates international law.”)
Stalled Ceasefire: Negotiations to extend the initial ceasefire in Gaza face obstacles, with Israel threatening to resume fighting if its war goals aren’t met. Allegations of Hamas violating the agreement have further complicated the situation.
Saudi Arabia’s Automotive Industry Ambitions:
Global Leadership Goal: Saudi Arabia aims to become a global leader in the automotive industry, supported by Vision 2030, strategic investments, and innovative efforts. The focus is on localization, creating a favorable environment for sustainable growth, and introducing electric vehicles (EVs).
Establishing a Strong Foundation: The Kingdom is expediting steps to become a key player in the global automotive value chain, focusing on localizing manufacturing and establishing training academies for modern technologies like electric mobility and autonomous driving.
Attracting Major Players: Saudi Arabia has successfully attracted more than four leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), reducing reliance on imports and strengthening the local supply chain.
Electric Vehicle Focus: The launch of the “Sir” automotive brand, through a partnership between the Public Investment Fund (PIF) and “Chery” and “Foxconn,” reflects a focus on electric vehicles, electronic mobility, and autonomous driving technologies.
Saudi Arabia’s Digital Transformation and Technological Advancement:
Government Readiness: Saudi Arabia continues to make progress in digital indicators, with government entities achieving a 74.69% readiness rate in adopting emerging technologies.
AI Integration: The government is committed to utilizing AI and digital innovations to improve operational efficiency, accelerate achievements, and enhance the digital experience.
Strategic Role of AI: AI is considered a key technology for 2025, playing a central role in reducing resources, increasing productivity, and accelerating achievements.
Public-Private Collaboration: Ongoing collaboration between government entities and the private sector contributes to improving the digital experience and enhancing the quality of life.“ (“The CEO of the Innovation and Emerging Technologies Center in the Digital Government Authority, Ahmed bin Abdulmohsen Al-Madi, confirmed that artificial intelligence represents the central technical axis for 2025, given its pivotal role in reducing resources, increasing productivity, and accelerating completion.”)
Economic Diversification and Investment Opportunities in Saudi Arabia:
Infrastructure Investment Needs: Saudi Arabia needs approximately $1 trillion in infrastructure investments over the next 7-10 years, covering roads, ports, logistics, technology, and digital sectors.
Private Sector Involvement: The private sector’s cooperation is essential to achieve these investment goals, as the Kingdom cannot finance these projects alone.
Investment Opportunities for Global Firms: Saudi Arabia will offer $1.8 trillion in investment opportunities to global companies, encouraging foreign firms to participate in the country’s transformation.
PIF’s Role: The Public Investment Fund (PIF) plays a central role in executing these massive projects, with significant investment opportunities available for the private sector.
International Relations and Conflicts:
Ukraine War: The US President is trying to get back money given to Ukraine as aid.
Sudan Conflict: A “charter” to form a parallel government between the “Support Forces” and allied groups, despite the ongoing conflict, has been agreed upon.
Celebration of Saudi Identity and Heritage:
Founding Day Celebrations: Saudi Arabia celebrates its Founding Day, commemorating the establishment of the first Saudi state in 1727, with various events and activities showcasing the country’s rich history and heritage.
“Memory of the Land” Activities: Events like “Memory of the Land” attract thousands of visitors, offering a journey through time, interactive experiences, and cultural displays.
Jeddah Historical Area: Jeddah’s historic area hosts events that spotlight national history and revive cultural heritage, with artistic exhibitions, traditional arts, and opportunities for visitors to engage with Saudi culture.(“This generous directive comes in commemoration of the kings and imams of the Saudi state and in consolidation of loyalty and recognition for the march and in consolidation of the sacrifices and achievements in the march of the Saudi state from three centuries until today.”)
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Labor Market:
Job Displacement and Efficiency: The IMF director’s comparison of AI’s impact on the labor market to a tsunami highlights concerns about job displacement, with some jobs becoming more efficient or disappearing altogether.
Varying Outcomes: AI’s impact varies across countries, with densely populated nations potentially benefiting from increased productivity, while others face rising unemployment.
Strategic Importance: AI becomes an increasingly important element in offsetting low birth rates, as is the case with countries like Japan.
Counterfeit Goods and Intellectual Property Rights:
“Counterfeit markets” cause issues all over the world, especially in places like Turkey and China.
The intellectual property body in Saudi Arabia had 100,000 reports of intellectual property issues in 2022.
Quotes from the original sources:
(Automotive Industry) (“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is striving to transform itself into a global leader in the automotive industry.”)
(Founding Day)“(“Today, we remember with pride the firm foundations on which our blessed state was founded, and we affirm that this is a great legacy that we cherish as a responsibility for future generations and to carry on the path of construction and prosperity.”)
(AI in Government) ” (“Government entities have employed artificial intelligence in community projects that support development”)
Conclusion:
These sources paint a picture of Saudi Arabia as a nation in dynamic transition, actively pursuing economic diversification, technological advancement, and a more prominent role on the global stage. The Kingdom is also committed to preserving its cultural heritage and providing humanitarian assistance while addressing complex regional challenges. The future of Saudi Arabia is a topic of global interest.
Saudi Arabia: Development, Culture, and Global Relations
FAQ on Saudi Arabia’s Development, Culture, and International Relations
What is the primary focus of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030?
Vision 2030 emphasizes diversifying the Saudi economy, improving the quality of life, and enhancing the Kingdom’s role in the region and the world. Key areas of focus include developing the tourism sector, expanding local manufacturing (particularly in the automotive and defense industries), fostering technological innovation, and empowering Saudi citizens through education and job creation.
How is Saudi Arabia working to promote and preserve its cultural heritage?
Saudi Arabia is actively celebrating its rich cultural heritage through various initiatives, such as establishing museums, hosting cultural events, and supporting traditional crafts. This includes highlighting historical sites like Jeddah’s historic district (a UNESCO World Heritage site) and celebrating national occasions like Founding Day, all of which are aimed at fostering national pride, and educating younger generations about their history.
What role is technology and innovation playing in Saudi Arabia’s future?
Technology and innovation are central to Saudi Arabia’s development strategy. The Kingdom is investing heavily in digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI), and emerging technologies to improve operational efficiency across government sectors, enhance the digital experience for citizens, and create a knowledge-based economy. This includes initiatives such as facilitating smart cities, promoting electronic vehicle manufacturing, and fostering a vibrant tech startup ecosystem.
How is Saudi Arabia positioning itself in the global automotive industry?
Saudi Arabia is actively working to become a major player in the global automotive industry, with a focus on electric vehicles (EVs). This involves establishing manufacturing plants, attracting foreign investment, developing a skilled workforce, and creating a favorable regulatory environment. The goal is to not only meet domestic demand but also to export EVs and automotive components, contributing to the diversification of the Saudi economy.
What is Saudi Arabia’s approach to humanitarian aid and international relations?
Saudi Arabia aims to provide humanitarian assistance based on its Islamic values and cultural heritage. The Kingdom seeks to work with international organizations to ensure its humanitarian efforts address pressing global issues, such as health emergencies, poverty, and displacement. In international relations, Saudi Arabia strives to play a mediating role in regional conflicts and promote peaceful solutions, often facilitating discussions between conflicting parties.
How is Saudi Arabia supporting the Palestinian cause?
Saudi Arabia stands by the Palestinian people and their right to their land. It rejects any attempts to displace Palestinians or expand settlements, considering such actions a violation of international law and a form of ethnic cleansing. Saudi Arabia supports the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and works through international forums to advocate for Palestinian rights.
How is Saudi Arabia balancing economic growth with sustainability and environmental protection?
Saudi Arabia recognizes the importance of environmental sustainability and is integrating it into its development plans. The Kingdom is investing in renewable energy, promoting sustainable tourism practices, and implementing policies to reduce carbon emissions. Initiatives like the Saudi Green Initiative and the Middle East Green Initiative aim to enhance environmental protection, promote sustainable resource management, and mitigate the impacts of climate change.
What is Saudi Arabia doing to support its senior citizens?
Saudi Arabia recognizes the importance of supporting its senior citizens. Organizations, with support from banks, are launching projects and programs to improve the quality of life for the elderly. These initiatives focus on providing healthcare, social support, and raising awareness about the needs of senior citizens in the community, ensuring they are respected and cared for.
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Humanitarian Efforts and Charitable Giving
The sources discuss charity work in the context of:
King Salman Center for Relief and Humanitarian Aid playing a role in assisting those benefiting from the project of sponsoring orphans.
Highlighting the importance of the forum to be a unique opportunity to develop new strategies to maximize the use of modern technologies to enhance humanitarian action and to reach the neediest groups. The forum seeks to consolidate efforts between governments, international organizations and civil society organizations.
Presenting a donation to the United Nations in Geneva, reflecting Saudi Arabia’s efforts to support international organizations and enhance the Arabic language in international organizations.
The role of Imam Abdulaziz bin Muhammad bin Saud in donating books to students of science and researchers.
A project to support people with disabilities.
Supporting developmental, media, and community activities, such as those aimed at integrating senior citizens into society and raising awareness about their rights.
Aiding the Palestinian people.
The Kingdom’s سفارات (embassies) celebrate the Kingdom’s Foundation day by including children from the orphanage.
Saudi Vision 2030: Diversification, Digitalization, and Cultural Heritage
The Saudi Vision 2030 is a transformative plan that aims to diversify the Kingdom’s economy, enhance various sectors, and improve the quality of life for its citizens. Several sources provide insights into different facets of this vision:
Diversification and Economic Growth: Saudi Arabia aims to become a major global investment destination by undertaking large-scale projects to strengthen the national economy and attract foreign investments. These investments, valued at trillions of dollars, focus on developing infrastructure to support economic diversification.
Government Digital Transformation: A key component of Saudi Vision 2030 involves developing a “smarter” digital government that utilizes technologies like artificial intelligence to improve efficiency, enhance user experience, and promote innovation. This includes adopting emerging technologies to improve public sector performance and the services provided to citizens.
Cultural and Historical Preservation: The vision emphasizes the importance of celebrating and preserving Saudi Arabia’s rich cultural heritage. This is evident in the various celebrations, exhibitions, and events centered around the Kingdom’s Foundation Day, which serve to promote national pride, educate younger generations about their history, and strengthen the sense of national identity.
Tourism: The Saudi Vision 2030 aims to promote cultural tourism and transform Jeddah into a global destination by highlighting the country’s cultural, historical, and natural assets.
Sports: The vision intends to continue to achieve sports accomplishments.
Values: The Saudi Vision 2030 promotes values such as cooperation, harmony, and prosperity for stability. It aims for a comprehensive unity that contains communities.
The Palestinian Issue: Reconstruction, Conflict, and Occupation
The Palestinian issue is addressed in the sources in the context of:
Rebuilding Gaza’s social fabric A conference was held to discuss rebuilding the social structure of Gaza, which had been affected by Israeli aggression. The aim was to provide social services and develop plans for reconstruction, while ensuring cooperation between local, regional, and international bodies.
Humanitarian aid Adoption of emergency relief plans to help the Palestinian people, while setting specific controls to monitor the implementation of these plans.
Prisoner release negotiations Indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas to extend a truce in Gaza in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Confronting displacement Gazans display steadfastness in the face of destruction and defy intentions of displacement with determination to rebuild.
Calls for a second “Nakba” and destruction of Gaza Some Israeli sentiments express calls for resuming the war, a second “Nakba” and the complete destruction of the Gaza Strip.
Accusations of exploiting public sentiment Netanyahu is accused of exploiting public sentiment and calls for revenge to postpone political concessions to the Palestinians and prolong the war.
Continued Israeli military operations The Israeli army continues military operations in the West Bank, with the aim of dismantling Palestinian resistance infrastructure.
Settler violence Settlers attack Palestinian property in the West Bank.
Temple Mount tensions Extremist settlers storm the Al-Aqsa Mosque, performing Talmudic rituals and increasing tensions.
Continued occupation Israel Katz states that military operations will continue until the “elimination of terrorism” and to prevent the return of residents in northern West Bank.
Saudi Arabia: Localizing Automotive Manufacturing and Electric Vehicle Development
The sources discuss the car industry in Saudi Arabia with an emphasis on the Kingdom’s efforts to localize manufacturing and become a regional hub.
Here are key aspects of the automotive industry discussed in the sources:
Localization of Manufacturing: Saudi Arabia is actively working to localize the automotive industry. This involves establishing a strong foundation for manufacturing within the Kingdom.
Partnerships and Investments:
The Kingdom has attracted more than four leading car manufacturing companies to establish manufacturing operations.
A partnership between the Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Hon Hai Precision Industries (Foxconn) has led to the launch of “Ceer,” a national commercial brand for electric vehicles.
Focus on Modern Technologies: The industry is focusing on modern technologies such as electric mobility, connectivity, and autonomous driving. This is reflected in the development of innovative electric vehicles and related technologies.
Supply Chain Development: Efforts are underway to strengthen the local supply chain, reduce reliance on imports, and increase local content in manufacturing.
Job Creation: The automotive sector is expected to be a significant job creator, both directly and indirectly through related industries.
Growth Projections: The Saudi Arabian automotive sector is projected to grow at an annual rate of 12% by 2030, driven by local investments and the adoption of sustainable mobility solutions.
Strategic Goals: The Kingdom aims to not only meet local demand but also become a major player in the global automotive market. This involves integrating localization with innovation and global collaboration.
Vision 2030: The development of the automotive industry aligns with the broader goals of Saudi Vision 2030, which seeks to diversify the economy and promote sustainable development.
Training: There is also an emphasis on training academies.
The Saudi Arabian government is supporting the automotive industry to achieve its goals. The sources suggest that Saudi Arabia is not only building an automotive industry but also creating a sustainable future.
Saudi Vision 2030: Digital Transformation of the Saudi Government
The sources indicate that developing a “smarter” digital government is a key component of Saudi Vision 2030.
Here’s what the sources say about the digital transformation of the Saudi government:
Adoption of Modern Technologies: Governmental entities are embracing technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bring about qualitative changes across sectors.
Efficiency and Productivity: Digital transformation is intended to improve operational efficiency, increase productivity and streamline processes.
Data Analysis and Decision-Making: The use of AI facilitates the analysis of large datasets, enabling more accurate and faster decision-making.
Enhanced User Experience: Digital initiatives are geared towards improving the experience of users and increasing the efficiency of services provided to them.
Innovation and Transparency: Digital transformation promotes innovation, enhances transparency, and helps in achieving the goals of digital transformation effectively.
Examples of Digital Initiatives:
The Ministry of Interior launched a technical platform that supports digital transformation and enhances efficiency in operations.
King Khalid University is using the “Metaverse” to transform traditional educational curricula into interactive learning experiences.
King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology developed an AI system to support individuals in rehabilitation and recovery journeys.
The Ministry of Finance launched a project to manage infrastructure effectively through the utilization of AI, improving productivity and reducing operational costs.
The Ministry of Health launched a “virtual twin” project that simulates the health status of individuals using smart data.
The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development launched an AI project to monitor the labor market in real-time.
The Tourism Ministry developed platforms that analyze visitor feedback to identify areas needing improvement.
The Riyadh Municipality launched a smart monitoring project for neighborhoods, which relies on AI.
Alignment with Vision 2030: These efforts align with the broader goals of Saudi Vision 2030, which seeks to diversify the economy and promote sustainable development.
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The text is a transcript from a video course on Microsoft Word 2019 advanced techniques. It provides detailed instructions and demonstrations on a range of essential skills. The course covers customization options, efficient document layout, graphics integration, and navigation tools. Specific topics include keyboard shortcuts, screen tips, ribbon management, rulers, finding/replacing formatting, and the navigation pane. It explores working with graphics, text boxes, links/hyperlinks, tables, views, page layout, and dividing documents. The course aims to enhance users’ proficiency in creating professional-looking documents with advanced features.
Word 2019 Advanced Study Guide
Quiz
How can you access the Help ribbon if it’s not visible in Word 2019? You can access the Help ribbon by going to the File tab, navigating to the backstage area, and enabling the Help ribbon option in the settings or customization area.
What key can you press for a quick way to jump into the Save As dialog box? F12
What’s the benefit of contextual ribbons in Word? Contextual ribbons appear when you select specific elements like pictures or charts, offering tools and commands relevant to that element, streamlining the editing process.
What is the purpose of rulers in Word documents? Rulers, both horizontal and vertical, enable users to see margins, set tabs for alignment, and center objects or line up text accurately within the document.
How can you modify the units of measurement displayed on the ruler in Word? To change the units of measurement, go to File > Options > Advanced, scroll to the Display section, and select your preferred unit (e.g., centimeters) from the “Show measurements in units of” drop-down menu.
Besides replacing text, what else can the Find and Replace feature be used for in Word? Find and Replace can also locate and replace specific formatting, such as font styles, indentation, or paragraph spacing, throughout a document.
What do the red, blue, and brown lines indicate when spell check has been completed and are visible within the document? A red line indicates a misspelled word, a blue double underline indicates a grammatical error, and a brown dotted line suggests reviewing the sentence for conciseness.
How can you use autocorrect to type a pound currency symbol and why might that be useful? This is done by first inserting the pound currency symbol manually (Insert > Symbols), copying the pound symbol, and then going to File > Options > Proofing > Autocorrect Options, then typing the curly brackets and a p into the replace box and pasting the pound symbol into the with box. This can be particularly useful for people using American keyboards and machines.
What happens when you press the Alt key while working in Word and how is that useful? Pressing the Alt key displays keyboard shortcuts on the ribbon, allowing users to navigate and execute commands using the keyboard instead of the mouse.
In Word, how can you show every style that you have applied to each line? This is done in draft view, jump up to file and we’re going all the way down into our options and we want to jump straight across to the advanced area. If we scroll down all the way down to this display section you’re looking for this option here so where it says style area pane width in draft and outline views.
Essay Questions
Discuss the various view options available in Word 2019 and analyze how each view can enhance the user experience for different tasks such as editing, reading, or outlining a document.
Explain the importance of using section breaks in Word documents. Describe at least three different scenarios where using section breaks can significantly improve document formatting and organization.
Compare and contrast the use of manual formatting versus styles in Word 2019. Discuss the advantages of using styles for maintaining consistency and facilitating efficient document updates, especially in longer documents.
Discuss the options available for inserting and manipulating graphics in Word. Compare using 3D models versus icons, and explain how captions and tables of figures contribute to document clarity and navigation.
Explain the purpose and functionality of the Mail Merge feature in Word. Describe the steps involved in performing a Mail Merge and discuss how it can be used to create personalized documents for mass distribution.
Glossary of Key Terms
Backstage Area: The File tab in Word, providing access to document management options like saving, printing, and settings.
Contextual Ribbons: Ribbons that appear depending on the selected object or task, offering relevant commands and tools.
ScreenTip: A small box that displays information when hovering the mouse pointer over a command or feature.
Rulers: Horizontal and vertical guides that display margins, tabs, and object positions.
Print Layout View: The default view in Word that displays the document as it will appear when printed.
Find and Replace: A feature for locating and replacing specific text or formatting within a document.
Keyboard Shortcut: A key or combination of keys that performs a specific command or action.
Autocorrect: A feature that automatically corrects common typing errors and can be customized with specific entries.
Thesaurus: A tool for finding synonyms of a selected word.
Read Mode: A view option that optimizes the document for reading, hiding most editing tools.
Outline View: A view option that displays the document in a hierarchical structure of headings and subheadings.
Table Styles: Predefined formats that can be applied to tables to quickly enhance their appearance.
Cell Reference: A way to identify a cell within a table (e.g., A1, B2), used in formulas for calculations.
Formula: An equation used to perform calculations in a Word table.
Word Art: A feature for creating stylized text with various effects, such as shadows, reflections, and transformations.
Caption: A numbered label added to figures, tables, or equations, providing a reference point within the document.
Table of Figures: A list of all figures, tables, and equations in a document, with page numbers and clickable links.
Text Box: A container for text that can be positioned anywhere on a page, independent of the main document flow.
Header: Text that appears at the top of every page in a section.
Footer: Text that appears at the bottom of every page in a section.
Section Break: A division in a document that allows for different formatting settings (e.g., margins, headers, footers) within each section.
Page Break: A marker that forces the following text to begin on the next page.
Gutter Margin: An additional margin added to a page layout to compensate for the part of the paper that’s made unusable by the binding process.
Column Break: A marker that forces the following text to begin on the next column.
Hyphenation: A process of breaking words at the end of a line to improve text flow and spacing.
Document Property: Metadata associated with a document, such as the author, title, or subject.
Field: A placeholder that is replaced with dynamic content, such as the date, file name, or author.
Hyperlink: A link that directs the user to another location within the document, a website, or an email address.
Object: An element that is linked to a third-party program.
Word 2019 Advanced Training: Enhance Your Skills
Okay, here’s a briefing document summarizing the key themes and ideas from the provided text excerpts:
Briefing Document: Word 2019 Advanced Training
Overview:
This document summarizes a training course focused on advanced features in Microsoft Word 2019. The course is designed to enhance user proficiency through demonstrations, downloadable practice files, and exercises. It covers a wide range of topics, including document formatting, layout control, graphic integration, automation, and more.
Main Themes and Ideas:
Course Structure and Resources:
The course is divided into sections and modules. Each module contains a demo video (5-15 minutes), downloadable course files, and a practice exercise.
“Each module contains one demo video that’s usually between 5 and 15 minutes long you’ll find all of the files that i use in these demo videos in the course files folder so you can download those and follow along if you want to and then at the end of each section there is a practice exercise that will allow you to practice the skills that you’ve learned in the section”
The instructor, Deb, emphasizes hands-on learning and encourages users to practice the skills learned.
Accessing Help and Customization:
Word 2019 offers built-in help features accessible via a dedicated ribbon (which may need to be enabled).
Users can customize the ribbon by adding/removing tabs and creating custom ribbons with frequently used commands.
“You can of course customize the way that your ribbons look so again if we jump up to file and go all the way down to options there is a section in here for customize ribbon”
Essential Skills and Formatting:
The course covers essential skills such as keyboard shortcuts, using screen tips, and working with rulers for precise document layout.
“In this module i just want to talk to you about something that is very small but very important in word and that is working with the rulers now rulers are really important when you’re working in word documents”
Find and Replace functionality extends beyond text to include formatting.
Emphasis on proofing tools: Spell check, Grammar check and conciseness.
“In this module I want to run through with you where you can go within word to get help at any point during this course now word has some really good features when it comes to accessing help so it might be that you need help on a specific command or task or maybe you just want to access some resources and read up about something a little bit more”
Automation and Efficiency:
The course teaches users how to use autocorrect to automate frequently typed words/phrases/symbols
“i often have problems typing in the pound currency symbol… this is something that i like to have set up as an autocorrect option”
Exploration of macros for automating repetitive tasks.
Document Views:
The training explores various Word views (Read Mode, Print Layout, Web Layout, Outline, Draft) and their specific uses.
Draft view allows to see the styles applied.
“let’s now jump across into outline view now outline view is intended to be a document development or editing tool and as the name might suggest it’s a means for you to organize large quantities of text and also quickly move through your document”
Working with Tables:
Creating tables from text and manipulating table styles.
Using formulas to perform calculations within tables.
“in this module i want to talk to you a little bit about how you can work with formulas to do calculations with table data”
Graphics and Visual Elements:
Using WordArt for stylized text.
Filling shapes with pictures.
Working with icons and 3D models to enhance document appearance.
Adding captions to figures and creating a table of figures.
Document Structure and Layout:
Using text boxes for precise text placement.
Controlling margins, orientation, and size.
Working with Columns.
In-depth coverage of breaks (page, section, column) for dividing and controlling document layout. Headers and footers customized to specific sections of a document.
“Breaks are particularly useful if you’ve ever struggled to get the formatting of a long document looking like you want it to look in each section now you might be thinking to yourself well what do you mean what’s a section how do I create a section well in this module I just want to give you an overview and an introduction to breaks”
Master and Subdocuments:
An advanced technique for managing very large documents by splitting them into smaller, manageable files.
“tends to be something that are not as widely used mainly because i find people don’t really understand what they are and why they are useful and i will say they are only really useful if you are someone who works with very large documents i’m talking 100 pages plus”
Adding Links:
Adding different types of hyperlinks into a document (websites, files, locations within the document, and email addresses).
“now another thing I could do is link to an external document so if I move a bit further down my employment contract I have a section here for brief description of the job”
Embedding Objects:
Different ways of inserting excel charts into word document. Linking to other documents
Overall Impression:
This training program appears to be comprehensive, covering a wide array of advanced Word 2019 features. The emphasis on practice and hands-on exercises should enable users to develop a strong understanding of the software’s capabilities.
Microsoft Word 2019 Advanced FAQ
Microsoft Word 2019 Advanced FAQ
How is this Word 2019 advanced course structured?
The course is organized into sections, each covering a specific topic. Within each section, there are modules (lessons) that include a demo video (5-15 minutes long), downloadable course files used in the video, and a practice exercise to reinforce learned skills. At the end of each section there is an exercise file for the section.
How can I access help within Word 2019 during this course?
Word 2019 has built-in help features that can assist with specific commands, tasks, or provide access to resources. A “Help” ribbon may be available (ensure it’s enabled in the backstage area if not visible).
Where can I find keyboard shortcuts in Word? How can I use them?
You can search for keyboard shortcuts in the Word help files. For instance, Ctrl+Shift+Right Arrow selects a word, Shift+End selects a line, Shift+Down Arrow selects multiple lines, and Ctrl+A selects the entire document.
How do I customize the ribbon in Word 2019?
Go to File > Options > Customize Ribbon. You can enable/disable ribbons, or create your own custom ribbons with frequently used commands. Note that some organizations may restrict ribbon customization.
Why are rulers important in Word, and how do I display/change their units?
Rulers are essential for visualizing margins, setting tabs, aligning objects, and centering text. To display them, go to the View ribbon and check the “Ruler” box in the “Show” group (ensure you are in Print Layout view). To change measurement units (inches, centimeters, etc.), go to File > Options > Advanced, scroll to the “Display” section, and choose your preferred unit.
What is the “Find and Replace” feature useful for beyond just replacing text?
“Find and Replace” (Ctrl+H) can locate and replace specific formatting styles throughout a document, like font, indentation, italics or other paragraph settings. You can clear existing formatting from search fields using the “No Formatting” button. You can replace double paragraph markers with a single one to create single line spacing in a document.
How do I use the Editor/Proofing tools in Word to improve my document?
The Editor feature (available in recent versions of Word) checks spelling, grammar, and conciseness. It highlights errors with different colored underlines (red for spelling, blue for grammar, brown for conciseness). You can right-click on a misspelled word to fix it immediately. It can be enabled through File > Options > Proofing and the statistics can be disabled through the options menu there as well.
What is autocorrect in Word and how can I make the most of it?
Autocorrect automatically corrects common typing errors and can be customized in File > Options > Proofing > Autocorrect Options. You can add your own autocorrect entries, such as replacing initials with your full name. Autocorrect settings will automatically correct fractions, create hyperlinks, and many other useful formatting changes while typing in the document. You can override autocorrect by hovering over the automatically corrected word and choosing undo the action.
Word Keyboard Shortcut Guide
Keyboard shortcuts can increase efficiency in Word by allowing you to open files, navigate documents, and invoke commands without using a mouse. Many shortcuts exist, but users often memorize the ones they use frequently.
Some key points regarding keyboard shortcuts include:
Accessing a List of Shortcuts You can access a full list of keyboard shortcuts in Word by searching “keyboard shortcuts” in the search bar. The help section will then provide a comprehensive list, which can be printed for reference.
Customizing Shortcuts Word allows you to customize keyboard shortcuts by assigning specific actions to key combinations. This can be done in the options menu under ‘Customize Ribbon’. Be cautious not to reassign existing shortcuts.
Examples of common shortcuts:
Ctrl+N creates a new blank document.
Ctrl+O opens an existing document.
Esc returns to the blank document.
Typing =rand() then pressing Enter generates random text.
Ctrl+Home jumps to the top of the document, while Ctrl+End jumps to the bottom.
Ctrl+Z undoes the previous action.
Typing =lorem() then pressing Enter generates “lorem ipsum” text.
Ctrl + right/left arrow jumps to the next or previous word.
Ctrl+Shift + right/left arrow highlights words.
Ctrl + up/down arrow jumps to the next or previous paragraph.
Ctrl+Shift + >/< increases or decreases font size.
F12 opens the Save As dialog box.
Screen Tips: Hovering the mouse over commands on the ribbon will display a screen tip, which often includes the keyboard shortcut for that command.
Ribbon shortcuts Pressing the Alt key displays shortcuts for navigating the ribbon via the keyboard.
Customizing and Using Screen Tips
Screen tips are small informational boxes that appear when you hover your mouse over a command on the ribbon. They provide useful information about the command’s function and, importantly, often display the keyboard shortcut associated with that command. Not every command has a keyboard shortcut listed in the screen tip.
Screen tips can be customized or disabled. To customize screen tips:
Go to File > Options.
Under the General area, find the User Interface options.
You can choose from the following screen tip styles:
Show feature descriptions in screen tips (shows the command description)
Don’t show feature descriptions in screen tips (removes the command description)
Don’t show screen tips at all (disables screen tips entirely)
You can also choose whether or not shortcut keys are shown in screen tips:
Go to File > Options.
Go to the Advanced area and scroll down to the Display section.
Check or uncheck the Show shortcut keys in ScreenTips option.
It is also worth noting that it is possible to create custom screen tips, especially when using hyperlinks and bookmarks.
Microsoft Word Ribbon: Management and Customization
The ribbon in Word is a horizontal strip across the top of the screen that organizes commands into tabs and groups. Managing and customizing the ribbon can help you use Word more efficiently.
Key aspects of ribbon management include:
Ribbon Tabs and Groups: The ribbon is organized into tabs such as “Home”, “Insert”, “Draw”, “Design”, and “Layout”. Each tab contains groups of related commands, like “Clipboard”, “Font”, and “Paragraph” on the Home tab.
Accessing Backstage Options: The “File” tab provides access to backstage options for tasks such as creating new documents, opening existing files, saving, printing, and accessing Word options.
Galleries: Some commands, like styles, are presented in a gallery, which is a drop-down menu displaying various options.
Dialog Box Launcher: Some groups have a dialog box launcher (a small arrow in the corner) that opens more advanced options related to that group. Not every group has a dialog box launcher.
Customizing the Ribbon:
You can customize the ribbon by adding or removing tabs and groups.
To customize the ribbon, go to File > Options > Customize Ribbon.
You can create a new tab and add frequently used commands to it.
It is possible that access to ribbon customization may be restricted by organizational policies.
Contextual Ribbons: Certain ribbons appear only when needed, such as the “Table Design” and “Layout” ribbons when a table is selected. These ribbons disappear when you click outside the object.
Minimizing the Ribbon:
You can collapse the ribbon to increase screen space by using the ribbon display options in the top right corner. The options include:
Auto Hide Ribbon: Hides the ribbon entirely, only showing it when you move your mouse to the top of the screen.
Show Tabs: Displays only the ribbon tabs, showing the commands when a tab is clicked.
Show Tabs and Commands: Shows both the tabs and commands. This is typically the default.
Another way to collapse or display the ribbon is by using the Ctrl + F1 shortcut key.
Accessing Commands with the Keyboard: Pressing the Alt key displays shortcut letters for each tab and command, allowing you to navigate the ribbon using the keyboard.
Tell Me Feature: The “Tell Me” box (or search bar) at the top can be used to search for commands and access help. Type in a search term, and Word will show you where the command is located and provide help options. The keyboard shortcut for the Tell Me box is Alt + Q.
Word: Using Document Rulers for Alignment and Measurement
Document rulers in Word are important for seeing margins and setting tabs to align items correctly. They help when centering objects or lining up text.
Here’s a breakdown of key aspects:
Displaying Rulers: To display rulers, go to the View ribbon, and in the Show group, check the Ruler box. Ensure you are in Print Layout view to see the rulers. The horizontal ruler runs across the top of the page, and the vertical ruler runs down the side.
Changing Measurement Units: To change the measurement units of the ruler (e.g., from inches to centimeters), go to File > Options > Advanced. In the Display section, find the “Show measurements in units of” option and select your desired unit from the dropdown menu. Available units include centimeters, millimeters, points, and picas.
Functionality: Rulers allow you to:
See and set tab stops.
Move table borders.
Line up objects.
Measure items in the document.
Usefulness: Having rulers turned on by default is helpful for tasks such as centering objects on a page or aligning text.
Word: Working with Text Boxes
Text boxes in Word provide more flexibility in placing text and the types of text that can be added to a document. They allow text to “float” on the page and be positioned exactly where needed.
Key aspects of working with text boxes:
Inserting Text Boxes:
You can find text box options on the Insert ribbon, in the Text group.
Clicking the Text Box dropdown opens the Text Box Gallery, which offers built-in options such as simple text boxes, quote boxes, and sidebars.
At the bottom of the gallery, there is access to more text boxes from Office.com.
The Draw Text Box option allows you to create a text box of a specific size.
Layout Options: When a text box is inserted, a Layout Options button appears, allowing you to control how the text box interacts with surrounding text. These options include:
In Line with Text: Places the text box in line with the surrounding text, affecting the flow of the text.
Square: Wraps text around the text box in a square fashion.
Tight: Wraps text closely around the text box.
Through: Allows text to run through the text box.
Top and Bottom: Prevents text from appearing on either side of the text box.
Behind Text: Allows text to flow over the top of the text box.
In Front of Text: Allows the text box to be placed on top of the text.
Formatting Text Boxes:
Once a text box is added, you can format it using the Drawing Tools or Shape Format ribbon.
Formatting options include changing the shape fill, outline, and effects like shadows and glows.
For a quote box, you may need to adjust the color using the Recolor options in the Adjust group.
Text Alignment and Margins:
To modify text alignment and margins within a text box, right-click the text box and select Format Shape.
In the Format Shape pane, go to Text Options > Text Layout & Properties to find alignment and margin settings.
You can adjust vertical alignment (top, middle, bottom), text direction, and margins (left, right, top, bottom).
The Wrap text in shape option controls whether the text wraps within the text box.
Sidebars:
Sidebars are text boxes used to add supplementary information that stands out from the main text.
To modify the shape or color of the sidebar, use the options in the Drawing Tools Format ribbon.
Linking Text Boxes:
Linking text boxes allows text to flow across multiple text boxes.
To link text boxes, select the first text box, go to the Format ribbon, and in the Text group, click Create Link.
The cursor will change to a “pouring” icon; click the next text box to link them.
To break the link between text boxes, select a text box and click Break Link in the Text group of the Format ribbon. Breaking the link will place all the text into the selected text box.
Fill Color Issue: When changing the shape fill of a text box, a white background may appear behind the text. To resolve this, change the color from the Format Shape pane rather than the Drawing Tools Format ribbon.
Microsoft Word 2019 Advanced Tutorial
The Original Text
subscribe and click the bell icon to turn on notifications we’ve made the accompanying exercise files for this tutorial available for free just click the link below in the video details to get these hello everyone and welcome to this training course for word 2019 advanced my name is deborah ashby and i’m an i.t trainer specializing in the design delivery and facilitation of microsoft courses both online and in the classroom and i’ve been in and around the it industry for about 25 years now and i’ve been an it trainer since 2007. now i started my career on an it help desk helping people fix their documents and spreadsheets before transitioning into training and a large part of my career has been spent working as a trainer in law firms and as anyone who works in the legal industry will know it is a very document heavy environment so i found myself using word to a really high level every single day so over the course of the years that i worked in this industry i really got to understand how word works how it’s used in the real world how to troubleshoot long complex documents and i also picked up lots of tips and tricks to make producing documents much more efficient now this training course is predominantly designed for people using word 2019 either the standalone desktop version or the latest version available through microsoft 365. i will say however there is a lot of crossover with older versions so if you’re using word 2016 or maybe even word 2013 you should still be able to follow through this training course without too many issues but just be aware that there are some features available in word 2019 that aren’t available in those older versions now this is an advanced word training course so i’m going to make a few assumptions i’m going to assume that you have a working copy of word 2019 on your pc or laptop i’m also going to assume that you have a good understanding of basic word functionality either gained through everyday use or maybe from completing a word for beginners training course and finally i’m going to assume that you know the basic terminology used in word so terms such as ribbon tab group right click dialog box things like that now this course is divided up into sections and each section is related to a particular topic in word and what you’ll find within that section is a number of different modules or lessons and each module contains one demo video that’s usually between 5 and 15 minutes long you’ll find all of the files that i use in these demo videos in the course files folder so you can download those and follow along if you want to and then at the end of each section there is a practice exercise that will allow you to practice the skills that you’ve learned in the section so with all that said and without further ado let’s dive into our first module where i’m going to run through with you where you can go to access help at any point during this course once again my name is deb i’m really excited to get into this course with you so all that’s left to do is grab a drink and prepare to immerse yourself in the wonderful world of word 2019 hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is deb and it’s my absolute pleasure to be guiding you through this course and currently we are in section one which is the introductory section and i just want to start out by running through with you where you can go within word to get help at any point during this course now word has some really good features when it comes to accessing help so it might be that you need help on a specific command or task or maybe you just want to access some resources and read up about something a little bit more so in this module we’re just going to run through a few of the options that you have so on the screen here i just have a document that i’ve created and you’ll see that this just has some junk text in it which doesn’t really make too much sense but that’s fine in this case because we’re not actually going to be doing anything with this text we just need to have a document open so we can explore the help options now the eagle-eyed amongst you may see up here on our ribbons we have an entire ribbon dedicated to help now if this ribbon isn’t turned on or you can’t see it in your copy of word it might be that you need to go into the backstage area and just enable that ribbon so let me quickly show you how to do that if you can’t see this help tab so we’re going to go across to the file tab and all the way down into our word options and this is where you’ll basically find all of those little options that control word and define how your copy of word is set up now when you’re looking to enable or disable any ribbons you’ll find these options under the customize ribbon section and in this pane on the right hand side this is where you’ll see all of your ribbons laid out and you’ll see right at the bottom i have the help ribbon ticked so if you can’t see this ribbon it’s probably because you don’t have a tick in this box and so it’s not displaying so just make sure you do pop a tick in there click on ok and you should find you can then see your help ribbon now in this help ribbon we just have one group and the first option here is just plain old help and as you can see we can also press the f1 key on our keyboard as a shortcut to the help screen so let’s click on it and what you’ll see is that you get a help pane open up at the side now this pane is somewhat customizable so if it’s a bit too wide for you or even a bit narrow if you hover your mouse over the boundary you’ll see i get that double headed arrow and i can drag in or i can drag out and all of the help is categorized into different groups so for example if i click on get started at the top you can see i get a helpful little video about some of the basics of work so this one is related to creating a document if i scroll down you’ll see i also get written out instruction as well and it goes through some of those basic things that you need to know in word so really very useful if you want to go back to that main menu you have a back arrow which i’m going to click and you can then dive in and have a browse through some of these other sections so this one for example has numerous different subcategories so if i wanted to know how to create a bulleted or numbered list i can click on this again i get a little video and also some written instruction so quite a few items in there for you to have a browse through if you’re looking for something in particular and if you scroll all the way to the bottom you’ll also see that you have a list down here of top task so these are popular help items that again you might want to have a read through so for example if i wanted to know how to add watermark i’m going to come into here again i get my little video that i can play and then i have some more links at the bottom for related tasks and if you ever just want to get back to that main home screen you can click on the little icon here that looks like a house and that’s going to take you back to that main menu and of course just above you also have a search so if you know specifically what you’re looking for so maybe i want to insert a table i can type that in i can see it comes up from the list and there we go once i select it it then pulls back all of the relevant topics to my search term i can then click on that link and once again i’m taken through to a video and written instruction so a fairly comprehensive help file that’s available for you to access at any time simply by pressing the f1 shortcut key now the other things that you have within this help group you have a contact support button so as we hover over the screen tip says get help from an office support agent so if we click on this it’s again going to open up a pane on the right hand side and you can see i’m getting a message saying they’re sorry but they’re currently unable to provide phone support but you could if you wanted to type in a message into here and send that off to microsoft now how quickly you’ll get a reply on that i do not know but that option is there if you need it you can also provide feedback on anything in word so you can let microsoft know if you particularly like something or if you don’t like something or even if you have some kind of suggestion and i will say that i do know that these are collated by microsoft and a lot of the suggestions from their customers are integrated into newer versions so if you do have something that you want to tell them then that feedback button is there we also have a show training option so let’s take a look at this and this is basically going to show you some online training and learning content so again it really depends what it is that you’re interested in so maybe i was looking for some help on formatting text i can click on this section just here and again it’s going to take me into those help files so this is really another way of getting to those help files and then finally we have a what’s new button and this is quite a useful little button because microsoft are always changing things in these applications some are very minor updates some are quite major but sometimes i like to jump in here click on what’s new just so i can see anything new that’s been added since the last time that i checked so whilst there’s nothing new right now i can see what the last feature that was released was and that was the ability to be able to type hands-free using a microphone so it’s always worth keeping your eye on this area so you can keep up to date with any changes and new features so that is your help ribbon now another way to obtain help which essentially is going to jump you into the same help file is you have this little box at the top that says search and if i hover over you’ll see that the actual name for this box is tell me and in older versions it used to be called tell me what you want to do but i think in this version they’ve definitely shortened that down and you can see that this also has a keyboard shortcut of alt plus q now what we do with this is we can start to type in a search term and it will go away and search the help files for us so if i wanted some help on themes i can type themes into the top there and what it’s going to give me is it’s going to show me where themes is located so instead of hunting around the ribbons to try and find where i would change my document theme it’s actually taken me straight to it in this little shootout menu at the side so i could come in here and i could just change my theme alternatively if i didn’t particularly want to apply a theme at this stage maybe i was just looking for some help you’ll see underneath it says get help on and then it says that there are 10 results for themes so again if i click on this it’s going to pop open that help pane and jump me to the section in help that relates to themes and i can then go through click on my different sections to try and find what it is that i’m looking for so that tell me box at the top can be really useful when it comes to navigating or trying to find where different commands are located on the ribbons and also for quickly accessing help so that is it on help those are all the resources that you have they are fairly comprehensive and i do find myself diving in and out of them reasonably often when i’m not sure how to do something or if i just want to read a more in-depth explanation about a task tool or command that’s it for this module in the next module we’re going to be doing an exercise to practice some of the things that we’ve been over in the introductory section and then we’re going to move on to section 2 where the real work starts so i’m going to jump over to the exercise now and i look forward to seeing you there for the next section you’ll want to download the course exercise files click the link below in the video description to get these you can also scroll through the details to find timestamps for each section in this course if you’re enjoying this training please leave us a comment hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is deb and we are down into our first exercise exercise one and in this exercise and all of the exercises hereafter we’re just going to practice some of the skills that we’ve learned in this section now this is the introductory section but there are a couple of things i’d like you to practice before moving on to section two so the first part of this exercise is very straightforward i just want you to make sure that you have word open with a blank document on the screen as i have here and i’d like you to check the version of word that you’re using in the second part of the exercise i’d like you to search through the help files for keyboard shortcuts i want you to find the keyboard shortcut for closing a document and then i’d like you to use that keyboard shortcut to close the open blank document that you have on the screen so if you want to practice that then you can pause this video now if you’ve already completed this exercise and you want to see my answer then carry on playing the video so let’s take a look at the answer to this exercise the first thing i asked you to do was to check the version of word that you’re using so to do that we go up to the file tab and we go down to the account section and this is where you’ll find that information and you can see here that i’m using microsoft office professional plus 2019 let’s click on back the second part of the exercise i asked you to do a search through the help files for keyboard shortcuts so i’m going to jump up to my search box at the top here and i’m going to do a search for keyboard shortcuts and what you’ll see is below i have 10 help results for keyboard shortcuts so let’s click and the top link here is keyboard shortcuts in word now i asked you to search for the keyboard shortcut that will close a document so if you scroll down through keyboard shortcuts and down to frequently use shortcuts you’ll see in here you have an option to close the document which is control plus w so now we know what that keyboard shortcut is i’m just going to use that to close this document control w and that is it i hope you got on okay with that exercise and i will see you in the next section hello everyone this is deb and welcome back to our course on word 2019 advanced we’re now down into section two and in this section we’re going to be covering some essential skills that you should have when you’re working in word 2019 now i know that this is an advanced course and we will be working through some of the advanced features of word but it’s really important that we just solidify the skills that we have in word make sure that we know those essentials those basics in order to give ourselves a good foundation in which to progress on from what i hope to show you in this particular section is some of the things that you need to have turned on some of the things that you need to know how to access or implement in word in order to be able to achieve some of those more advanced skills and even if you are aware of some of these things that i’m going to show you in this section hopefully you’ll pick up some extra tips and tricks which will help you work in word more efficiently because that’s what we’re really aiming for here we all work in a very time pressed environment at least most of us do where we want to be able to use word in the most efficient way possible in order to get our tasks done and that really leads on to what i want to start out in this module with and that is talking a little bit about the ribbon screen tips and those all important keyboard shortcuts so let’s start out with the latter let’s talk about keyboard shortcuts now keyboard shortcuts are a great way to increase your efficiency when you’re working in word whether you’re just trying to open files move around a document or invoke certain commands or dialog boxes they’re just a quick way of doing that so your hands don’t have to leave the keyboard and you might think well you know i don’t mind using my mouse and that is entirely up to you if you’re really comfortable using your mouse to do things then that’s absolutely fine but you probably would be surprised how much quicker it is if you’re already typing if you already have your hands on the keyboard it’s a lot easier just to invoke a quick keyboard shortcut as opposed to moving your hands to your mouse and then trying to carry out whatever task you’re trying to do so we’re going to start out by looking at some of those key keyboard shortcuts now there are so many keyboard shortcuts in word and if you’re anything like me you won’t memorize them all there are hundreds of them but you will pick up a few along the way which you’ll find yourself using all the time so let’s start out by taking a look at a few of them and i’m going to show you where you can access the entire list which you can then print off if you want to and utilize the ones you need so currently on the screen i just have word open i don’t currently have a document open so let’s start out by doing that if i press the keyboard shortcut control n that’s going to give me a new blank document if i wanted to open an existing document control o is going to take me into that open screen in the backstage area and i can then go in and choose to open one of my recent documents alternatively i can browse for a document to open now i’m not going to do that i’m happy with my blank document so if i want to go back to my blank document i can click the back arrow up here alternatively the shortcut for that is the escape key so i’ve got my blank document and let’s just get some text in here now i’m not too concerned about what this text is at this stage but this is another useful little tip if you ever want some junk text just some random text in a document sometimes if you want to maybe play around with layouts or try out some things you don’t really want to do it on an actual document it’s quite nice just to be able to quickly get some lines of text in your document so that you can do that so a quick tip is you can type in equals rand which stands for random open a bracket and then define how many paragraphs you want and how many lines within that paragraph so i’m going to say i want 40 paragraphs of six lines each close my bracket looks very much like an excel command hit enter and that is exactly what i get now you can see it’s jumped me all the way down to the bottom of my document so if i want to jump back up to the top a keyboard shortcut i can use is control home to get me all the way back up there and you can probably guess what’s coming next control end key is going to jump me to the bottom so this is essentially random text that i have in my document i’m going to show you another way to enter random text so what i want to do is i want to essentially undo what i’ve just done so we have a keyboard shortcut for that and it is control z and i’m going to control z again and again to get rid of that little piece of code so the other way i can enter random text is type in equals lorem and then do exactly the same thing this time i’m going to have 20 paragraphs of 10 lines each hit enter and i get that lorem ipsum test text control home to jump me up to the top of the document now when it comes to navigating efficiently around your document again there are a few different keyboard shortcuts that you can use now you’re probably already aware that you can use your left right up and down arrows to move across one character but if you just add in the control key so i’m going to do control key and right arrow that’s going to jump me to each new word and i can use the left arrow to go back again if i do ctrl shift right arrow it’s going to highlight those words as i go across left arrow is going to unhighlight them or deselect them and if i hold down control and do my down arrow that’s going to jump me to the next paragraph and the up arrow will jump me to the paragraph above now when it comes to making selections again there’s a few important keyboard shortcuts that you should know we’ve just seen one of them we can select an entire word simply by doing control shift right arrow and i can carry on doing that to select each word and if i want to select the entire line i just need to do shift and end to select that line i could then move down by doing shift down arrow to carry on selecting lines like so and of course shift up arrow does the opposite if i do shift home it’s going to deselect and of course a really important keyboard shortcut if you just want to select everything in your document control a will select all so some really important keyboard shortcuts there by no means all of them but some ones that i personally use frequently let’s now jump into our document and add a quick title so we’re just going to call this lorem ipsum now i want to make this title stand out a little bit so of course we have keyboard shortcuts for some of our font formatting as well so i’m clicked at the end of the title at the moment so if i do control shift home it’s going to select the entire title and then if i want to make that bold control b is going to give me bold control i is going to make that italic and if i wanted to apply an underline as well ctrl u is going to give me an underline now if i decided at this stage i wanted to do some more advanced font formatting i might want to jump into the font formatting dialog box and again there is a quick way to do that if we do control d that’s going to jump us straight into that font formatting dialog box so it might be that i want to come in here and maybe change the underline style to double underline click on ok and there we go and if at this stage i want to do something like increase the font size if i hold down ctrl shift and then use my angle bracket or what you might know as the greater than sign on your keyboard i can increase my font size and if i use the other angle bracket or the less than symbol on the keyboard and that will take that font size back down again now at this stage i’m currently working in an unsaved document so you can see at the top in the title bar it says document 4 which tells me that i haven’t yet saved this so what i’m going to do is i’m going to save this to a folder that i have on my pc and a quick way to jump into that save as dialog box is to press the f12 key and that’s going to pop up my local folders so i’m just going to select a folder to save this into and we’re going to select the section 2 folder i’m happy with the name lorem ipsum.docx i’m going to click save and there we go we now have a saved document now as i said those are just a few of the keyboard shortcuts that are available in word but if you do want to see a full list of them you can do that very simply from within word so right to the top here where we have this search bar if we click in here and type in keyboard shortcuts you can see just here we have 10 results in the help section within word so if i click on this it’s going to open up a pane on the right hand side which is essentially going to jump me into words help facility and you’ll see here all of the matches that we have for keyboard shortcuts so lots of information in here but if you purely just want to list so you can see all of the keyboard shortcuts available it’s this top link that you’re going to want keyboard shortcuts in word and here we go now this is a pane that you can pop out if i just grab the top and just drag it i can then make this as big as i want to make it easier for me to read and it’s going to go through all of the different keyboard shortcuts organized into helpful topics so you can see here at the top it says frequently used shortcuts if i click on this it’s going to show me all of those keyboard shortcuts available to open a document create a new document save so on and so forth so this might be something that you want to print out or it just might be something you want to refer to from time to time but really useful to know where to access that information now it’s also worth noting that you can customize keyboard shortcuts so if you want to essentially assign your own shortcuts to certain things in word then you can definitely do that as well if we jump up to the file menu and we’re in the backstage now so we’re going to go down to options right at the bottom and you’ll find your keyboard shortcut customization options underneath customize ribbon and right at the bottom here it says keyboard shortcuts we have a customize button and we can now go in and look through the different categories and the different commands and set up our own keyboard shortcuts so what you’ll see is that for some of these there are already keyboard shortcuts so for example if i click on file open you can see that we have these two current keyboard shortcuts assigned now i could go in and change that or add another one if i wanted to but just be aware of this when you are setting your keyboard shortcuts so let’s quickly add in a new keyboard shortcut i’m going to scroll down and let’s say for file close now i’m going to add a new keyboard shortcut and this is going to be ctrl shift y now i can see underneath that this isn’t currently assigned to anything and that is exactly what i’m looking for what you need to be careful of is using shortcut keys that are already assigned to other things so you want to make sure it says unassigned under here and when you’re happy with it you can click on assign and close and click on ok and now let’s test to see if this works i’m going to close this document down ctrl shift y and there we go if i want to reopen the document i can do control o and there it is at the top of my list now word is also quite helpful it does show you what the keyboard shortcuts are for each command when you hover over them and we’re now moving into talking about screen tips and that is exactly where we’re going to pick up in the next module so please join me for that hi everyone and welcome back to my course on word 2019 advanced we’re down in section 2 where we’re just recapping some of those word essential skills to give us a good foundation from which to build from and in the previous module i ran you through some of those essential keyboard shortcuts and also showed you where you can find a big long list of all of the keyboard shortcuts available in word to help you become more efficient and we finished up that module by talking about screen tips and that’s really what i want to concentrate on in this particular module now screen tips if you’re not sure what i mean when i say that word you’ve probably come across them in your everyday usage but maybe just not have known what they’re called and all a screen tip is essentially is when you hover over any of the commands on the ribbon so for example if i hover over format painter you’ll see that i get that little informational box pop up there so it’s essentially giving me some really useful information about what that command does but it’s also showing me the keyboard shortcuts available for that command now it’s worth noting that not every single command on the ribbon will have a keyboard shortcut but the majority of them do so again if i hover over bullets i can see there it’s telling me that i can use this button to create a bulleted list if i hover over bold it tells me what that command does and also shows me that keyboard shortcut so this is a really useful little option if you want to know what the keyboard shortcut is of a particular command you can utilize that screen tip now again you will notice that you don’t have a keyboard shortcut listed in all of the screen tips so again if i hover over the numbering command you can see there it tells me what that command does but it’s not showing me the keyboard shortcut so just bear that in mind when you’re hovering over now if you’re somebody who maybe doesn’t like having those screen tips pop up sometimes they can be a little bit annoying or maybe you just want to customize the style of the screen tip then you can definitely do that as well and as you’ve probably guessed we can do that from file and options so you’ll find your screen tip options underneath the general area and if we take a look under user interface options this first section just here at the bottom we have screen tips style so this is where you can come in and you have three options when it comes to customizing those screen tips so you can select to show feature descriptions in screen tips so that’s the description of what that command does you can say don’t show feature descriptions in screen tips so that will remove it and you can select and not show screen tips at all so if i was to select don’t show screen tips and click on ok you’ll now see that when i hover over something like format painter i’m not getting that screen tip pop up now i actually do like to have my screen tips turned on so i’m going to go back here and i’m going to say show feature descriptions in screen tips now another thing you can customize when it comes to screen tips is whether or not that shortcut key is shown in the screen tip now again i find this really useful but if for some reason you don’t want to have that showing if you jump across to the advanced area and we’re going to scroll all the way down to display you can see here there is an option which i currently have ticked that says show shortcut keys in screen tips so again if you didn’t want to do that you could untick that box click on ok and now when i hover over format painter i just have the description but i don’t have the screen tips and you’ll see the same if i hover over bold just the description no screen tips in there now it’s also worth noting that you can create your own screen tips and this is particularly useful when you’re using things like hyperlinks and bookmarks i’m going to show you exactly how you can add information into your document in the form of a screen tip to help people who are accessing that document know exactly what to do a bit later on in this course when we talk about bookmarks and hyperlinks but for now that is it on screen tips in the next module i’m going to talk to you a little bit more about the ribbons so please join me for that hi everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is still deb and we are in section two where we’ve been taking a look at those essential skills that you need when you’re working in word and in the past couple of modules we’ve taken a look at keyboard shortcuts and also how to utilize and customize screen tips in this third module of this section what i want to focus on is a little bit more about the ribbon if you’ve been using word for quite a few years and i’m sure you’re aware of this ribbon structure that we now have this is something which came in around 2010 where we switch from the menu drop-downs to our commands running horizontally across the screen on what we call ribbons so in this module i just want to go into a few options that you have when it comes to managing and using your ribbons so the first thing you need to be aware of is that we have our ribbon tabs running across the top so home insert draw design layout so on and so forth we also have a file tab which isn’t essentially a ribbon as it doesn’t have that horizontal organization but this is where you’ll find all of what we call our backstage options and these are the more admin tasks surrounding your documents so things like new document opening saving printing share options and of course also your overall word options now on each tab you’ll find that you have commands organized into groups so if we take the home tab as an example you can see the group names listed at the bottom so we have clipboard font paragraph styles editing and voice and these are obviously different on each tab depending on the commands contained within the group and these essentially just group together all commands that are similar to each other so for example in the clipboard group i have cut copy format painter and all of my paste options in the font group i have all of the commands available when it comes to formatting my fonts so things like changing the font style the size the color and also things like bold italic and underline so these are your different groups and within them we have related commands something else you need to be aware of are galleries now you’ll see these for certain items on the ribbon and it just so happens that we have one on the home ribbon and that is this styles gallery so in the styles group you can see here i have a selection of styles that i can apply to different pieces of text but if i click the drop down it’s going to open up that gallery and it’s going to show me all of the options so you’ll see this sometimes instead of having an actual command button you’ll have some kind of drop down which is going to allow you to go into a gallery to make your selection something else that you’ll also find on some of these groups is a dialog box launcher and that is this little arrow that you see here in the corner of each of these groups now it’s also worth noting that you don’t have a dialogue box launcher in every single group so you can see at the end here with editing and voice i don’t have that little arrow but if you do have a little box like this it’s going to take you into more options for that specific group so for this one paragraph i now have some other options available i can select which aren’t listed as commands within the group on the ribbon so these are always good to go into if you’re looking for more advanced features or just more commands now i’m using word 2019 on a high resolution laptop and you can see the way that my ribbons my groups and my commands are organized it’s worth noting that if you have a lower resolution laptop or pc you may find that your commands and groups look slightly different to mine now the only way i can recreate this is actually to minimize my screen so if i just minimize this down i’m just going to drag it in very slightly so you can see what happens so if i was using a lower resolution you can see that now some of my options are grouped together so now i have an editing group and if i click the drop down underneath i have find replace select so on and so forth if i maximize out you’ll see that my resolution i have those actually listed out on the ribbon as opposed to just grouped underneath an editing button so just be aware of that if you’re following through this course and you’re thinking well i don’t see exactly what you’re seeing it might be related to your screen resolution it’s nothing to worry about but just something to note as we work through the different modules now when it comes to these ribbons as well you don’t always have to have them displayed if you don’t want to you’ll notice that the ribbons do take up quite a bit of screen real estate as i call it and if you want to give yourself more room when you’re working on a document you can definitely collapse up these ribbons so in the top right hand corner you’ll see here i’m hovering my mouse over it we have some ribbon display options so if i click that i have the option to auto hide the ribbon to show just the tabs or to show tabs and commands so if i say auto hide ribbon you can see it gets rid of that ribbon and i now have more space in which to work on my document if i want to get those ribbons back i can just move my mouse to the top of the screen until i get that blue bar and click and it will pull that ribbon down but what you’ll see is that the ribbon isn’t actually locked to the top of the screen when i’m utilizing this mode as soon as i click back on the document that ribbon is going to disappear again now that might be something that you find quite useful or it might not let’s jump back into our ribbon options and i’m going to select the show tabs option so this is as you would expect it’s got rid of all of the commands the actual ribbons but it’s still showing me the tabs so if i want to quickly access something so maybe i want to make this entire paragraph bold i can jump up to home it’s going to display the ribbon i can select my option and then when i click back on the document it’s just going to go back to showing me those tabs now the third option we have is to show tabs and commands now this is the default in general for me i like to have all of my tabs and all of my commands showing but again this is entirely personal preference and really dependent you can switch it up depending on what document you’re working on another way to quickly collapse up that ribbon is by utilizing this little up arrow on the right hand side and you can see there it says collapse the ribbon i can just click that button and it collapses it i can then go to my ribbon options say show tabs and commands and it brings it back you’ll also notice as i hover over there is a shortcut key to collapse the ribbon quickly which is control f1 so if i press ctrl f1 you can see there we go ctrl f1 again brings that ribbon back now another thing you need to be made aware of when it comes to working in word with the ribbons are contextual ribbons now these are ribbons which you can’t see until you need them so let me show you a very quick example what i’m going to do is i’m just going to put into here i’m going to take off italics first of all i’m quickly going to insert a table so i’m going to jump up to insert i’m going to select table and i’m just going to do a very quick table of three columns by two rows now what you’ll see is that once i’m clicked in that table i now have two additional ribbons appear at the top i have a table design ribbon which is showing me all of my options with regards to customizing my table’s design and i have a layout ribbon again this is all related to the layout of my table if i was to click outside of the table so if i click somewhere else in the document you’ll see that both of those ribbons disappear and this is why we call them contextual ribbons they only appear when they’re needed and you’ll see this throughout your usage of word if you insert a picture if you insert a shape if you insert a chart once you’re clicked in the picture or in the charts you’ll find that you will have contextual ribbons appear so a really important thing to be made aware of when you’re working with your ribbons in word now i’m going to do a control z just to undo all of that and take my document back to how it was now another thing you can utilize when working with ribbons and this kind of ties back to the keyboard shortcuts is that if you press the alt key on your keyboard what you’ll see is you get all of these different shortcuts which essentially allows you to navigate through your ribbons using your keyboard as opposed to your mouse so this is quite good for people who either prefer to work predominantly with the keyboard or maybe if you have some kind of wrist injury which prevents you from working efficiently with your mouse this might be a good option for you so again for example if i wanted to jump to the insert ribbon you can see that the letter underneath is n so if i press n it takes me to the insert ribbon and i get a whole new set of shortcuts that i can utilize so if i wanted to access the inbuilt icons in word i can see that the shortcut key there is ns so if i press ns it’s going to take me into my icon library so a really nice way of being able to navigate through your ribbons and commands utilizing just the keyboard and of course if you want to come out of here you can press the alt key again alternatively if you press escape that will take you out as well and the final thing i want to mention in this particular module related to the ribbons is that you can of course customize the way that your ribbons look so again if we jump up to file and go all the way down to options there is a section in here for customize ribbon and what you’ll see in here is on the left hand side you have all of your main tabs so we can see things like home insert drawer design so on and so forth and if it has a tick next to it it means that it’s going to display it on your ribbon now this is a good point to note most of the time you’ll find that the developer ribbon is not selected by default and that’s because it is one of the lesser used ribbons now we are going to be using the developer ribbon in this course so what i’m going to do is i’m going to put a check in the developer ribbon click on ok and you can see that i now have a tab added at the top which is showing me the developer ribbon and all of the commands now of course you could go into options again and go down to customize ribbon and you can turn any of these ribbons off and on if you want to you could even if you wanted to create your own ribbon and assign to that ribbon maybe commands that you use most frequently so i’ll show you very quickly how you can do that just be aware that if you are using your copy of word through your organization this might be something that is locked down i know a lot of companies these days don’t allow their staff to create their own ribbons so if you come into here and you find that you have new tab and new group grayed out then it might be that your company has locked that specific functionality down but if you do have access to these what we can do is we can create a new tab and you can see at the bottom it says new tab custom i’m going to rename this and i’m just going to call this debs ribbon click on ok and i can now go in and create my group so remember all of your commands are in groups so i’m going to select new group custom which has been created by default i’m going to rename this and i can choose to give it a little icon if i want to i’m not going to i’m just going to call this group formatting click on ok and what i can now do is go through and add what commands i want to this formatting group so let’s look through our list of popular commands on the right hand side i’m going to add some bullets like so and you can see when i click add it appears under my new group that i’ve created i’m going to add font and also font color let’s also add a line left at the top so now i have four commands within my formatting group on my debs ribbon so let’s click on okay and there we go you’ll now see add at the top i have debs ribbon i have my group called formatting and i have those commands that i’ve added so if you do have access to this it’s actually quite cool to be able to create your own ribbons maybe with all the commands on it that you use most frequently and of course if you want to get rid of that ribbon if we go back into options and into customized ribbon i can deselect it which will turn it off but it’s still there or alternatively i can select it and i can say remove and that gets rid of the ribbon entirely so that is pretty much it just a few key features that i wanted to make you aware of when it comes to working with your ribbon that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hi guys and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is still deb and we are in section 2 where we’ve been taking a look at some of the essential skills you need to know in word now so far we’ve covered off keyboard shortcuts screen tips and we’ve taken a look at some options you have when it comes to working with the ribbons in this module i just want to talk to you about something that is very small but very important in word and that is working with the rulers now rulers are really important when you’re working in word documents they enable you to see your margins they also enable you to set things like tabs so that you can align items in your document correctly they’re also a big help if you’re trying to do things like center objects on a page or line up text so i always like to have my rulers turned on by default now in this example i’ve turned my rulers off just so i can show you how you turn them on so currently i have my document with my lorem ipsum text in it but i don’t have any vertical or horizontal rulers showing now in order to display your rulers it is very simple but you do need to make sure that you are first in print layout view so if we jump up to the view ribbon you can see here in the views group i have print layout selected so just make sure you’re in that view and then also on this ribbon there is a group called show and in there we have an option for ruler and as i hover over you’ll see that useful screen tip that says it shows rulers next to your document you can see and set tab stops move table borders and line up objects in the document and you can also measure stuff so really useful little things to have turned on so i’m going to click in the check box and just turn those rulers on so you’ll now see i have my horizontal ruler running across the top of the page and my vertical ruler running down the side of the page now one question i always get asked when it comes to rulers is how can you change the measurement of the ruler now currently my ruler is showing in inches but if you want to work in a different measurement so maybe centimeters or pixels and you can definitely jump into options and change that so if i want to change my ruler to centimeters i’m going to go up to the file tab i’m going to jump down to my options and i’m going to go straight into my advanced section now what you’re looking for in here is you want to scroll down until you get to the display area and it’s this option that you’re looking for show measurements in units off and you can see that mine is currently set to inches but if i wanted to i can click the drop down and underneath there i have centimeters millimeters points and peakers now peakers is a typographic unit of measurement and one pica is roughly equal to 1 6 of an inch in case you’re interested now i’m not going to use pickers but i am going to change this to centimeters click on ok and you’ll see now that my ruler has changed to show in centimeters as opposed to inches so if you haven’t done already please jump into that view ribbon make sure you have your rulers turned on and make sure that you have the measurements set to something that you find meaningful and can work with that’s it on rulers i will see you in the next module hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is still deb and we are still in section 2 where we’re taking a look at some of those essential skills that you need in word now in this module i want to move on a little bit and start to talk to you a little bit about finding and replacing formatting now you may have used find and replace previously in word but it’s not just for replacing text you can also use finder replace to locate specific types of formatting throughout your document and even replace that formatting with something else entirely now just before we get on to that i just want to briefly remind you of how we utilize the find and replace feature so what you see on the screen here is i have a word document open and it’s called staff list and this is a very small very basic little table that just lists some staff members their job title the department they work in and where they’re located now this is a very small table it would probably be quicker for me to maybe go through and manually make the changes i need but imagine if you have a much larger table or piece of text and you want to find something in that table or text and you want to replace it with something else it’s going to be a lot quicker for you to use the find and replace functionality so for example in this document it might be that i want to change those locations to make them a little bit more concise so wherever i have the word united kingdom i want to change that to uk and wherever i had the word united states of america i want to change that to usa so this would be a perfect scenario for utilizing find and replace so you’ll find your finder replace options on the home ribbon across all the way on the right hand side in the editing group you can see you have a find and a replace and you’ll see there as i hover over i get the screen tip with the keyboard shortcut of control h so i’m going to utilize that control h to bring up my find and replace dialog box so essentially what i want to do here is say what i want to find and then say what i want to replace it with so let’s just start out with united kingdom and i’m going to replace that with uk i’m going to say replace all it’s made three replacements and you’ll now see in the document that that has replaced successfully let’s do the other one so we’re going to look for united states of america and we’re going to replace that with usa and replace all so very quickly i’ve been able to make those bulk changes to my document so a really useful little utility so that might be how you’re used to using find and replace what i want to show you now is how you can take that on a stage further and find and replace formatting now when it comes to finding and replacing formatting you need to think about whether it’s going to be more efficient for you to utilize find and replace or more efficient for you to do it manually and there are definitely some scenarios where doing it manually is going to be quicker for you for example if you have a document and throughout that document you have some instances of bold text and you just want to change it all back to normal text so without the bold applied it’s probably going to be quicker for you just to do a control a on your document and then deselect bold which is going to put everything back to normal text so in those kind of situations it’s going to be quicker to do it manually however there are times when finding replace can really help you save time by applying formatting changes faster and easier than manual formatting so let’s take a look in this example as to how we can utilize find a replace to replace certain pieces of formatting in our document so i’m working in the lorem ipsum document and what you’ll see is if we go through this document i’ve made some changes to it you can see that i now have in blue font and underlined the word lorem ipsum management corporation and i have that fairly frequently throughout the entire document what you’ll also notice is that i have a section just here that’s indented very slightly from the rest of the text and is also showing in italics and what i’m going to do is i’m going to utilize find and replace formatting to make some changes to this document so let’s imagine the scenario it might be that i’ve done this document i’ve sent it to my manager and he’s come back and said to me it all looks great but i don’t want you to have the words lorem ipsum management corporation in blue or underlined i just want them to show in bold and he’s also said to me that he doesn’t want the word lorem ipsum management corporation he wants it to say lorem ipsum management corp now because i have this word throughout my document it’s probably going to be easier for me to utilize find and replace formatting to make these required changes so let’s take a look at how we might go about doing this i’m going to pull up that replace dialog box again remember keyboard shortcut control h and what you’ll immediately notice is that finder replace keeps in it the last search terms that you used so i’m just going to clear those out now the first thing you need to do here is you need to click on this more button because at the bottom this is where you’re going to find the replace formatting option and the first thing we need to do is we need to let word know what it is we’re looking for so in the find what box i’m looking for the words lorem ipsum management corporation but the thing i’m looking for is in blue it’s in bold and it’s underlined so i need to tell word that i’m also looking for those properties so i’m going to go down to the format box and i’m going to go to the font option i want to say that i’m looking for bold text font color is blue and the underline style is the solid line click on ok so now in the find what box is looking for the words lorem ipsum management corporation bold underline with a font color of blue so i’ve specified exactly what i’m looking for i can now go in and tell word what i want to replace it with so my manager said that he just wants this to be in bold but the same color as the rest of the text but he’s also said that he wants it to say corp as opposed to corporation so i’m going to say replace with lorem ipsum management corp and again i’m going to jump in to my formatting options i’m going to go to fonts and i’m going to specify the properties that i want to replace so i just want this to be in bold and i’m going to say font color i want to be set to automatic click on ok so now you can see all of my properties what i’m looking for and what i’m replacing it with if i click on replace all i can see it’s made five replacements and if we look in the document behind you can see that now i have lorem ipsum management corp as opposed to corporation it’s removed the blue font color it’s removed the underline but it’s showing in black in bold which is exactly what my manager asked for so pretty simple to replace the formatting let’s look at one more example now i’ve sent this document back to my manager i’ve made the edits that he’s asked for please come back again miss said actually halfway through the document we have this paragraph that’s slightly indented from the rest and is showing in italics and what he said to me is he wants to have italics removed and he wants the indentation to be removed so that’s in line with the rest of the document so what i would probably do here is i would make sure that my mouse is clicked at the start of this paragraph where we have that indentation and i might just want to check how much these paragraphs are indented by and i can do that by simply jumping up to the home ribbon and launching the paragraph dialog box and in here if i look down at the indentation section i can see that where i’m currently clicked is indented on the left as 0.6 centimeters so that’s useful information for me when i’m trying to find and replace the formatting so let’s cancel out of here and let’s do a ctrl h to fire up our find and replace dialog box now again what you’ll see in here is that it will hold in it the last searches that you did and i want to remove this so i’m going to just delete out where we have lorem ipsum management corp but you’ll see that it still holds that formatting underneath so i need to make sure that i click the no formatting button at the bottom just to get rid of that and i need to do it for both the find what and replace with so now i have a clean search what am i looking for this time well i’m not looking for any text specifically because this applies to this whole paragraph that’s indented so i’m going to click in find what and i’m going to jump straight down to find format and this time i’m searching specifically for text that is indented 0.6 centimeters so i’m going to go to the paragraph option and now i can set what i’m looking for so my indentation i’m going to set to zero 0.6 centimeters that is what i’m looking for and click on ok now i can also see that these paragraphs are showing in italics so i might want to add that in as well just to really refine what i’m looking for so i’m going to jump to format again and this time we’re going to go to font and i’m looking for everything that’s in italics so now i’m doing a very specific search for all texts indented on the left 0.6 centimeters and showing in italic font and what do i want to replace this with well let’s jump down to formatting go into font i want it just to be regular text and click on ok let’s go down to formatting again and into paragraph and i don’t want there to be any indentation so essentially i’m going to set this to zero centimeters click on ok and now i haven’t actually defined a piece of text but i have defined those properties that i’m looking for so now if i click on replace all it’s made one replacement and you’ll see now that that entire paragraph has been changed to regular font and it’s also now in line with the rest of the document so of course there are lots of different ways that you can utilize this by looking under this format option so this can be a really great way of very quickly and efficiently replacing certain items in your document that are formatted in a specific way so that’s it for this module in the next module we’re going to stay on this same train of thought and i’m going to show you how you can find and replace special characters so please join me for that hi everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we are midway through section two and in this section we’ve been learning some of those essential skills when it comes to working with word and in the previous module we took a look at how we can utilize the find and replace to find and replace formatting within a document i want to move on from that idea now and we’re still going to stay with find and replace but we’re going to talk about how you can find and replace special characters now special characters are characters that are not alphabetic or numeric so some examples of special characters would be things like quote marks question marks paragraph marks tabs things like that all of those are considered to be special characters in word and word has the ability for you to search for special characters and also replace special characters in a document which can be really useful so what i’m going to do in this module is just run through with you a few of the different ways that you can find and replace special characters now i’ve got a document on the screen and this is just some text that i’ve pulled from wikipedia about william shakespeare and if we have a look through this document it’s not very long but we do have some things that would be considered special characters so you can see here after the word william shakespeare in this first line of the first paragraph we have a copyright symbol we also have some curly brackets we have a hyphen in here we have some quotation marks down here and as we move down you’ll see there’s lots of other things in this document which are considered to be special characters what you also might notice with this document is that i have some rather large spaces in between each of the paragraphs i can see here that i’ve probably got double line spacing so the first thing i want to do with this document is i want to change the double line spacing to single line spacing now something that’s going to help me with this and something which i turn off and on periodically when i’m working in long documents is the show hide paragraph marker button so up on the home ribbon in the paragraph group you’ll see here you have an icon which looks like a paragraph marker and if we hover over and take a look at the screen tip you can see that it’s called show hide you can see the keyboard shortcut is control plus asterix and it says that if we toggle this on it’s going to show paragraph marks and other hidden formatting symbols and then it says this is especially useful for advanced layout tasks so if we toggle this button on simply by clicking you’ll see that i can now see where all of those paragraph markers are so i can see that yes in fact in between each of my paragraphs i have two paragraph markers and essentially what i want to do here is say to word i want you to find every time i have a double paragraph marker and replace it with one paragraph marker so let’s take a look at the first way that we can replace special characters now we’re going to need to jump back into our replace dialog box so once again you can either click on the home ribbon and click on the replace button in the editing group alternatively you can use the control h keyboard shortcut now i’m going to remove what was in my last search and i’m going to click my mouse in the find what box now in this case i’m looking for double paragraph markers but how do i actually input that into the find what field well if we go down to the bottom where we have our replace options you can see i have an option for replace and then special and if we click that we have about 20 or so options that we can use for our find and if you look at the top one it says paragraph mark so i’m going to select it and it puts in essentially what we call the carrot code for a paragraph marker now currently it’s just a single paragraph marker i’m looking for double paragraph markers so i’m going to do exactly the same thing go down to special and select paragraph mark so now i’m saying search for two paragraph marks and replace with one paragraph mark click on replace all it’s made for replacements and if i now check out my document you can see that i now have single line spacing between those paragraphs now something that you’ll also see is that this first paragraph is now very close to that line above ideally what i would want would be to have a little bit of space in there so i could jump in and just do that manually as i’ve just done but if i wanted to replace those double paragraph markers but keep the space at the top i could do this in a slightly different way so let me do ctrl z to undo and come back to my two paragraph marks so you can see here essentially i do have two paragraph marks so i’ve got one after william shakespeare and one just below the line so if i didn’t want these to be affected i could essentially select the document from the first line of the first paragraph down and then do my find and replace so we know how to do this i can do ctrl shift end and that’s going to select everything below where i’m clicked i can then do control h my options that i selected previously are still in there i’m going to say replace all it’s made three replacements and there we go now i’ve managed to remove them in the body of the document but i still have a space between that first paragraph and the horizontal line for the next example i’m just going to toggle that show hide button again to turn off those paragraph marks now the next thing i’m going to replace in this document are these hyphens now another way that you can do find and replace of special characters is that you can come in and highlight exactly what it is that you want to find in the document so i’m going to highlight in that first line that dash in between his birth date and the date he died i’m going to do ctrl h again and you can see automatically in the find what box it’s selected what i’ve got highlighted in the document i’m going to say replace that dash with a different type of dash so i’m going to go down to special and you can see here i have m dash and n dash now if you’re wondering what the difference is between these two it mainly relates to the size of the dash an m dash is a dash that is the width of the letter m and i’m sure you can imagine what an n dash is it’s a dash that is the width of a letter n so it’s slightly smaller now i’m going to replace this very small dash that i have in there with an m dash and once again it puts in the carrot code for that m dash i’m going to say replace all it’s made six replacements and there we go if you look now you can see that that dash is a lot bigger so now that i’ve replaced that dash looking at my document i can see that actually that dash does look a little bit strange it is a little bit too big particularly if i look in the name stratford-upon-avon that looks a little bit strange to me so what i’ve got in my documents now are m dashes so if i want to go in and replace them all i can say control h i’m going to remove what i have in find what and replace with and in find what i’m going to say find all of the m dash and replace with n dash which is a slightly smaller dash click on replace all it’s made six replacements and if i now take a look at my document i can see that yes that looks a little bit better so it’s definitely worth having a look through all of these different options that you have underneath special characters you can replace things like tabs column breaks fields footnote marks manual page breaks all of those kinds of things are available within the find and replace dialog box now something else i might want to replace in this document is this copyright symbol so in the first paragraph we have william shakespeare and then we have that copyright symbol just there and it might be that i want to replace the copyright symbol with the trademark symbol the tiny little tn now if i go into my replace dialog box and click special i can see that i don’t actually have an option in here to find the copyright symbol and replace it with the trademark symbol so how would i do that well let’s come out of here and something that’s super useful when it comes to doing things like this you’ll find under the insert ribbon and in the group on the end where we have symbol click on more symbols so this is going to open up the symbol window and you can see we have two tabs at the top if you click on special characters it’s actually going to show you all of those special characters and it also lists out their shortcut key and i can see in there that i have copyright symbol and i also have the trademark symbol so i can see copyright is alt control c and trademark is alt control t so i’m going to utilize that shortcut key in my find and replace so i’m going to cancel out of here and i’m going to select this copyright symbol i’m going to do control h to bring up replace and you can see because i’ve highlighted the copyright symbol it’s input it into find what and this time i’m just going to use that shortcut key to select the trademark symbol so alt control t and there you go it’s put in tm i can now say replace all it’s made for replacements and that is how you can utilize those symbol keyboard shortcuts in your find and replace so this is a really useful little option for you to review and you’ll see that they don’t all have shortcut keys but some of these main ones do so that’s another way that you can find and replace special characters in your document that’s it for this module in the next module we’re going to take a look at the navigation pane so please join me for that hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is still deb and we are in section two where we’ve been taking a look at some of those essential skills that you need to know in word and in this module i want to talk to you a little bit about navigating around your document in particular using the navigation pane now i want to start out this module by just highlighting something that i get asked about all the time and that is the existence of browse object in the later versions of word now if you don’t know what i mean by browse object if you ever used word 2013 or versions older than that you would have noticed a really helpful little facility to help you navigate around your document it was called browse object and you would find it underneath the vertical scroll bar in the bottom right hand corner it was essentially two arrows and a little globe icon and if you clicked on it it would allow you to jump to certain objects certain things within your document and it was a really useful little facility that i know a lot of people found really helpful now unfortunately it was eliminated in word 2013 so if you look down now at my vertical scroll bar you’ll see that i don’t have any of those little icons however in the versions after 2013 there has been a partial replacement for this utility by way of utilizing the navigation pane and also the go-to dialogue so i’m going to show you both of those utilities but i would say for those of you that did love the object browser these are definitely not as convenient as the old functionality so we’re going to start out by taking a look at the go to dialogue now before we jump into there there is something that i just want you to check and turn on in the status bar at the bottom in the left hand corner you can see that it’s showing me what section i’m currently clicked in what page i’m currently on so i’m currently on page one of five pages it’s telling me how many words i have in this current document and it’s also telling me the language that i’m using now these are really helpful pieces of information but they aren’t necessarily turned on by default for you when you’re using word so if you right-click your mouse in a blank area of this status bar you’ll see you get the customize status bar menu pop-up and anything that has a tick by it is currently being displayed in that status bar so i want you to go into here and i want you to make sure that you have a tick next to section and also a tick next to page number and if you want to turn on some of these other features then you’re more than welcome to so now we have those turned on let’s take a look at the go to dialog we’re going up to our home ribbon and we’re going all the way across into the editing group i’m going to click the drop down next to find and you’ll see that we have a little option here called go to the keyboard shortcut for this is ctrl g and if we take a look at that screen tip it says what’s faster than scrolling jumping go to lets you jump right to a specific page line footnote comment or other place in your document so in many ways this is very similar to the old object browser so let’s fire up go to and see what we have in here so you can basically see this is just another tab within the find and replace dialog and what this will allow you to do is to quickly jump to various different objects or elements within your document so for example i have a five page document and if i wanted to jump very quickly to page three i can make sure that i’ve selected page in the go to what list and then i can enter my page number three click on go to and it’s gonna jump me straight down to page three i could also do the same with sections now currently i haven’t sectioned up my document i just have one section but if you did have multiple sections you can enter in your section number and it will jump to that section i can choose to jump to a specific line now this might be when you want to turn on line numbers so i’m going to jump up to the layout tab and in this first group page setup you can see one of the options that we have is line numbers now i have a few different options i can select in here but essentially all i want is a number next to each line in the document so i’m going to select continuous and you can see now that my document has line numbers so now if i want to jump to a specific line number i can enter in the line number in here let’s say 50. click on go to and you can see underneath it’s jumped me to line 50. now that may or may not be an option that you want to use but it’s good to know that it is there so what i’m going to do is i’m going to go in and i’m going to turn off those line numbers i can also navigate or jump to any bookmarks that i have in the document we don’t currently have any in here just yet any comments footnotes endnotes fields tables lots of different things that we can jump to for example i could select graphic and then i can enter a graphic number now the only graphics i have in this document are essentially the logos in the header on each page but if i wanted to jump forward three graphics i could type in three click on go to it’s going to jump me to the third graphic from wherever i was currently clicked i could choose object which gives me a little drop down menu and i can then select from the drop down what object i want to jump to so if i have something like an excel chart inserted into my word document i can select excel chart click on next and it’s going to jump me to that particular chart so lots of different options in this drop down menu for you and we can also navigate by headings and i can enter in a heading number so if i enter in say heading 4 click on go to and it’s going to jump me to heading 4. so you can utilize that go to dialog in order to navigate around your document now that’s all well and good but sometimes i find this a little bit cumbersome to use sometimes i don’t know the heading number that i want to jump to sometimes i don’t know how many graphics i want to jump forward i just want to navigate through and that is where the navigation pane is probably going to be more helpful to you so let’s close out of go to and we’re going to turn on the navigation pane so we’re going to go up to the view tab and in this show group you’ll see the bottom option there is navigation pane and the little screen tip says that this is like a tour guide for your document click on a heading a page or a search result and it will take you right there so let’s put a tick in the box and you’ll see my navigation pane opens up on the left hand side and we have three main headings up here headings pages and results and then we have a search document bar just above now what you’ll see under headings is it will essentially import all of the headings within your document into the navigation pane now i will say that this relies on your document being styled correctly and what i mean by that is that you’ve used heading styles throughout your document because the navigation pane is only going to pick up anything that has a style applied to it now you may or may not be familiar with using styles in your document but if i just click at the start of this title just here and jump back to the home ribbon i’m talking about this group here the styles group and you can see currently i have a grey box surrounding the style which is currently applied to the line that i’m clicked in so currently this is a heading one style if i click on the first item just here it says names of the employee and employer i can see that that has a heading 2 style applied and it’s really important to style up your documents particularly if you’re going to do things like tables of contents and particularly if you want to be able to navigate around using headings so essentially in this navigation pane i have everything in here that i’ve applied a heading style to and that enables me to very easily jump to specific points in the document so if i want to jump down to point 10 other paid leave i can just click on that heading in the navigation pane and it’s going to navigate me to that particular page what you’ll also see in here is that these are expandable and collapsible items so if i didn’t want to see any of these subheadings i only wanted to see the heading ones essentially i can just minimize up everything and i currently only have one heading one in this document which is that first heading so what i might want to do is maybe collapse up all of the heading three so that i’m only seeing heading ones and twos so i can do that like so and that makes the list a little bit easier to read and i can then navigate to wherever i like now i’m going to expand these again another useful feature in this headings area of the navigation pane is that you can reorganize your headings very simply from here so if i go down to let’s say 0.3 just here where it says job title or brief description of the job i have two subheadings underneath their job title and brief description of the job if i then decide that i want brief description of the job to appear before job title instead of going into my document and cutting and pasting and moving things around i can simply just drag and drop above where it says job title and what it will do is it will essentially move not only the heading but the entire paragraph associated with it so it’s a really great utility for reorganizing items within your document the next heading along is pages so again we can navigate specifically by different pages in our document and this is pretty much what it says on the tin we have all of the pages of our document listed out and if you want to jump to a specific one you simply click on it and then finally we have results now there’s nothing in here at the moment because this is going to display the results of any search that i’ve done in the search box above so what i can do here is i can enter in search terms to navigate to specific parts so if i type in the word abroad and click on the magnifying glass you can see it jumps me to page two where i have the word abroad and it’s highlighted it in yellow and of course you can customize this option if you don’t want it to highlight if you just want it to jump to the specific place in the document if you click the little drop down at the end of the search field you have an options button and this is where you can choose some of the options with regards to your search and you can see that the only one that i have highlighted in here is the highlight all so if you didn’t want it to appear in yellow you would just uncheck that box you can also see in here that you can choose to match case you can find whole words only and you can also do things like use wildcards let’s click that drop down arrow again and take a look at some of these other options we have access to advanced find in here so again that’s just going to open up that find and replace box in case you want to do a more intensive find within your document replace is going to jump us to our replace dialog and then again we have that go to option that we were just looking at now one thing i will say with this go to option if you do find this useful and you find yourself using it a lot as we no longer have quick access to it via the object browser in word 2019 what you could do is add go to to your quick access toolbar so let’s close out of here i’m going to go up to find in the editing group and where we have go to in the menu i’m going to right click and i’m going to say add to quick access toolbar and you’ll see now that on the quick access toolbar we now have the go to option so this makes it super easy whenever i want to invoke that dialog box i can just click on the quick access toolbar to bring it up as opposed to browsing to the home tab and going to find and then selecting go to and then finally at the bottom we have some specific things that we can find in our document so again if i wanted to look for specific graphics or tables let’s start with graphics it’s going to jump me to the next graphic from wherever i was clicked and for me that is the logo for this company in the header and i could also select tables and it’s going to jump me down to the only table that i have in this document which is on that final page now i’m going to do one final search in here i’m just going to type in the word job into the search box and click the magnifying glass you can see that i have seven results and it’s highlighting the headings where those results appear if i click on the results tab it’s going to show me the line of text where that search term appears and because i have seven results i can use my up and down arrows to navigate to the next result and you can see as i click the down arrow it’s moving through my document to the next instance of my search term once you’re finished with the search if you just click the cross to clear out the search results it’s going to take you back so you can start again and type in another search term and the final thing related to the navigation pane if you don’t particularly like the position of the navigation pane you can move this if i click the little drop down arrow for task pane options i have a move option and when i click that my cursor changes to that double headed arrow and i can just click and i can pick up the navigation pane and i can literally drag and drop it to wherever i like so i’m going to drag it over to the side because i prefer mine to be on the right hand side when you’re done with the navigation pane you can just click the cross in the top corner to close that down so that is how you utilize go to and the navigation pane to navigate around your document and it’s also the alternatives that you have available if you’ve been used to using the object browser in word 2013 or previous versions that’s it for this module i will see you in the next hi guys this is deb and welcome back to my course on word 2019 advanced we are coming towards the end of section two now and in this section we’ve been taking a look at those essential skills that you need to know in word and this section wouldn’t be complete without reviewing some of the options that we have for spelling and grammar checking now i don’t think i need to tell you how important it is that when you have a document that maybe you are sending to a client or maybe your manager or even your colleagues it’s important to run a spell check once the document has been complete if you don’t do this and you end up sending out a document that is full of spelling and grammatical errors it really doesn’t look very professional and it makes it look like you’ve rushed your document it doesn’t give the greatest impression and a spelling and grammar check is something which you should be doing at the end of your document so once it’s complete one of the final things you want to do before you send this document to somebody else or maybe upload it to cloud storage is you want to run a spelling and grammar check now in word 2019 the spelling and grammar checker is slightly different to previous versions of word so let’s dive in and take a look now when it comes to reviewing your document prior to sending it out you’ll find your spelling and grammar checker on the review tab and it’s not immediately obvious as it no longer says spelling or spell checker it’s in the proofing group which is this first group on the left hand side and the one you’re looking for is check document and you can see here as we hover over we get that screen tip which tells us we’re about to go into the editor and of course we have a shortcut key of f7 to quickly invoke that spell check so let’s check out our document and see if we have any issues that we need to fix so now in 2019 what we get is this editor pane pop-up on the left hand side and of course as with the navigation pane if you don’t like the position of this editor you can just pick it up and you can drag and drop it somewhere else now i’m fairly happy with it over on the left hand side so i’m going to pull it back to there now what the editor has done is it’s taken a look through my document remember my document isn’t that long it’s about five pages and it’s pulled up all of the issues that it’s found so currently i have seven issues that i need to review in my document and it’s been divided down into corrections and refinements and you can see that we have spelling grammar and conciseness and these are actually color-coded red blue and this kind of brown color and these colors correspond to how those errors show up in the document so for example if we scroll down and find our first error and here it is just here you can see that we have a red wiggly line underneath the word dependence now what these colors actually mean the red line indicates a misspelled word and you can see i have actually three of them on this particular page a blue double underline indicates a grammatical error and a brown dotted line which you can see just here invites me to review the conciseness of the sentence so that’s what they look like in your document but fortunately we don’t have to scroll through our document looking for these errors we can utilize the editor to quickly jump through and fix these particular errors so let’s deal with spelling first of all i’m going to click where it says spelling and straight away it opens up this spell checker now this looks very similar to spell checkers in previous versions of word it’s highlighted the first misspelled word that it’s found in the document which is dependence and it’s now providing me with some suggestions to replace that word so i can see that yes this top one is the one that i want so i’m going to click dependence to replace that word it replaces it and automatically moves on to the next misspelled word and i can see here that yes i have in fact spelt enroll wrong so i’m going to utilize the suggestion again click on it to replace the word and my final one here is training i have too many n’s in that word i’m gonna select the suggestion to replace that word so once you’ve gone through and corrected all the errors you’ll get a green tick next to that item so i know that in terms of spelling my document is now good to go so i can now move on to check my grammar i can see that i have three errors in here that i need to review so let’s click on grammar and if i look at this particular sentence that it’s picked up where it says there are no collective agreements the suggestion here is the word agreements and i can see that it’s spelt correctly what i’m thinking here is that it doesn’t particularly recognize the quote marks that i have around the words collective agreements now in this case i’m good with those quote marks i want them there so i don’t want this to register as a grammatical error so what i’m going to do is i’m going to go down underneath and i’m going to select ignore once and it will move me onto the next check here it’s picked up the sentence you will receive an additional day’s holiday for each five years of continuous employment and quite rightly it’s recognized that i haven’t spelt days quite correctly i’ve missed out the apostrophe so i’m going to change that and utilize the suggestion and then finally when it comes to grammar it’s picked up the sentence must inform jane doe by telephone as soon as possible but no later than two hours prior to your workday’s start time and again it’s recognized that i’ve put work day as two words and it’s made the suggestion of all one word so i’m gonna say yes change that and once again once you’ve been through and reviewed everything you’ll get a green tick to let you know that you’re good when it comes to grammar now finally in here we have a nice little option called conciseness so this essentially reviews your sentences in your document and works out if you could have written something a little bit more concisely i know a lot of the time i am very guilty of adding in extra words into sentences that don’t really need to be there so this is a great one to help keep your document on point without any unnecessary waffle so let’s see what it’s picked up i’m going to click on conciseness and it’s pulling back this sentence so it says while you’re working outside the uk in addition to your pay you’ll be paid all of your accommodation costs food allowance and any agreed reasonable expenses now you might think that that sentence sounds okay but what word is telling me is that i don’t really need the word of in this sentence so this might sound better if it says in addition to your pay you’ll be paid all your accommodation costs food allowance etc etc so it’s removing unnecessary words from a sentence to make it more concise so i’m going to say yup sounds good to me let’s select all and replace that so i’ve essentially finished reviewing my document and it’s popped up a readability statistics box which just shows me some really nice statistics with relation to how many words characters paragraphs and sentences i have in this document it’s also given me some averages which is quite nice and also the readability of my document graded against different scales now you don’t necessarily have to have this readability statistics turned on so if you don’t like that popping up once you’ve finished your spell check i’m going to show you in a moment how you can turn this off but the time being i’m going to click on ok word is telling me i’ve finished reviewing so i’m going to click ok and i’m now pretty certain that my document is error-free when i send this out now just before we leave this editor let’s just quickly jump into the settings at the bottom now when i click on settings it’s just going to essentially jump me into word options and to the proofing area i’m going to go through a lot of these options in the next module but the section i want to highlight here is this section just here so when correcting spelling and grammar in word it’s always worth reviewing these options to make sure everything is set up as you would like it so i like word to check spelling as i type so essentially when i’m typing a word if i misspell it i like it to underline it straight away in the document so that i know i also want it to mark grammar errors as i type and also frequently confused words now this next option it says check grammar and refinements in the editor pane so this is the edit pane that we’ve been using if i unchecked this box it’s only going to show me spelling errors it’s not going to give me the grammar and conciseness and then finally i have that show readability statistic so if i don’t want that to pop up i can just untick that particular box and if you wanted to right at the bottom we could do something like hide all the spelling and grammar errors in this document only so if you have a particular document where you don’t want to show any errors in it you can select it or even set it for all new documents and then select hide spelling errors and hide grammar errors now i’m not going to do that because i like to see when i’ve made a mistake and click on ok now i’m going to close down the editor pane and just one final thing i want to point out here when it comes to spell check as you type and let’s type a sentence and spell something wrong so i’m going to say the document is attached and you can see i’ve spelt document wrong so i have my red wiggly line indicating a spelling error now i don’t have to wait until the end to review any spelling errors what i tend to do is if i’m typing in a document i like to correct my spelling errors as i go if i see that i’ve misspelled a word if you right click on the word your first option you get is spelling which allows you to correct it as you’re typing so here i can see that i have my suggestion is document i can select it and it’s corrected immediately now that might be something that you like to do or alternatively you might just like to bash out your document and then just check the whole thing at the end it is entirely up to you and finally before we leave this module where we’ve been talking about proofing let’s just look at these other two options that we have in this proofing group thesaurus and word count now the thesaurus lets us select an alternative word that means the same thing so for example if i highlight the word accommodation in my document and click on thesaurus it’s going to give me a whole host of other options which basically mean accommodation so i find this useful sometimes when i’m writing a paragraph i find myself repeating the same word and it just doesn’t sound particularly great so it’s nice to have other options available so that’s a nice little option and then finally we have word count so again this just gives us some statistics and our document in relation to how many pages how many words we have in the document characters with spaces characters no spaces paragraphs and lines so again i find this particularly useful if maybe i am writing something like a blog post and i’ve been given a word limit so maybe i can’t go over a thousand words this helps me keep track of where i’m up to and of course in addition to this little word count pop-up box you also have that down in your status bar if you have word count turned on so that is it when it comes to proofing tools checking your document for spelling grammar and conciseness i hope you found that useful and i will see you in the next module hi guys this is deb and welcome back to my course on word 2019 advanced we’re coming towards the end of section two where we’ve been reviewing all of those essential skills when working in word and in this particular module i want to run through with you some options that you have when it comes to autocorrect now autocorrect is a super useful feature for automatically correcting misspelled words fixing things like capitalization and also invoking special characters and it’s so good you may not even have noticed when you’re busy typing away frantically in a document that it’s actually working as you type so let me show you what i mean and let’s take a look at autocorrect in action so currently i just have a blank document open i’m going to click in my blank document and i’m going to misspell the word the i’m going to type in hte and let’s just zoom in a little bit so that’s a bit easier to see now when i press space you can see the word auto corrects it to the word the the same thing with the word can if i type in a c n which can happen if you’re typing very quickly and it will auto correct the word and there are a whole host of commonly misspelled words that word recognizes and will autocorrect for you as you’re typing i’m going to delve in and take a look at some of those in a moment but just be aware that’s always chugging away in the background as you’re typing your document now aside from words there’s also some other things that word will auto correct for you as you’re typing so for example if i was to type in first and hit the space bar you can see that it becomes superscript the same thing if i was to type second third so on and so forth now some other examples of autocorrect in action would be utilizing symbols in your document so for example if i wanted to add the copyright symbol if i type in curly bracket c curly bracket you can see again that is set up to autocorrect to the copyright symbol if i type in bracket e bracket that’s set up to correct to the euro currency symbol and if i type in tm that’s going to correct to the trademark symbol and these are all set up within autocorrect options as defaults now something else that’s also set up to autocorrect is links and website addresses so if i was to type in http://www.google.com and hit enter you can see that automatically it corrects it so that it is now a hyperlink and if i hold my control key down i can click and that’s going to take me across to google so all of these things are set up by default in your auto correct options and of course as you can imagine you can customize this and add your own autocorrect options and we’re going to take a look at those now so you’ll find all of your autocorrect options underneath the file tab and we’re going to jump all the way down to options and we’re going into the proofing area and the first option that you have in the list is autocorrect options so we’re going to click on our button now there’s quite a few different tabs in here let’s jump across to the auto correct tab and this is where you can set up exactly what you want word to auto correct and you’ll see that there is a whole host of options already listed in here or words that it’s going to autocorrect so some of these check boxes that we have at the top you can see it’s going to correct two initial capitals so if you accidentally type in two capital letters at the beginning of the word it’s going to correct that it’s also going to automatically capitalize the first letter of sentences so again if you’ve typed a period or a full stop and then you accidentally hit a lowercase key it’s going to capitalize it through autocorrect it’s going to capitalize the first letter of table cells names of days and it’s going to correct the accidental usage of the caps lock key now this is a big one for me i am always accidentally hitting that caps lock key and if i’m looking down at my keyboard before i know it i’ve typed the entire sentence in capital letters so with that option ticked it’s going to auto-correct that for me and i don’t need to worry about it then underneath that we have the option replace text as you type and this is where we can set up what we want to auto correct now some of these you’ve already seen me use the top one here if you remember we typed in curly bracket c curly bracket and it also corrected to the copyright symbol the same with the euro symbol and also the trademark symbol and if we scroll down you’ll start to see all the different things that are set up to autocorrect and we have in here a lot of words that are commonly misspelt when you’re typing fast in a document and of course you can add your own ones into here so let’s add our own autocorrect option so maybe i find that i have to type my name fairly frequently in a document and instead of typing out my full name maybe i just want to be able to type in my initials and that’s gonna essentially autocorrect to my full name i’m going to click on add to add that to the list let’s click on ok and ok again and let’s check to see if that works i’m going to type in my initials hit the space bar and it auto corrects to my name so the scope of items that you can enter into autocorrect is really wide you can really make yourself a lot more efficient by utilizing short versions of words phrases or sentences to input them into your word document now one other thing i want to show you here i often have problems typing in the pound currency symbol obviously i’m in the uk and we use pounds but i find a lot of the time i’m working in american dollars because a lot of my clients are based in the us and i have an american laptop and i also have my options set to american keyboard layout now because of that typing in a pound currency symbol is quite difficult for me on my keyboard when i press the key that has the pound on it which is just above the three key it doesn’t actually input a pound if i show you now if i type in what should be a pound i actually get a hash symbol or the pound symbol as it’s called in america so a lot of the time if i have to type the pound currency symbol i find myself inserting a symbol which isn’t particularly efficient so this is something that i like to have set up as an autocorrect option so let me just show you how i do that first thing i’m going to do is i’m going to insert the symbol so we’re going to go to the insert tab across to symbol in that end group and you can see it’s my first one just there because i use this most frequently and i’m just going to input that into my document so i’m going to select the symbol now i could ctrl c to copy it but i don’t actually need to if i go to file options and back into my autocorrect options you can see that it’s automatically picked it up so what i can do is now type in what i want to type in order to achieve that pound symbol which is curly brackets p in this case click on add click on ok and okay again and let’s see if that works and it does so for me that’s a really great way of solving the problem that i personally have of not being able to type a pound symbol on the keyboard that i’m using now let’s jump back into file options proofing and auto correct options and take a look at some of these other tabs so these are all your auto correct options and you can go through and add in as many as you like we then have math autocorrect so if you’re someone who works with a lot of mathematical symbols you may want to check out this section and also add in your own autocorrect options we then have an auto format as you type and you will have noticed some of these in action in the examples that i showed you in the document at the beginning so we can see our option there to auto correct fractions you can also see the internet and network paths with hyperlinks so if you remember when we typed in http://www.google.com it auto-corrected to a hyperlink ordinal so that was when we were typing first second third and it was changing them to superscript and there are lots of other things in here so things like straight quotes with smart quotes and also hyphens with a dash so it’s worth coming into here and just checking which options you want to turn on now this is the auto format as you type so this will correct as you’re typing these things in you also have an auto format tab where we have many of the same options so definitely go through and check all of those now one other important point to note when it comes to autocorrect is that you can override any autocorrect options so let me show you an example of this i’m just going to type a quick sentence into this document [Music] the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog now i don’t if you notice when i started to type that sentence i actually typed a lowercase t for the word the and of course word auto corrected that to capitalize that first letter now what about if i actually wanted that to be a lowercase t well when the auto correction has been applied if you hover your mouse over the corrected letter so in this case the t you’ll see you get this little autocorrect options drop down and if i click that drop down i can choose to undo the automatic capitalization this one time or i can choose to stop auto capitalizing the first letter of sentences so selecting that option is essentially going to turn it off within word options so if i now go on to the next line and type the same sentence it’s not auto correcting now i’m going to undo that option because i like it when it auto corrects for me and then of course the final option you have in here will just jump you into all of those autocorrect options to make any further customizations a couple of final things i want to show you in here we’re going to stay in our word options and we’re going to go down to advanced and in editing options i just want to highlight to you this option just here show autocomplete suggestions now autocomplete is a little bit different to autocorrect there are some words that word will automatically recognize as you start to type them and it will offer you a suggestion for completing that word now i actually really like this option so i have a tick in the box so this might be something that you want to turn on so let me show you what this does let’s click on okay and if i was to type a word let’s say monday you can see as i get part way through the word i get that little suggestion just above press enter to insert i can just hit enter and it will complete that word and it will work the same for most of the days of the week it also works for months of the year but it’s worth pointing out that not all of them it works for it works for the longer ones but something like may doesn’t auto-complete and neither does something like march but longer words you’ll get that little suggestion and you can just hit enter to complete them so if when you’re typing you do see that little screen tip pop up just be aware that you can hit enter just to complete that word saves you a little bit of time so that is it on autocorrect and auto complete in the next module we’re going to take a look at how you can group objects together so please join me for that hi everyone this is deb and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re almost at the end of section two and in this section we’ve been reviewing some of those essential skills that you should know in what and in this module i want to talk to you a little bit about grouping objects because this is a really important and often overlooked skill now anytime that you insert something into a word document so that might be some kind of shape or maybe a picture or even something like a chart or a table that is essentially considered or classed as an object in word and when an object whatever that may be is inserted into a word document it is an independent object i.e it’s not linked to the other objects on the page so an example of this would be the document that i have open on the screen so this is just a little meet the team document which is made up of a number of different objects we have some shapes some circles and those circles have been filled with an employee’s photograph and these shapes are considered to be individual objects and for each of these employees we also have a text box underneath that contains the details their name their department and these text boxes again are individual objects and you can see as i click on them i’m essentially selecting that particular object we then have these connector lines to show how marcus is linked to everybody else in the organization and again if i click on these arrows and these are just connector arrows these are also individual objects now when i say these are individual objects i mean they’re independent of everything else so if i wanted to resize marcus’s picture if i click on it and then i drag out the handle it’s just going to resize marcus it’s not going to resize anything else ctrl z to undo now when you have individual objects on a page that’s all well and good if you want to make edits to that particular object but there will be times when maybe you want to group together all of the objects on a page so that you can do things like resize currently if i wanted to resize this entire diagram i don’t really have the ability to do that because every time i click on an object it just selects that individual object so essentially i’m only resizing that individual object it’s not allowing me to resize everything in one go so what i would need to do here would be to group my objects together now there are a couple of different ways that you can do that the first way is that you can go in and utilizing your shift key you can select all of the individual objects and then group them so let’s do that now this process can be a little bit tedious depending on how many objects you have on your page i’m going to select the first one i’m going to hold down shift i’m going to select his text box and let’s go through still holding down shift as we make our selections and don’t forget those connector arrows as well so i’ve now got essentially all of my objects selected what i can now do is group them together and there are a couple of different places i can go in order to access my group options you’ll see that because i have objects selected i now have two different contextual ribbons appear at the top drawing tools and picture tools and it actually doesn’t matter whether you go into drawing tools or picture tools because the option that we need is available on both of these ribbons in the arrange group we have a group option and you can see here if i select group so you can see that that has now grouped all of those objects together they’re no longer individual they’re there as a group i’m just going to ctrl z to undo that because there is another way that i can group objects together without jumping up to my ribbons once i have all the objects selected if i right click on one of the objects in that right click menu i also have the group option in there and it pretty much does exactly the same thing so essentially now everything is grouped together as one object and i can resize this diagram as one single object now remember if you want to keep the aspect ratio so if you don’t want these pictures to distort as you resize if you hold down the shift key as you drag any of these handles in and there we go i can also pick this object up and i can place it wherever i like within this document now you will notice that the text inside these text boxes is now being cut off so it might be that i want to do some rearranging with that text maybe make the font a little bit smaller but pretty much everything else has resized nicely and we don’t have any distortion now once i have my objects grouped if i want to now work on them as individual objects of course i also have an ungroup option so let’s just right click go down to group and you’ll see now the one that we have available to select is the ungroup option and now everything is back to individual objects so i’m going to go in and i’m just going to decrease the font size in these text boxes and i’ll be right back with you now another really nice method that’s available in word for selecting all of your objects prior to grouping or ungrouping is using the selection pane and this is actually my preferred method particularly if i have a document that has lots of objects that are overlapping each other sometimes when you’re using this manual method of selecting your objects by clicking and holding down your shift key if you have lots of objects kind of stacked on top of each other it can be really difficult to grab objects that are underneath other objects so an easier way of doing this is utilizing the selection pane so i’m going to click on one of my objects so that i get my contextual ribbons and again i can utilize either the drawing tools or the picture tools format tab and in the arrange group you’ll see that we have an option there for selection pane and the screen tip says you can see a list of all of your objects this makes it easier to select objects change their order or change their visibility so let’s click to open up that pane i’m going to make this a bit wider now i had this pane open earlier and i’ve already started to rename some of my objects if you look at the objects just here where it says text box 2 oval 9 overlay oval 7 oval 3 and straight connector 11. these are essentially the default names that word will give your objects so they’re not particularly meaningful and sometimes if you have a lot of objects on the page it’s a bit hard to know which one you’re selecting from this pane so what i like to do is go through and rename all of the objects so i can easily identify them which is exactly what i’ve done with these ones at the top so the first one middle arrow connector if i click on this it’s going to select that middle arrow connector we have left arrow connector and you’ll see the selection in the document right arrow we have vivian fisher text box so that is the text box that contains her information we have a text box for darius one for sarah and then i still have these to rename so let’s go through i’m going to click on text box 2 and i can see that that is marx’s text box so i double click and i can simply go in and say marcus lee text box and hit enter if i click on oval 9 to see what that is i can see that that is the photo for vivian fisher so again i can double click on oval 9 and i can rename this object [Music] vivian fisher photo hit enter so i’m going to go through and rename the rest of these and i’ll see you back here in a moment so there we go i now have all of my objects with meaningful labels which makes it super easy for me to make selections of individual objects using this selection pane so as i mentioned before this is great if you have objects that are stacked on top of each other and are quite hard to select manually you’ll also notice in the selection pane you have this little eye icon to the right of each of the objects so this allows you to essentially show or hide specific objects so for example if i click on the i next to marcus lee text box you can see that now that is hidden click again and it brings it back so again this is good if you need to see an object that’s underneath another object you can also use this selection pane to essentially move your objects forward or backwards so an example would be sarah cox’s photo if i wanted the photo to be over the top of the sarah cox marketing text box i can do that by just dragging the object in the selection pane so all i would need to do is grab sarah cox photo from the selection pane and i’m going to drag it and i’m going to place it above where it says sarah cox text box and let go and you can see now that it’s brought that layer essentially that object to the front now i’m actually going to drag that back down because i want the text box in front so when it comes to utilizing this pane for grouping this makes it super easy all you need to do is select the top object hold down control and select the rest of the objects so sometimes that is a lot easier than trying to fiddle around in the main document once you’ve got them all selected you can go up to your format ribbon and use your group option alternatively you can right click and you have your group option in here and there we go and now these objects are grouped if you look over in the selection pane you can see it’s created a group again with a very generic name but i’m going to double click and i’m going to rename this meet the team and hit enter so a few really useful options there when it comes to grouping objects i hope you found that useful in the next module i’m going to talk to you about how to align objects accurately in your document so please join me for that hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is deb and we are in the final module of this section section two and in this module we have been looking at all of those essential skills in word and in the previous module we were looking at how you can group and ungroup different objects that you have in your word document i’d like to progress that idea on a little bit and talk to you about aligning objects in your documents now aligning is really just the process of making sure that all of the pictures shapes charts whatever it is that you might have in your document are all lined up nicely in relation to other objects on the page and also on the page itself and many people don’t realize that there are lots of tools available in word that really help you align these objects accurately so the document that i’ve got on the screen here is just our meet the team document and i have three pictures of employees and also some labels for those pictures and currently these pictures and labels are very much scattered haphazardly around the page so it might be that i’ve just created these and inserted these pictures into my document without too much concern with how they’re lined up but now i want to put these in a nice neat line and position them underneath this title now the most obvious thing which people reach for is just by doing this manually so i could grab one of the pictures and i can drag it and position it where i want it to be and kind of have a good guess which may or may not be accurate as to where the center is so on and so forth but i don’t really need to do that and i can take all of the inaccuracy out of this process by utilizing words alignment tools so let me show you how they work so what i’m aiming for here first of all is i want to get all three of these pictures in a row with even spacing in between each i’m not going to worry too much about where they’re positioned in relation to the page i just want them in a nice row lined up with each other with equal spacing so all i need to do is first of all make my selection so i’m going to hold down shift and select all three of the pictures and it’s worth noting when you are aligning objects you do want them to be ungrouped now i’m going to jump up to my picture tools format ribbon and in the arrange group we have an align drop down and this houses all of your alignment options so i can align the selected objects to the left hand margin to the center or to the right hand margin i can align them to the top of the page to the middle or to the bottom and i can distribute them horizontally or vertically now i want my pictures to be arranged in a line horizontally so the first option i’m going to choose here is a line middle and there we go they are now lined up in relation to each other to the middle but one thing that’s glaringly obvious here is that i have quite a large amount of space between the middle and the last picture and a small amount of space in between the first two pictures so i’m going to want to jump back into my alignment tools and this is where i can utilize the distribute horizontally option this will ensure that i have an even amount of space in between all of my selected objects so there we go i now have these pictures very quickly lined up and looking good now with regards to how these are positioned on the actual page if i zoom out a little bit they’re actually not too bad they’re fairly close to the center but i’m pretty sure that they’re not exactly center aligned and middle aligned so essentially what i want to do is i want to align this group of pictures to the dead center of this page so the first thing i need to do here is group my pictures together so that they’re one object i’m going to right click go to group and select group and there we go so now i have them grouped together i can now align this as one object utilizing my alignment tools so i’m going to say align middle and you see that jumps down very slightly and also align to the center to center them vertically on the page and now when i scroll out i know that these three objects are not only aligned in relation to each other but also in relation to the page so i have these grouped together they’re in the middle of the page but when i re-look at this document i think to myself actually i want these three pictures to be underneath the meet the team title so i might be tempted here to jump back into my alignment tools and maybe select something like a line top but if i select this you’ll see that i don’t really get the result that i wanted it’s going to align my object to the top of the page regardless of if i have text in there or not so i’m going to ctrl z to undo that and if i jump back into my alignment tools i don’t actually have an alignment tool that’s going to accommodate any text that i have above what i’m trying to align so in this particular situation i’m probably going to want to move this object manually into the position that i want and in order to help me do that and ensure that everything is still lined up i’m going to first turn on use alignment guides now alignment guides are super useful when you have them turned on and you pick up a picture or an object and try to move it you’ll see they start to appear these green lines which run across the page telling you when you’ve centered or lined up your object with other objects on the page so currently this alignment guide is telling me that this is in the dead center if i move across slightly it’s telling me that it’s lined up with the end of the meet the team text i could do the same on the other side it’s lined up with the end of the meet the team text if i was to move this down you can see there because i have those two green lines intersecting that is the dead center of the document so utilizing these it means i can safely drag this up and it doesn’t matter if i go off course a little bit because when i get to the position i want to put it in i can just utilize my alignment guides so i know that this is dead in the center like so so now i have these labels for each of my staff members so once again i’m going to pick these up and i’m just going to drag this one up to here and i want it to be about there and i’m going to let go now notice that when i place that particular object i didn’t get any alignment guides come up to assist me so when you’re doing more granular work like this it can be useful sometimes to turn on grid lines to help you align some of your objects and there’s a couple of different ways that we can turn on grid lines we can do it from the view ribbon in the show group we have a gridlines option if i select the tick it’s going to give me some gridlines i could also do it from that format menu from picture tools or drawing tools so if i click on one of the pictures and go up to my picture tools format tab in that align drop down i have a view gridlines option and this can then really help me when it comes to aligning some of these other items so i’m going to drag this label up i’m going to position it just there and then i’m going to grab the final label and i’m going to position it just there and i’ve used that line in my grid so that i know that there is the same amount of space between that line and the bottom of these text boxes now one thing that you’ll also notice when you’re moving objects around and i’ll just select this text box as an example is you’ll see as i move it’s not particularly smooth it’s kind of jumping all over the place a little bit there’s a little nudge in there as you drag the object around and that is because by default word makes objects snap or jump to an underlying grid laid across the document and that is why when you’re dragging these around it’s attempting to snap it to that underlying grid and this can cause some issues sometimes when you’re trying to align objects because you don’t have as much control as to exactly where you place things because it’s constantly going to move it to the next underlying grid line now you can turn this snapping feature off again if we jump up to the format ribbon and go into our alignment options you’ll find these options underneath grid settings and there’s a couple of options that you want to make sure that you’ve got turned off to kind of override that grid snapping and that is this one here these snap objects to other objects we take a tick out of that box and i’m also going to remove the grid lines from this screen click on ok and now you’ll see that when i move my object around that is so much smoother because it’s not constantly trying to snap so it gives me a little bit more control when it comes to placing my objects on my page now i’m going to jump back in to those grid settings and i’m just going to turn back on object snapping and snap objects to grid when the grid lines are not displayed so now that i’ve turned those back on you’ll see we get that jumpy movement again but a quick way of overriding this is to hold down your alt key as you’re dragging your object around so instead of going in and turning on and off those options you can just do that in order to override that snapping utility and of course if you need to make any granular changes so if you prefer to have a little bit more control if you select an object you can use your arrow keys to move that particular object now again because i have snapping turned on you can see as i move it definitely jumps so if i want to be super granular i would again go in and i would turn off those snapping options and then when i utilize my mouse i get much more control as to where i’m placing that particular object now one final point to mention here and it relates to those grid lines which i’m just going to turn back on is you can adjust the spacing of your grid line so you’re not just stuck with this one grid style if you go back into your alignment options and down into grid settings you can change the horizontal spacing and the vertical spacing of these grid lines so if i want a little bit more space i can put these up to let’s say 8 centimeters click on ok and i get a different type of grid so entirely up to you how you want to display those hopefully that’s given you a good introduction as to the plethora of alignment utilities that you have available to you within word to really help you align those objects on your page and make your document look really professional that’s it for this module we have one final exercise and then we are on to the next section so i will see you over there hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’ve made it down to exercise 2 and in this exercise we’re going to practice some of the skills that we’ve learned in section two which was all about those basic word skills that everybody should have and i want to start out this exercise by showing you my answer so on the screen i have a document and the title is seven facts about henry viii i have some paragraphs of text and also some numbered items and then right at the bottom i have another heading titled the wives of henry viii and i have eight circles all perfectly lined up and what i want you to do in this exercise is basically recreate what i have here so let’s take a look at what i’d like you to do so this is the same document but you can see as we scroll through it’s in a less tidy state so what i want you to do is utilize some of the skills you’ve learned in this section to replicate the neat version so the first thing you need to do in this exercise is open the document titled exercise 2 from the exercises folder i’d then like you to toggle on show hide so you can see all of the paragraph markers in this document i’d then like you to go through and replace all double paragraph markers with single paragraph markers once you’ve done that i’d like you to scroll down to page two and i’d like you to align these circles on the page so that they’re distributed evenly and aligned to the center i’d then like you to group the four circles together and duplicate them and position the second row so it’s neatly under the first and then just to finish up i’d like you to give your document a spell check so quite a few different tasks there please feel free to re-watch this video and pause where needed as you practice each task so i’m going to show you my answer now so you might want to pause this video but if you’re ready let’s proceed so let’s run through the answer to this exercise the first thing i asked you to do was open exercise 2 and then turn on show hide markers so we’re going up to the home ribbon into our paragraph group and clicking show hide so i can now see all of those paragraph markers what i then wanted you to do was to find all of the double paragraph markers in the document and replace them with single paragraph markers so for this we need to invoke find and replace and the shortcut key for that is control h now for this you need to click in the find what box and then from your special options at the bottom you need to select paragraph mark twice to find those double paragraphs i then want to replace them with a single paragraph mark and replace all i can see it’s made five replacements i’m going to click on ok and close down find and replace the final part of this exercise was to align these circles and then duplicate them so the first thing i’m going to do is select all of my circles by holding down my shift key and then up to the drawing tools ribbon the format tab and we’re going to go to our alignment options and the first one i’m going to select here is a line middle and then i’m going to distribute them evenly so back up to a line and distribute horizontally i now want to duplicate these four circles so the quickest way to do that is to group these circles together so once you have them selected right click and select group i’m then going to press the ctrl d keyboard shortcut to duplicate and then i’m going to move these circles into position and remember i can select both groups of circles go up to a line and make sure that they’re both aligned to the center and finally i just ask you to do a quick spell check of this document which we do from the review tab check document i can see i have one spelling error just here so let’s check it out and i can see it’s picked up the word solent now i know in this case that this is fine so i’m going to say ignore once and my spell check is complete so those are the steps that i wanted you to take in order to recreate this document the final thing i might want to do here just to make this document a bit cleaner is turn off show hide that is it for exercise two i will see you in the next section hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’ve made it down to section 3 and in this section we’re going to be talking about how you can work with different views in word now views are just the way that you are viewing your document and in word we have different views that you can toggle between and they each display your document in a slightly different way now which one you choose to use very much depends on what you’re trying to do at that particular time so what we’re going to do in this section is we’re going to go through all of the different views that you have i’m going to show you the difference between them and also highlight when would be the best situation to use each view but in this first module i really just want to introduce you to the options that we have on the view ribbon so i’ve got a document open at the moment and this is an employment contract and i’m currently clicked on the view ribbon so let’s just take a look at the different elements which make up this ribbon so the first group here is our views group and this is really what we’re going to be focusing on in the next few modules this is where you can come to switch between all of the different views that you have available we have read mode we have print layout mode web layout outline and draft now by default more often than not you’re working in print layout view which is the one that i have selected now and this is by far the best view when it comes to editing your document now i’m going to go into each of these different views and the advantages and disadvantages of them over the next few modules but just be aware that this is where you come on the ribbon to switch between your different views it’s also worth noting that this isn’t the only place where you can come in order to switch views if you cast your eyes down to the bottom right hand corner of the screen right down in the status bar you’ll see you have a zoom slider but then you also have access to different views down here so we have web layout view print layout view and also read mode and focus mode so two different areas where you can switch between views the next group on this view ribbon is the immersive group now these two options here focus and immersive reader you’ll only have these if you are using word 2019 or word as part of microsoft 365. these are newer features and again they’re related to how you’re viewing and how you’re reading your document and once again we’re going to go into these in the following modules the next section is page movement and again this is a reasonably new addition to word so in general by default when you’re reading or working on a document and you scroll your mouse it’s going to scroll vertically that’s what we’re all used to when we’re working in a document however we do have now another option called side to side so if i was to select that you can see now if i use my mouse i’m actually reading this document as if i had these pages on my desk in front of me i’m reading them side by side as opposed to scrolling through vertically i’m going to jump that back to vertical we then have our show group and we’ve pretty much seen a demonstration of everything in this little group in the course so far i’ve got my rulers turned on both vertical and horizontal we’ve seen what happens when we turn on grid lines and also we’ve utilized that navigation pane in order to navigate around our documents the next group is the zoom group so this is related to zooming in and out and moving around your document so i have my zoom option here where i can jump in there and select how much i want to zoom in by so if i say 200 we’re going to zoom right in to there which makes things a little bit easier to read if i want to jump back to the default of 100 i have a dedicated button for that as well which is going to pop me straight out again i can choose to view just one page multiple pages or i can select page width so it’s going to zoom in as much as it can without cutting anything off of the document we then have the window group so this is related to how you arrange your different word windows on your page and then finally on the end here we have switch windows so when you click this it’s going to list all of the open word documents that you have so now currently i only have one document open so that’s the only one i’m seeing but if i had multiple they would all be listed down here and i can just click to very quickly switch to that particular document and then finally on the end here we have a macros button where i can view any macros i have set up and also record a new macro as well and we’ll be covering this later in the course it’s also worth noting that when it comes to zooming you do have a zoom slider in the bottom right hand corner next to those little view shortcut buttons as well so i could utilize my slider just by dragging in and dragging out in order to change the zoom on that particular document also when it comes to zoom if you are using a mouse that has a scroll wheel if you hold down the control button and move your scroll wheel you see you can zoom in and out on your document like that as well so that is pretty much it i really just wanted to give you an overview in this module of all of the different commands and options that you have available on this views ribbon before we do a deeper dive in the next few modules and that’s exactly what we’re going to do in the next module where we’re going to delve a bit more into these different views so please join me for that hi guys and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re down into section three where we’re taking a look at the different ways that you can view your document in word in the previous module we had a quick run through of all of the options and commands available on the views ribbon and what i want to do in this module is really focus in on reading documents now sometimes particularly if you work in a job role that requires you to read lots of long documents so maybe you’re a lawyer who’s constantly reading contracts or maybe you’re a writer who needs to go through and review your work sometimes it’s quite nice to be able to switch into a view mode that’s going to allow you just to read your document that is it’s going to remove all distractions and it’s going to give you more screen space more real estate so you can read your document a little bit easier and fortunately word has a view that’s going to allow you to do just that and it’s called read mode so let me show you how it works so i’m going up to the view ribbon and across to the views group and we’re going to switch into this one just here read mode and straight away you’ll notice quite a drastic change the thing that’s most obvious is that all of our ribbons have disappeared so anything that could possibly distract us has been removed from the top of the screen or collapsed up i should say leaving us with a lot more space to read our document the documents also zoomed itself in to the maximum without cutting off any of the words or the sentences so the text is nice and big on the screen making it easier for me to read another thing you’ll notice is that it’s put it into a two column layout so instead of just reading vertically i’m now reading across the screen so this is much more like a book so here i’m seeing pages one and two and if i want to move to the next two pages i have an arrow over on the right hand side which i can click it’s going to slide along like i’m turning the pages of a book and i can read the next two pages now of course i don’t have to use my mouse to click on these arrows i can also use my arrow keys to move through the different pages in this document now whilst the ribbons are collapsed up when you’re working in this view you do still have access to them if you look in the bar running across the top we still have access to file tools and view so if i click view if i want to switch back into print layout view and essentially edit my document i can just select edit document and it’s going to jump me back to print layout view let’s go back into read mode and click view again now there’s lots of things in this view menu that we can do whilst we’re working in read mode so we can switch to focus mode now i’m not going to do that right now because we are going to cover this a bit later in this module i can bring up the navigation pane so if i want to search for something in this particular document i can do that i can choose to show any comments that have been added into the document now i currently don’t have any but if you do it will show all of your comments alongside your document i can choose the column width so currently i have the default column width set but if i switch to narrow i now have three narrow columns as opposed to two wider columns and if i select wide columns i basically just get one column now i like the default so let’s switch back to that i can also change the page color so currently i have this set to none so i just have black text on a white background but you also have the choice of displaying it in sepia or even in inverse so we have a black background with white text now you might not personally like these but sometimes particularly if people have sight issues these different color backgrounds can be a lot easier on the eye and make it easier for you to read your document so it’s worth having a little experiment with those we then have some layout options so i have column layout set which i quite like but i can also choose paper layout which essentially puts it back very similar to print layout view where we’re scrolling vertically and let’s put mine back to column layout i have a syllables option so this shows the breaks between syllables in your document so let’s click that and what you’ll see now is that the syllables of each word are separated by a little gray square back up to view and let’s just turn syllables off we have a text spacing option and this basically increases the amount of space in between the characters and also the lines so again if you find it a little bit easier to read a document like that then you can jump in there and you can turn on text spacing now i’m going to turn mine off to put that back and then finally in this view menu we have a read aloud option so this will read out all of the text and will also highlight each word as it’s read so again this is a really great option with regards to accessibility if you’re someone who is maybe partially cited then essentially you can have word read your document back to you written statement of employment particulars employee this statement lists the terms and conditions particulars of your employment with us so lots of different options for you to explore underneath that view menu let’s take a look at what we’ve got in tools so if we click on tools again we have our find which is just going to pop out that navigation pane so if you want to search for anything in the document you can just type it in and it’s going to highlight much like it does in any other view mode we also have under tools as smart lookup so if i was to highlight a specific word in this document so let’s say employment go to tools and smart lookup it’s going to search for that word it’s going to pop open a pane on the right hand side and it’s going to basically search the internet and pop up any entries which relate to that particular word so you can see in here i have some wikipedia entries and then also i have some results of the web search so that’s a nice way of being able to select someone’s name or a place name or anything in your document and then explore it further on the internet without leaving the bounds of word and then finally in here we have a translate option where it’s going to pick up the word that i’ve got selected and i can choose a language to translate it to so let’s just say dutch and there we go and if i wanted to i could even select insert to replace the english word with the dutch word in the document so a few nice options in there as well and then of course finally we have our file menu and that just jumps us back to our regular backstage area now if you wanted to go even further here and get rid of this blue bar running across the top if you click on the icon right in the top right hand corner which says auto hide reading toolbar if you click that it’s going to get rid of those menu options so really all you have now on the screen is your document you can go through and read and to get them back again i’m just going to click that button once more so that is pretty much the options that you have when it comes to read mode now everything i’ve shown you there is really related to being able to focus entirely on the document that you’re reading without any distractions and focus is such an important point when it comes to using word so often it’s very easy for us to lose focus we have many different distractions constantly coming at us from email notifications we have the internet our fingertips we can very easily go off down a rabbit hole and lose focus on what we’re doing and with that point of focus in mind microsoft brought in a couple of new features which are really going to help you focus on the document at hand and you’ll find these features in this group called immersive and the first option we have here is focus and if we hover over and take a look at the screen tip it says that when you’re working in this mode it eliminates distractions so you can focus entirely on your document so let’s jump in here and see what we have so the real aim of focus mode is to enhance your document viewing experience by hiding all of the ribbons and distractions on the screen and allow you just to concentrate on the content of your document and you can see here that is pretty much literally all i have on this page i have a plain black background and just my document now of course you can pull down those ribbons if you move your mouse to the top of the screen the ribbon will drop down again and you can make any selections that you need but one thing that you’ll notice is when you are in focus mode if you go back to the view ribbon you have an additional option that’s been added and that is background so this will allow you to change the background that you’re using when you’re working in focus mode and i will say these backgrounds did used to be a lot more interesting in older versions of word we used to have things like a wooden coffee table background which is quite nice now we just have these solid fill colors and you can go in and select whichever one is going to suit your eyes the best so i’m going to choose dark gray and really that is the extent of focus mode it just clears everything out the way allowing you to focus on your document now if you want to come out of focus mode you can go back to your ribbon and just click the focus button once more alternatively if you press the escape key on your keyboard that will take you out and back into print layout view and then finally we have the immersive reader and the immersive reader is part of words learning tools and the idea of it is to help with reading fluency and comprehension now when we jump into here you’ll notice that a lot of these look fairly similar as we had access to a lot of these options when we were working in read mode so we can change our column width and this changes the line length to improve focus and comprehension we can change the page color which can make text easy to scan with less eye strain we can choose to focus in on a specific line so i can say one line three lines five lines and this is all dependent on where you’re actually clicked on the page we can increase the amount of space between words characters and lines with the text spacing option we can show the breakdown between syllables to improve word recognition and pronunciation and then of course we have that read aloud option again which lets you hear your document as each word is highlighted so it’s a really useful tools within the immersive reader as well so hopefully now you have a greater understanding of some of the tools available to you when it comes to reading and really focusing on the document at hand that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re down into section three where we’re taking a look at the different views that you can work in when using word and in this module module three we’re going to be taking a look at print layout and web layout views now i currently have a document open on the screen and i’m clicked on the view tab and as we know from previous modules we can switch between our different views in the first group here the views group now the first thing you’ll probably notice is that the view that i have currently selected is highlighted in grey and this is normally the default print layout view and if you’re following along with me and you’re not currently in this view i would ask you to switch to it now simply by clicking on the print layout command now the major benefit when it comes to print layout view is that you can basically see how your document is going to look if you were to print it so it allows you to better judge things like the margins the spacing that you have throughout your document page breaks section breaks and lots of other visual elements and if you see anything that looks a bit strange then it allows you to adjust them accordingly and even if this is a document that you don’t necessarily intend to print you’ll probably find that working in print layout view is going to be most suitable for you the majority of the time now one other thing you’ll notice with print layout view if i scroll down to where we move on to the second page you’ll see that we have a gap in between our pages so it makes it really easy for me to see where one page ends and the next page begins it’s also showing me that bottom margin as well now if you didn’t want to have any space between these pages you could jump into file options and in the display area this first option here page display options we have show white space between pages in print layout view and you can see the screen tip says show the top and bottom margins including the content of headers and footers so if i was to untick this option and click on ok what you’ll now see is that i don’t have any space between those pages and i’m not seeing the header or the footer so this is sometimes a nice option if you are maybe just reading a really long document and you don’t have to keep scrolling past a very large header or footer you just want to read down the page then that option can be quite useful now in this case i’m going to turn that back on because i do want to see where one page ends and the next page begins also remember that if you want to switch into print layout view you can utilize the little buttons on that status bar next to the zoom slider so now let’s jump across into web layout view so now we’re looking at our document in a completely different way you can see that this view you don’t have margins spacing page breaks and other elements which you might find distracting or disruptive when you’re reading your document and basically web layout view is designed to show you what your document is going to look like if you were to upload it to the internet and publish it as a web page it gives you a much more compact version of your document and you can see that we don’t really have any page breaks section breaks line breaks or anything that’s distracting us from reading this document it’s also worth noting that you don’t need to switch back into print layout view if you want to make any edits to your document if you are working in web layout view you can simply edit your document in this view as well so that is pretty much all there is to print layout and web layout view hopefully that gives you a greater understanding of the difference between the two and helps you make better decisions when it comes to establishing which one is going to be the best option for whatever it is you’re doing at the time in the next module we’re going to explore the final two views that we haven’t yet looked at and that is outline and draft view so please join me for that hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re down in section 3 where we’re currently looking at how you can work with views in word and in the previous modules we’ve taken a look at print layout and web layout view and we’ve also seen some of the new modes like read mode focus and immersive reader that really help you focus on the document at hand in this module we’re going to finish up this section on views by taking a look at the final two views available in word and that is outline and draft view so let’s start out by switching into draft view now draft view is a view that displays just the text in your document so you won’t see any margins or page breaks and you also won’t see any images or any other visual elements it enables you to continuously scroll through your document without any interruption and page breaks are marked with a very faint dotted line now one of the things that i really like about draft view is its ability to show you what styles you have applied to each line in your document now in order to view the styles you need to turn on the draft pane so let me just show you where you need to go in order to do that i’m going to jump up to file and we’re going all the way down into our options and we want to jump straight across to the advanced area now if we scroll down all the way down to this display section you’re looking for this option here so where it says style area pane width in draft and outline views now if you have that set to zero centimeters or zero then you’re not going to be able to see that style area pane so all you need to do is change this to something like two centimeters click on ok and now you can see down the left hand side we have our style pane visible now if this is a bit too narrow or a bit too wide you can adjust it simply by dragging it in or out but what you’ll see now is that i can see every single style that i have applied to each line so i can see that this top sentence here is a heading one we then have a paragraph of normal text we then have a heading two so on and so forth so the kind of situations where i would utilize this would be if i have a long document that i’m currently trying to add styles to i find this view particularly useful when i’m doing that because i can see what i’ve applied and it just makes it a lot easier for me to ensure that everything is consistent and i’m applying the correct styles to the correct lines once you’ve finished using that styles pane you don’t have to jump back into options to turn it off you can just grab the edge once more and just drag it all the way over to the left hand side and it will disappear so that is draft view let’s now jump across into outline view now it’s worth noting that you can turn on the styles area pane for outline view as well so let’s jump up to file again go into options back into advanced i’m just going to turn that styles area pane back on again like so now outline view is useful if you just want to view the headings and subheadings and text in your document without images or other visuals and it’s a really good view to work in if you need to do some reorganizing of your document now you’ll see that as soon as i switched into outline view this view comes with its own contextual ribbon so if you have a look now you’ll see that i have a new ribbon to the left of the home ribbon called outlining and on this ribbon i have some controls which allow me to adjust what i’m seeing in this particular view what you’ll also notice is next to my different headings i have these collapsible and expandable buttons so in this outline tools group in this first section here this is where i can change the level heading for a particular item so currently if i just take this first heading one as an example i’m clicked in the heading one if i wanted to change that to a heading two i could say level 2 and you can see now that that has changed and i have all of my different level headings in here that correspond to the heading levels i also have demote and promote buttons so i can click on promote to pull that back up to a heading one and then i have a specific button to promote to a heading one and a specific button to demote to body text in the next group of outline tools this is where i can specify which levels i want to show in my outline so for example if i’m only interested in seeing the level twos i can select that level and now it collapses up anything that’s body text or heading three four and i’m only seeing those heading twos if i say level three i’m also going to get thrown in there now anything that i have marked as a heading three i also have in this drop down on all levels which is going to bring everything back again if i want to turn off any text formatting so maybe i have a lot of formatting in the document making it quite hard to read i could untick the show text formatting box and it’s just going to put that into normal text and i also have a show first line only option which is just going to show me the first line of any of my paragraphs so if we take this one as an example this first normal paragraph if i say show first line only i’m now only seeing the first line of that particular paragraph so this view is a good view to work in if you have a reasonably large document that has lots of heading styles contained within it sometimes it’s easier to jump into this view collapse up everything that you don’t need to make it easier for you to edit your document and once you’ve finished working in outline view you have a close outline view button just here and that will take you back to print layout view and you can continue editing your document so that is pretty much it on the subject of views hopefully you’ve got a good idea now as to what each view is which will help you make a better decision when it comes to which view to work in for a particular task that’s it for this module and that is it for this section we have one exercise to do and then we’re going to move on into section four where we’re going to be talking about working with tables so please join me for that hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’ve made it down to exercise 3 and in this exercise we’re going to practice the skills we’ve learned in section three when it comes to working with views now this is a reasonably straightforward exercise so the first thing i want you to do is open the exercise three document from the exercises folder i’d like you to switch the document into read mode and change the page color to sepia once you’ve done that i’d like you to come back to editing the document what i’d then like you to do is switch to outline view and turn on the styles pane and i want you to make sure that you’ve set the styles pane to two inches now the final part of this exercise is optional it’s not content that we’ve covered in this particular section but at this stage in a word advanced course these are definitely skills you should know so if you do want to practice your skills a little further in word the final part of this exercise is to replace all of these numbered items with the heading 3 style now just a little tip on this if you have the styles pane open you’re going to be able to see what styles are currently applied to these numbered items and you can use that information to very quickly change all of those styles to a heading three now as i mentioned that last part is completely optional so see how you go with that if you want to go through this exercise you can pause the video now if you’d like to see the answer to this exercise then carry on watching this video so let’s take a look at the answer to this exercise the first thing i asked you to do was to switch into read mode and change the page color to sepia so i’m going to go up to the view ribbon and into my views group and switch to read mode now to change this background page color to sepia all we need to do is jump up to view go down to page color and select sepia i then asked you to go back to editing the document so again we’re going to go up to view and select edit document i then asked you to switch into outline view making sure that you can see the styles pane now currently i can’t see my styles pane so i need to go into the backstage and turn that on so let’s jump up to file and down to options and we want to select advanced from this list and we’re going to scroll down until we get to the display section and you can see here it says style area pane width in draft and outline views and curry that’s set to zero centimeters and what i’ve asked you to do is change this to two inches so i’m going to go just above change the measurement to inches and then i’m going to type in 2 and click on ok and now you’ll see the styles pane in the left hand margin now the optional part of this exercise was to replace all of these numbered items with a heading 3 style and a little tip i gave you was that when you’ve got the styles pane showing you can see which styles are applied to each paragraph so i can see here that i have the list paragraph style applied to all of my numbered items so a quick way of changing everything that’s marked as a list paragraph to a heading 3 is to go to the home ribbon jump into the advanced options for styles i’m just going to make this a little bit bigger i’m going to find the list paragraph style which is towards the bottom here click the drop down and i’m going to say select all seven instances so very quickly that’s going to select all items where list paragraph is the style now i have them all selected i can simply jump up to my styles gallery and very quickly apply a heading 3. i’m going to close down my styles pane and switch my document back to print layout and there we go that was what i was looking for i hope you got on okay with that i will see you in the next section hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re down into section four and in this section we’re going to explore some of the more advanced features of working with tables in word now tables are an extremely useful feature and probably something that you utilize already when you’re putting together a document tables help us organize our information into columns and rows making the information a lot easier to read tables also have their own contextual ribbons where you can change the layout and apply formatting and you can format tables to your heart’s content so that they really stand out from your document or are in line with company branding guidelines and in this first module i want to start out by showing you how you can create your own table styles now before we dive straight into that we’re going to do a little bit of a recap and create a table from some data that i have imported into this word document so essentially what i have here is some sales information which originally existed in an excel spreadsheet and what i want to do is i want to put this information into this word document and organize it in a nice table so all i’ve really done to pull this across is i’ve opened up the excel spreadsheet and i’ve copied and pasted it with no formatting into my word document so if you ever have this situation where you have a bunch of text on the screen and you want to put it into a table there is a really nice feature in word called convert text to table which allows you to do this simply and easily now with this data you’ll see in this first line here this is basically my column headings and then i have my data for those column headings underneath but what you’ll also see is that it’s not quite lined up every single field is separated by a tab character now how do i know that well if we turn on our show hide markers i can see these little arrows indicate that that is a tab separating each of the fields and this is quite important for an accurate conversion if you have some consistency with the character that’s been used to separate each field then word should do a pretty good job at converting your text into a table whereas if you have a mixture of different things separating the fields then you might find that you have to do a little bit of rearranging after you’ve done the conversion but our data looks pretty good so i’m going to turn off my show hide markers and we’re going to convert this text to a table so all i need to do is highlight everything i’m going to jump out to the insert ribbon and click the lower half of that table drop down and i’m looking for this option here convert text to table and essentially what it does is it looks at my data it looks at where i have those tab spaces and it tries to work out how many columns and rows i’m going to need so it’s worked out that i need seven columns so that would be right country product units sold manufacturing price sale price and gross sales and it’s worked out that i also need 18 rows i’m going to say create me a table with fixed column widths all of my columns even and at the bottom here i tell it that my text is separated with tab characters i’m going to click on ok and let’s see how it’s done well not too bad it’s guessed that i’ve got more columns than i actually have so i’m simply going to come into here highlight the column that i no longer need and on my table tools layout ribbon in my rows and columns group i’m going to select delete column so now that i’ve deleted that column it’s left me quite a lot of space the table doesn’t automatically resize to accommodate that blank space so what i’m going to do is i’m going to auto fit this table by selecting the entire table up to the layout ribbon and we have some auto fit options so auto fit to contents will basically modify the table so that each column is as wide as the widest item in the table i can autofit to the window which will expand the table so that it’s flush on either side with the left and right margin or i can choose a fixed column width so all of my columns are exactly the same size now in this case i want to auto fit to window and there we go my table is now a lot more evenly spaced and if i wanted to i can go in and i can make some further adjustments simply by dragging these columns over now looking at my table and looking at this first column i can see that this would probably fit a little bit better if i change united kingdom and united states of america to uk and usa respectively so this is where i can utilize find and replace so up to home we’re going to go all the way across to the editing group and we’re going to select replace and i’m going to say find united kingdom and replace with uk i’m going to replace all and we’re going to do the same but we’re going to find united states of america and replace that with usa and replace all so there we go with a few edits my table is now looking a lot neater so once we’re at this stage i’m probably going to want to jazz this table up a little bit make it stand out by applying some kind of table style and we have a whole host of table styles available on the table tools design ribbon and it’s this large group in the middle we have numerous different options and it really depends how we want our table to look so we have some plain table styles you can see as i hover over i’m getting that live preview in the document in the background i have some grid table styles so this is where we can start to apply some colors these table styles will give our heading row a color the next row will give the first column and the heading row a darker color and there is a whole host of different table styles that you can apply if you scroll through the list so let’s just apply something fairly straightforward i’m going to apply this grid table 4 accent 5 style and it’s worth noting that when you do apply a table style because the table style might make certain words bigger or might make them bold you might find that you’ll need to come back into the table and just rejig some of the widths of these columns again to accommodate the newly formatted text and also here i’m not particularly interested in having my countries showing in bold so i’m going to select them all and utilizing my mini toolbar pop-up i’m going to deselect bold so reasonably quickly i’ve been able to use words inbuilt table styles to very quickly format a table of data that’s all well and good but what if you want to create your own table style which maybe aligns more to your company or branding colors or house style well you can definitely do that as well you’ll see right at the bottom we have an option to create a new table style and this is going to allow us to define how we want each element of the table formatted it’s then going to save it as a table style which we can then reuse so let’s quickly create a new style and apply it to our table so the first thing i need to do here is give my new style a name so i’m going to call this deb table the style type while i’m doing a table style so i’m going to select table from that list and then i can basically choose a style to base it on and this is really like a starting point so in here we have lots and lots and lots of different table styles and if i select one of them you’ll see in the preview window below what that looks like so if you want to utilize one of these as your starting point you can do that and then you can format the various different elements so i’m going to start with table grid light and now we can go in and format each of the individual elements of the table so in the apply formatting to drop down you can see we have whole table header row total row first column so on and so forth so you just go through and select where you want to apply the formatting and then set the formatting properties so i’m going to start out with the whole table and what i’m going to do is i’m going to change the font for the entire table to this font just here and i’m actually going to make it slightly smaller because that is quite a large font and i’m happy with the font color and the borders but what i am going to do is i’m going to center everything like so i’m now going to go back up to my apply formatting 2 drop down and i’m going to define how i want the header row to look so i want my header row to be in bold i want the background fill of the header row to be let’s do a dark green color and i want the font to be white so it stands out i’m going to go back up to my apply formatting 2 and i could do total row first column last column but i’m going to say even banded rows i’m going to choose my fill color which is going to be a lighter green color and i could carry on going through applying formatting for each element of my table now i’m happy with the way that looks so i’m going to leave it just there but i have a final selection to make at the bottom here i can choose to make this table style available only in this document or in new documents based on this template now i’m not using any specific template for my document so when you don’t select a template you’re using the normal dot dot template so pretty much most documents that you create are going to be based on the normal dot dot template so if i was to select this option new documents based on this template pretty much every time i create a new blank document my table style is going to be available so i’m going to select this option and i’m going to say ok and what you’ll see now is that in our table styles drop down we have a new group at the top called custom and this is where you’ll find any table styles that you’ve created and i can just click it to apply it to my table now i can see here once i’ve applied it that that first column is again in bold so what i want to do is jump back into my table style modify it and remove bold for that first column so up to table styles right click your mouse and you have an option for modify table style so now i’m going to say apply formatting to first column and what you’ll see here is that in this window it doesn’t actually show as being in bold but if it’s showing in bold in your table then just toggle it so it appears to be on in your modify style box click on ok and you’ll find the reverse happens now a couple of other things i can also do in this right click menu i could set this table style as default so whenever i create a table it’s going to utilize this style i could also choose to apply the table style but clear out all of the formatting or apply and maintain formatting which is basically just the same as clicking on the style and of course if i no longer need the table style i have a delete table style option in here as well so that is how you convert text to a table and also create and apply your own table styles in the next module we’re going to delve a little bit more into formatting and we’re going to talk about table breaks and repeat headings so please join me for that hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re down in section 4 where we’re taking a look at some of the more advanced options when it comes to working with tables in documents and in the previous module we took a look at how you can convert text to a table and then create your own table style now in this module we’re going to delve a little bit more into table properties and i’m going to show you how you can split a table and also how you can repeat table headings so in this document i have a similar table to in the last module but this one contains a lot more information you’ll see that this table runs across three pages now there’s something very important to note when it comes to dealing with a larger table like this so i’m going to select the table and i’m going to right click and jump into table properties now there’s an option in here in the rows section that says allow rows to break across pages and currently i have that ticked and you’ll probably find that you also have it ticked because it is the default setting now when you have this option ticked what that basically means is that if you have a row for example this bottom row of page one if this row contains a lot of information the row will essentially break across both pages so let me show you an example i’m just going to make this row a little bit wider by adding in some returns so now essentially what i have is this one row breaking across the pages and that’s being controlled by that little setting in table properties so let’s go back and select the entire table again now another way of selecting the entire table is to jump up to the layout ribbon and in this first group click the drop down underneath select and choose select table we can then jump into table properties using the properties button and it takes us back to that same dialog box so now if i was to untick allow rows to break across pages and click on ok what you’ll see now with this final row is that it will shift the entire row down onto the next page so i no longer have a row splitting across two pages so that’s a really important point to know when you’re dealing with tables that run across multiple pages now i’m going to ctrl z to undo and put that row back on that first page now another thing you can do when it comes to a very large table is that you can actually split that table up so if i decided that i wanted to split this table into two all i need to do is select the row where i want it to split jump up to the table tools layout ribbon and then in the merge group i have a split table option and you’ll see it splits where i was clicked and when it’s also done there because this is now a new table it’s automatically applied my table style and made the first row a heading row now i don’t actually want it to look like that so what i’m going to do here to fix that is i’m going to jump up and select the entire table again i’m going to go across to the design ribbon and in the table style options i’m going to untick header row and that will remove that header formatting so now essentially i have two tables in my document this first one which is a fairly small table and then this second one which spreads across the rest of the pages now another little cool trick here that’s worth knowing is that if you put a table into a blank document it’s going to insert right at the top of the page which means that if i then want to go in and maybe add a title to the top of this document i can’t click there’s nowhere for me to click my cursor in order to add the title now you could get around this by copying and pasting the table further down the page but there is a much easier trick to get a blank line above any table that’s inserted at the top of the document make sure that your mouse is clicked in the first table cell so just before where it says country and then if you press ctrl shift enter that is going to put a blank line above the table for you and now i can add in my title like so and i might want to give this some formatting and i’m going to make this a little bit bigger or like so so now i’ve got this table split into two what if i want to do the reverse of that what if i decide that i now no longer want them split i want to re-merge them together well again there is a cool little keyboard shortcut that can do this for you very simply so the first thing you need to do is once again select the bottom table and then to merge it with the top table if you do alt shift up arrow it’s as simple as that now the final thing i want to show you with this table is how you can repeat the header row across multiple pages so in order to demonstrate this a little bit clearer i’m going to change the way that i’m viewing my document so i’m up in the view ribbon i’m going to go to the zoom group and i’m going to say that i want to view my document as multiple pages so this is going to put my three pages side by side and this makes it a lot clearer to see so you can see that on page one i have my column headings there so country product units sold so on and so forth but those currently don’t repeat across the other pages and sometimes it can be a bit confusing if you’re looking at data where you can’t actually see those column headings to know what information you’re looking at so there is a very simple way to get those column headings to repeat across all of your pages now i’m going to go back to zooming into a hundred percent so i’m going to select the row that i want to repeat so in this case this is the header row i’m going to right click my mouse and go into table properties and the option that you need to select is this one just here repeat as header row at the top of each page so let’s put a tick in the box click on ok and now if we look down i can see that i have those header rows repeated across all of the pages so it’s as simple as that now that option will repeat whichever row that you have selected so that doesn’t necessarily have to be the header row if you have a different row within your table that you want to repeat at the top of each page then all you would need to do is select it and run through the same process again and that is pretty much it for this module we’ve explored how we can split up a table and how we can join it back together again how we can add a blank row above a table and also how we can get those header rows to repeat across multiple pages i hope you found that useful i will see you in the next module hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re down in section four where we’re looking at working with tables in word documents and so far we’ve seen quite a few really useful tips and tricks when it comes to manipulating tables in this module i want to talk to you a little bit about how you can work with formulas to do calculations with table data now formulas are more commonly associated with excel but you do have a selection of formulas that you can also utilize in word and the good news is the functions and the formulas should look very familiar if you are an excel user because they are pretty much exactly the same so to add up numbers we use the sum function to find the minimum value we use min the maximum value max so on and so forth however there is a slight difference when it comes to how you select the data that you want to perform the calculation on so in this module i’m going to run through a few different ways that you can utilize formulas so what we’re going to do is we’re going to add a totals row to the bottom of this table so i’m going to press ctrl end to jump me all the way to the bottom of my table and i’m going to quickly add a new row now there’s numerous different ways that you can add rows into tables but by far the quickest way is just to click your mouse just outside the last row of the table on the right hand side and then press your enter key and that’s going to give you a brand new row so i’m going to add a total row in and i’m going to format this very slightly so i’m going to make it stand out by applying some bold font and i’m also going to give this a top border to separate it from the rest of the data so i’m going to go into my borders group on the table tools design ribbon i’m going to select the width that i want the border so i’m going to say one and a half points and i’m going to choose the pen color we’re going to have this as a dark green and then the border that i’m going to add is just going to be a top border like so so now we have a real separation between our table data and our total row now in the last two columns of my table i have sale price and gross sales and it might be that i want to perform some calculations on these two columns so let’s start with the sales price i’m going to click in that last row in that column and we’re going to add in a formula first of all that’s basically just going to add up everything in this sales price column so if we jump up to the table tools layout ribbon in that final group on the end the data group we have an option to add a formula so let’s click it so this is our little formulas dialog box and you can see the word has made a guess as to what i might want to do with these numbers and it’s input the formula into the formula field for me so it’s doing a simple sum calculation but instead of selecting cells like you would in excel it’s got the word above which basically means it’s going to sum all of the numeric values above where i’m clicked which is essentially the entire column and it probably won’t surprise you to know that if we had our table laid out in a slightly different way i could utilize the word below to sum everything below i can say sum everything to the left or sum everything to the right i can even combine two and say sum everything to the right and to the left so you can use these directional words in order to essentially select the range that you want to sum now i’m going to stick with above in this case i can then choose what i want my number format to be so if i look at my number format in this column i can see that i have two decimal places so the number format i’m going to want to use is going to be this one just here that has those two decimal places now the paste function box at the bottom this essentially shows you all of the functions that are available for you to use in a formula in a word table i’m going to look at a couple of these other ones in a moment but for the time being i’m happy with my sum calculation i’m going to click on ok and there we go now unlike excel we don’t have an auto fill so we can’t essentially drag this formula across in order to total the gross sales column as well so there’s a couple of ways that we can get around this we can either click in the gross cells column and repeat what we’ve just done by adding in the formula alternatively i could copy the formula ctrl c and do a ctrl v to paste it in now you’ll notice that it hasn’t updated but if i click and then right click and select update field that will refresh it and give me my new total so that’s a quick little work around now let’s go back to this field i’m just going to delete out that value and let’s add in another formula now another way that you can do this is instead of using the words above below left and right to essentially make your selections you can almost do cell references with word tables now this isn’t quite as intuitive as something like excel but let me show you how you can do it so i’m going to cancel out here for one moment and scroll to the top of this last page now the way that you can utilize cell references is basically to count the number of columns in your table so essentially in word the first column is column a second column b c d e and f so that is the first part of my cell reference i then need to tell word which row i want to utilize now the problem here occurs because unlike excel the rows in our table are not numbered and that might be fine if you have quite a small table you can just count down but in my table i have a lot of rows so how can i find out what my row numbers are well unfortunately there isn’t a great way to do this you either do have to count down or for example if i want to see how many rows i have in this table what i can do is select the entire table right click my mouse and jump into table properties and you’ll see when we click on that row tab it says rows 1 to 125 so i know that i have 124 rows in my table so if i was adding up something towards the end of this table that’s probably going to help me work out which row number i need as i said not particularly intuitive but i’m just trying to show you some ways that you could possibly think about doing this so just as an example i know i’ve got 124 rows let’s add up row 123 and 124 of the sale price column so the sale price column is a b c d is column e so i’m going to jump up into my formula and this time i’m going to replace the word above and we’re going to sum row 122 and 123 because 124 is the actual totals row so that’s going to be e two comma e one two three we’re going to choose our number format which is decimal places click on okay and it’s giving me the answer of twenty two dollars which i can see very clearly is the sum of both of these numbers now i’m going to delete this out again and let’s jump back up to our formula button now as i mentioned earlier you have a whole host of different functions that you can utilize in word tables so for example i could count the number of items i have in this particular column so what i can do is delete out the current formula being careful to leave the equal sign there and choose a different function that i want to use so this time i’m going to utilize count and i’m just going to say count everything above click on ok and you see it’s giving me 122. i’m probably going to want to go in there and just change that number formatting to just a plain number like so and just to show you one final example of a slightly more complicated formula we’re going to jump back into our formula button we’re going to remove what we have in there and this time we’re going to do an if calculation so i’m going to select if now if you don’t know what if is if you’re not an excel user if basically does a logical test and it will give you one of two answers for example if you have some students that have all taken a test you might want to say if student a receives a mark of greater than 70 percent then he gets an a so that is a logical test with an outcome i’m just going to utilize this to show you very quickly how you can do an if calculation in your word table so let’s do something pretty basic here i’m going to say if the sum of and let’s use those cell references again e 1 2 2 and e 1 2 3. if that is greater than 20 then i want you to put 20 in the cell if it’s not i want you to put a zero now again if you’re not used to excel formulas then this will probably seem a little bit strange a little bit complicated but let’s just read through this formula again so we’re saying if the sum so the total of e122 and e123 is greater than 20 then i want the number 20 to appear in the cell if it’s not then i want a 0 to appear in the cell now these are the two cells that we added up previously so i know the result is going to be 21 which essentially is greater than 20 so what i’m expecting to see when i click ok here is the number 20 in this cell and i’m going to make sure i have my number format set to an integer and i’m going to say ok and there we go so a few different examples there of utilizing formulas in your word tables i hope you enjoyed that and i will see you in the next module hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’ve made it all the way down to exercise four and in the proceeding section we’ve been talking about working with tables and in this exercise we’re going to get a chance to practice all of those skills that we’ve learned so on the screen here i have my finished document so this is what we’re working towards this is what i want you to replicate in this exercise so what i have on the screen here are two different tables i can see that they have some table formatting applied and i can also see that each of the tables has a totals row so when you’re working through this exercise if you need a reference point as to what i’m after i want you to essentially recreate this so let’s see what we need to do so this is our starting document it’s exercise four in the exercises folder and what i currently have here is one long table it has about 30 or so employee names it has their department then we have a blank column and then we have their salary so the first part of this exercise i want you to remove the blank column from the table and then auto fit the table to the window once you’ve done that i want you to split up this table so you’ll see that the first half of this table contains employees in the finance department and the second part of the table contains employees in the sales department so essentially i want all of the finance employees in one table and all of the sales employees in another table so i want you to split this table into two separate tables once you’ve done that i want you to make sure that the second table has a heading row the same as this row that i currently have highlighted and then once you’ve done that i’d like you to apply a table style to both tables and if you want to go a little bit more advanced with this i would encourage you to create your own table style and then finally i want you to add a totals row at the bottom of each table and add a formula into the salary column that’s going to calculate the total of all staff salaries so quite a few tasks for you to practice there as always pause this video as needed but if you’d like to see my answer carry on watching this video so let’s take a look at the answer the first thing i asked you to do in this exercise was remove the blank column from the table so i’m going to select my column right click and i’m going to say delete columns i then asked you to auto fit the table to the window so i need to select the entire table go up to my table tools layout ribbon and in the middle here i have an autofit option and i want to say autofit to window to resize that table i then asked you to split this table into finance and sales employees so i’m going to go down until i find the first sales employee i’m just going to select that entire row i’m going to jump back up to my table tools layout ribbon and in the merge group i have my split table option so i now essentially have two separate tables now my second table currently doesn’t have a header row so i’d like you to add one of those so again we’re going to right click go to insert and say insert rows above and then i’m just going to add in those column headings i then asked you to apply a table style of your choosing to both of these tables and the advanced option here was to create your own table style so i’m going to select my first table up to the table tools design ribbon and if i was creating my own table style i would need to click the drop down in the table styles gallery and select new table style at the bottom and at this point i could give my style a name and then set the options for my table the simpler option for this would be just to select a table style from the drop down gallery so i’m going to choose my custom table style and i’m going to apply this to both of my tables and the final thing i asked you to do was to add a totals row to the bottom of both tables and use a formula to calculate the total salaries for each department so let’s first add in a new row i’m just going to click at the end of the table and hit enter to add in that row i’m going to type in total tab across to that final row and then i’m going to go up to the layout ribbon and insert a formula now the formula that i’ve got in here the default is correct it’s just going to sum everything that’s above and i’m going to choose a number format i want the dollar currency sign and two decimal places after and click on ok i’m going to do exactly the same for the second table hit enter type in total tab tab click on formula select my number format and click on ok and there we go if you got something that looked like this then you are doing pretty good so far that’s the end of this exercise i will see you in the next section hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’ve made it down to section 5 and in this section we’re going to explore the wonderful visual world of graphics and pictures now whilst content is king when it comes to word documents it’s also extremely important to think about how your documents look and make them engaging for your reader by utilizing pictures text effects icons and graphics and in this first module we’re going to take a look at how you can add interest to text by utilizing word art so in this document in front of me i just have a circle shape with a nice image in the middle and this might be some kind of logo for a travel company or maybe some kind of image that i want to use in the heading of a newsletter what i want to do here is i want to add in some nice text onto this picture and i’m sure we’re all aware of the numerous font formatting options that we have available in word you can find them all on the home ribbon in the font group now i don’t want to actually concentrate on those i just want to show you a different type of formatting that you can apply to any text so the first thing i’m going to do is i’m going to actually insert a text box because i want to be able to move this piece of text over the top of my image so i’m going to click on the insert tab and over in the text group our first option here is text box and you’ll see that we have quite a few pre-formatted text boxes that we can insert into our word document so it really depends what you want your text box to look like now i just want a simple text box so i’m going to select this first option just here now this simple text box just has default formatting and you can see that i get some test text within a nice little text box which i can pick up drag and drop wherever i want to on the page and of course i can edit this text so i’m going to add in the name of this travel company which is go explore travel now currently my text looks a little bit dull but as we all know we have many options available to us on the home ribbon in the font formatting group but what i want to go through in this module is i want to introduce you to some of the word art options so let’s jump across to the insert tab and again over in this text group you can see that we have a drop down for word art now all wordart is is a quick way of applying different types of formatting to a piece of selected text now the word art gallery is reasonably limited but i like to see these as more of a starting point because every element or every property of the word arc can also be customized so i’m going to go in and let’s just select this second one here fill blue accent color 1 with a shadow and there we go you can see i get another text box which is showing me my newly formatted word art so i can then drag and drop that and place that wherever i like now as i mentioned before once you have added some word art into your document you can then jump up to the format tab and you have this word art styles group if we click the drop down in the gallery you can change your text to any one of the options that you see available here as i hover over each one i get this kind of live preview so i can see what that’s going to look like when applied to my text now it might be that i want to change this to gradient fill gold accent color four so let’s do that and my text has changed i also have other options in here to customize this further so if i quite liked the style but i didn’t particularly like the font color i can go in and i can change the fill color i also have some gradient fill options down here which i can choose from so if i was to change this to a green color and then go back up and say gradient i have different variations of a green gradient now i’m actually going to change this back to blue and you can see i still have a yellow outline so again if i wanted to i can jump up to my word art styles group and change that text outline to something else so let’s just do a darker blue and what i also have in here is the ability to add some text effects to my word art so if we click on text effects i can add a shadow and you’ll see that change in the live preview i can add an inner shadow or a perspective shadow as well we have lots of other options in here so reflection can be quite a nice one we have glow which will put a nice glow around the selected text we can make it a bevel texture and i have to say probably out of all of these this is the one i use the least and we have some 3d rotation options as well so it really depends how you want your text to look something else that we also have is this transform utility so this allows you to warp your text in various different ways so if i just show you one of these follow path options let’s click this arch just here you can see what that’s done to this particular selected text so i could then drag that down and into my logo and when i click away i can see that yes that looks quite nice now if i wanted to i could also warp this a little bit more so by utilizing this little orange handle if i drag this down you can see i’m drawing a path like so and then if i decide that i don’t want it inside the picture i can move that to just above and i can make any editing changes to this piece of text that i need to using my word art styles group now i’m going to drag this back down and just place it within my logo and don’t forget that whenever you see that little arrow in the bottom right hand corner of any group if you click the arrow it’s going to take you into more formatting options for your selected item so a lot of these are repeats of what we already have in this word styles group so for example i can add shadows from here i can also add different types of reflection but i have some additional options so i could add a shadow and then i could do things like change the transparency change the size so on and so forth so i have a little bit more control when it comes to the text effects that i’m adding i can change my text fill and outline from here as well so if i wanted to switch it to a gradient fill i could definitely do that and i can adjust my gradient options so let’s just click this end gradient stop and i’m going to change that color to a darker blue and i’m going to adjust these gradient stops and you’ll see as i do this it adjusts it very slightly in my logo i also have similar options for the text outline as well so if i didn’t want any outline if i say no outline it’s going to get rid of that now i don’t like that because it kind of blends a bit too much into the background i’m going to say solid line but i’m going to take the width of that line down very slightly so it’s a little bit more subtle and then finally we have a text box option and this is where i can choose my alignment position and also the text direction so if i was to change this to something like rotate all text 90 degrees you can see what we get there it’s a little bit of a mess because of the warp that i have on there now one thing i’ll say about wordart is that some of the options that you have are not particularly useful when it comes to creating professional documents most of the time when i’m utilizing wordart i’m doing some kind of fun personal projects so maybe it’s some kind of newsletter or an invitation to a party so just bear that in mind when you’re utilizing word art that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is still deb and we are down in section 5 where we’re taking a look at graphics and pictures in this module i’m going to talk to you about filling shapes with pictures because this is a really nice effect and i get so many questions about exactly how to do this correctly so i’m going to show you a couple of examples now what i have open on the screen here is a template for a newsletter and this is just a template that’s available in word that i’ve modified to suit the travel industry so this might be some kind of newsletter that goes out to all of our customer base every single month and it gives them updates on what trips are upcoming and also some useful information so this newsletter currently is made up of quite a large header so everything you can see in the top half here that looks like it’s slightly grayed out is actually the header and if i double click right at the top of the page it takes me into that header and i can now go in and edit the individual elements now what i want to focus on here are these three pictures on the left hand side what i’ve done here is i’ve drawn a rounded rectangle shape and then i filled it with a picture now i’ve seen people try to fill shapes with pictures many many times and i’ve seen people try all kinds of weird and wonderful things to get the picture to fit exactly inside the shape so i’m going to show you a quick trick on how to make this really easy so i’m going to close my headroom footer and let’s move down our newsletter so what i’ve got here are two shapes essentially which we’re going to fill with pictures the first one is this shape that looks like a very large tab shape and then we have a circle and all i’ve done to get these is jump up to the insert ribbon go into shapes and i’ve selected the rectangle top corners rounded for this first shape and then the second shape is simply an oval now one thing to note with this oval and i’ll just quickly click it and show you if i just select that shape and start to draw i get a very free freeform oval shape if i want it to be exactly a circle what i need to do let me just select that again is hold down the shift key as i drag and it gives me a nice equal circle so that is how i got this circle shape in my document so what i want in here essentially is in this top rounded rectangle shape i want to fill this with a picture of the featured trip which is rwanda so what i’ve done is i’ve actually saved off a picture already that i want to use within this shape so once you have your picture saved off all you need to do to fill this shape very neatly is right click on the shape and jump into the format shape option and you’ll get this pane pop out on the right hand side and under the fill section you want to make sure you select picture or texture fill and what you’ll see get filled in there first of all is the last picture that you utilized so for me that was the picture of morocco that i used up in this header now don’t worry about that too much and also don’t worry about the fact that it looks very stretched and distorted we’re going to fix that with the method that we use so what i want to do now is i want to go down and i want to choose my picture source which in this case is my local drives because that’s where i have my picture saved off to i’m going to select insert and i get a choice from a file online pictures or from icons so if you didn’t have a picture saved off you could jump into online pictures and you could search for gorillas and essentially this will do a search of the internet now you can go in and choose a picture that you want to add but i will say something about inserting pictures into documents is that you need to be careful of the copyright on the picture always make sure that you have creative commons only ticked at the top because that will list pictures that you can utilize in your documents i will say that even if you do check this box it’s always worth double checking exactly what the license is on a picture before you use it if it’s a picture that nobody’s going to see apart from you then you’re probably okay to add pretty much any picture but if this document is going to be shared or used in promotional material then you really need to be careful of the copyright and just on that note if you are looking for free pictures that you can freely use in any of your documents or any of your powerpoint presentations even then i would suggest you check out a couple of different websites the first website that is amazing for free stock photos and videos is pexels.com it has a very simple search interface you just search what you’re looking for so let’s say gorillaz hit enter and we have all of these pictures come up and these are all free to download and use so all you need to do is select the picture you want to use and you have a free download button at the top so this is a great website for images another website that’s really good is unsplash.com so this works in a similar way again we just have that search bar very simple type in gorilla and it’s going to pull back all of the images that you can utilize so a couple of really good resources there if you’re looking for images so i’m going to cancel out of here because i’m going to use a picture that i have saved off to my local pc and the picture i’m using is actually from that pixels website so i’m going to say from a file and i’m going to use this picture just here click on insert and you can see it inserts it into the shape now again look at how that image is distorted and this is where people get a bit stuck they manage to get to this stage and insert the picture but then they see that the picture looks pixelated blurry distorted and they don’t really know how to fix that well it’s very simple we just need to use our fill utility so with the shape and the picture selected i’m going to jump up to my picture tools format ribbon and the option we want to go to is in this end group here the crop button and i’m going to click the lower half and what i want to say is i want to fill the picture in the shape and it kind of looks like this so what i can then do is because i want to have the gorilla’s face in this i’m going to drag the picture down like so and once i have in the position that i want i’m going to go back to my crop button and i’m going to say crop and there we go so now the image is no longer distorted so i’ve got one picture in place in my newsletter and things are starting to look really nice i have one more that i need to do and that is this picture down here so currently where i have this empty circle you can see just above it says speak to our africa continent specialist ed omara now and what i want is a picture of ed smiling and ready to take your call now once again i have a picture of ed saved off to my pc so i’m going to select my shape right click and jump into format shape and we’re going to go through the same process i’m going to say fill with a picture or texture film it’s going to fill it with the last image i used but we’re just going to jump straight down into picture source say insert from a file and there is ed once again our picture is distorted so we’re going to jump up to picture tools format go into our crop tool and select to fill the picture within the shape and there we go now if i wanted to make him a little bit bigger i can drag the picture out or in i can move it around and just get it in the position that i want it to be in so let’s move it just there like so i’m going to say crop and crop and there we go a perfectly cropped picture now i’ve removed that picture of ed because i want to show you a slightly different way of doing this let’s imagine that ed has now left the company and has been replaced with a different africa continent specialist and her name is claire stone so now i want her picture to be filled in this circle now another way that i could do this is if i had a picture of claire stone elsewhere in this document i can utilize it to fill the shape as opposed to inserting it from a saved picture so what i’m going to do is i’m going to jump down to the second page and we’re just going to insert a picture of claire stone and there we go so this might be elsewhere in the document i want to take this picture and i want to use it to fill this shape so what i could do is click on her picture and copy it ctrl c as soon as i copy it that picture is now saved to the clipboard so when i come to fill my shape when i select it and go to my format shape pane and select picture or texture film in my picture source instead of choosing insert i can now choose the clipboard option and it’s going to fill it with whatever i have collected on my clipboard last now that picture is pretty good but i am going to go up to the format ribbon and do my crop and fill and just move her over very slightly and maybe i will make this picture a little bit bigger so that she’s closer into the camera like so and click the crop button i can then safely go in and delete out this picture if i need to so that is how you insert a shape you fill it with a picture using the insert method and also the clipboard method i hope you found that useful i will see you in the next module hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re down in section 5 where we’ve been exploring the options that we have when it comes to graphics and pictures in your documents and in the previous module we took a look at how you can fill shapes with pictures now in this module i want to talk to you a little bit about file size when it comes to a document that contains multiple images one thing you need to be careful of if you do have a document like this that has a lot of graphics in it or photos that you’ve added is that the file size can get really huge so if we take a look at this particular document that i have open on the screen which is our travel newsletter i’ve got quite a lot of images in here now these ones at the top seem fairly small so you might think well they’re not going to take up too much space this one’s a bit larger but all in all but on the face of it these images wouldn’t seem to increase the file size by a great deal because they’re not absolutely huge however let’s jump in and take a look at what the file size is currently at if we jump up to the file tab and go down to info in the properties section i can see the size of this particular document and currently it’s a whopping 43.6 meg now that is a pretty large file and what you will notice is that if you do have a document which has quite a few pictures in it you’ll start to notice some lag so when it comes to things like saving it will take a little bit longer if you have this document automatically uploading into onedrive or cloud storage you might find you get a delay as it does that so what can we do about this if we want a nice document with lots of really high quality images in it well there is something we can do to help keep that file size down and that is an option in word called compress images so what you need to do is you need to click on any image in your document so let’s click on our image of the gorilla i then get access to my drawing tools and picture tools tabs at the top and again i can utilize either of these so i’m going to jump into picture tools and in the adjust group you’ll see you have an option to compress pictures and as i hover over it says compress pictures in the document to reduce its size so if i click this option i get two compression options at the top i can choose to compress just the picture that i’m clicked on which is what i currently have selected now the second option in here is a really important one delete cropped areas of picture if you’re trying to reduce the file size of your document it’s a good idea to have this option ticked because if you don’t essentially what happens is that when you crop a picture like we did with this gorilla picture if you remember we went up to the crop tool we filled and then we cropped if you don’t have this option selected even though you can only see the cropped area it means that the entire high definition picture is still floating around in the background of this document and adding to that file size so always make sure that when you are cropping pictures that you select delete cropped areas of picture to keep that file size down you then have some options with regards to the resolution of the pictures in your document and of course the higher the resolution the more space that’s going to take up the bigger the file size so sometimes it is a bit of a balancing act with regards to the quality of the original picture and trying to keep that file size as low as possible now i always like to select this top option which preserves the quality of the original picture but what i’m going to do is i’m going to untick the apply only to this picture option because i want to compress all of the images in this particular document i’m going to click on ok so let’s go and take a look at what our file size is now i’m going to go back up to file into info and look at that we’re down to 15.3 megabytes so quite a difference there we’ve managed to shave off about 25 meg of file size if i want to compress it even more if i go back i may decide that i don’t need a super super high quality so i can click on a picture again go up to format and intercompress pictures once more i’m going to take the tick out of this top box and i’m going to utilize this print option so it says excellent quality on most printers and screens so i’m going to say print which is a slightly lower resolution click on ok i’m going to save my document and let’s take one more look file info and now we’re down to 12 meg so very quickly we’ve managed to shave off a lot of that file size and if you do that you’ll find your document works more efficiently and you won’t get that lag in as much so just be aware of that particularly if you have longer documents which contain lots of images make sure that you choose to delete the cropped areas and also compress all of the pictures to a quality that’s suitable for you that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced in this section we are looking at graphics and pictures in documents and in the previous module i showed you how you can reduce your file size by compressing all of the pictures in your document in this module i want to move on to talking about reusable content now in word you have the ability to essentially save off images and text and reuse them elsewhere in your documents and this is a really good way of being a little bit more efficient if there is a certain image or maybe a certain piece of text or quote that you use constantly throughout your documents sometimes it’s a bit tedious to keep having to type it over and over again or insert the same image instead what you can do is utilize quick parts in word which essentially allows you to save off your content into a organizer and reuse it when you need it so let’s take a look at a couple of examples so on the screen i still have my travel newsletter open and what i want to do is i want to take this picture of claire and i want to reuse this in a different document and maybe this is a picture that i have to reuse all the time so when i’m sending out pr related to the company i like to show a list of all of my consultants with their picture so maybe i find that i’m constantly inserting the same picture over and over again and that isn’t the most efficient way to work so what we’re going to do is we’re going to save off claire’s picture to our building blocks organizer so all we need to do is click on the picture and we’re going to go up to the insert tab and all the way across to this text group and you’ll see one of the options that we have is quick parts and if i hover over it says insert pre-formatted text auto text document properties and fields anywhere in the document to reuse content in your document select it and save it to the quick part gallery and that is exactly what we’re going to do so we’re going to click the drop down and one of the options that we have right at the bottom is save selection to quick part gallery so let’s click that and it allows us to create a new building block so essentially i have to give this quick part a name so i’m going to call this cs for claire stone now i could call this her entire name but i’m keeping it fairly short because i want to show you an even quicker way of reinserting the content a bit later on in this module so for now i’m going to call it cs i can choose which gallery i want to save it into and we have a whole host of different galleries in here so this is really just a way of categorizing the content that you’re saving off now i’m just going to say this to quick parts the category is going to be general but again you could go in and create your own categories so maybe i want one for images and click on ok i can give this a description photo of consultant claire stone i’m saving it into my building blocks template and when i want to insert it i’m going to choose to insert the content only now i have a couple of other options in here i can choose to insert the content in its own paragraph or insert the content in its own page so if i was to select this bottom option for example when i re-insert this image of claire it’s going to give me a new page with just that image on now i don’t want that i just want to insert the content only so it’s only going to insert the image wherever i’m clicked and i’m going to click on ok so now i have that image saved off into my quick parts gallery so what do i do if i want to reuse this piece of content well let’s jump across to a different document so in this document i have a page that’s called our consultants and i just have a table in this page and in this table i have a picture of two of our other consultants and i want to add claire stone into the top just here so instead of having to go and recreate the shape with the filled image or maybe copy and paste the image from somewhere else i can just insert it using my quick part so i go up to insert across to quick parts and you can see it there at the top cs and as i hover it says photo of consultant claire stone so all i need to do is select and you can see it’s put that piece of content in here now you’ll also see that it hasn’t inserted it where my mouse pointer was clicked and that’s related to the layout options of this picture so when i click on it you’ll see this little icon pop out to the side and this is where i can choose my layout options and currently i can see that this one is set to in front of text so what that basically means is that when i saved this image as a quick part in my previous document this was the layout option i had set on that picture and if i want to go back and double check that by clicking on the image and clicking the little icon i can see that yes i have in front of text saved on this picture so it’s bringing across that layout option as well as the picture now in front of text basically allows me to move this picture and drop it wherever i like on the page so i can put it on top of text on top of other images so word isn’t really in control of where that image is placed hence why it’s just put it basically down at the bottom of the page in this particular document so all i need to do to get it to jump up to where i was clicked is just change that layout option to inline with text and you’ll see it will pop up to where my cursor was clicked and if i want to reuse that in another document i do exactly the same thing just up to quick parts and i can select it from my list now if you have a lot of quick parts you might find that this list starts to get very long so another way that you can insert it so let me just delete out claire again is if we go to quick parts i can go to the building blocks organizer and this is where i’ll find all of the different building blocks that i can add and you can see that there are a lot of things in word that by default are set up as building blocks so things like templates are essentially building blocks headers and footers are building blocks page numbering is a building block now if i’m looking for my particular building block i know it’s called cs so what i might want to do here is order the names of my building blocks alphabetically to make it a bit easier to find so i’m going to click on the name column heading and now i can scroll through looking for my cs building block which is just there i can see in the preview window what that looks like and i can insert it from here by clicking the insert button and once again because of those layout options i need to change this to inline with text to get that to pop back up now an even quicker way that i can do this is let’s delete that out again if i know what i’ve called my building block so in this case cs all i need to do to recall it is type in the name so cs and press the f3 key and once again you’ll see it inserts it i’m going to pop that back up by changing the layout let’s take a look at one more example of saving a piece of content so in the previous example we saved off an image but you can also save off text so at the bottom of this document i have a line of text and this is a quote from a magazine highly experienced travel specialists that care about your trip as much as you do and this is a quote i use often in any pr material that i send out about the company so this might be something that i want to save off so once again i’m just going to select the piece of content that i want to save i’m going to jump up to the insert tab and across to quick parts and i could do the same thing save selection to quick part gallery and then choose which gallery i want to save it to but if it’s a piece of text i could also save it to the auto text gallery automatically and all that does it’s basically the same window but it just selects the gallery auto text so it’s a little bit quicker and i’m going to give this a name we’re going to call it outsider quote i’m going to create a new category and i’m going to call this quotes and my description [Music] quote from outsider magazine i’m going to save this into my building blocks and i’m going to choose insert content only and let’s click on ok so now if i jump across to my other document and scroll up to the top i’m going to put a little line in here and we’re going to pull through our quote so once again i can go into my quick parts option and this time i can go to auto text and i’ll see it listed there so that’s a quick way of inserting it also remember i could type in outside a quote and press f3 in order to get that to insert so this is what we call reusable content and of course if you want to manage any of your content if you jump back down to your building blocks organizer you can find your quick part so let’s find cs again and i have an edit properties box so i can go in i can change the name i can change where i’ve got it saved the description all of those kinds of things so pretty much everything i can modify and if i decide that i no longer want it i also have a delete button down here as well so i’m going to delete out cs click on close and it doesn’t actually affect the image in the document it just deletes the quick part so it’s not available for future use so the final thing i might want to do on this page to make it look a little bit nicer it’s just remove the borders of this table so let’s quickly do that i’m gonna select the table jump up to the table tools design ribbon and i’m gonna go to borders and i’m gonna say no borders and there we go we have a very nice looking document that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re done in section 5 where we’re taking a look at how to jazz up our documents a little bit with graphics and pictures and in this module i’m going to introduce you to something that’s reasonably new when i say reasonably it was released in word 2013 and that is icons and 3d models so let’s start out with icons so on the screen here i am starting to design a brochure for a company called buy tech and this company buys and sells laptops and this first page is a very simple design we just have a background image we have some formatted text and then i’ve drawn three circles which are just shapes and added text boxes inside them what you also might notice is that i’ve changed the orientation of this page to landscape and what i’m aiming to do here is i want to make this first page look a little bit more interesting by utilizing icons as opposed to the text that we currently have now you’ll find your icons on the insert ribbon in the illustrations group you should see a little option there that says insert an icon and the screen tip says insert an icon to visually communicate using symbols and you’ll see this a lot when you’re looking at different websites brochures documents these days it’s a lot more modern to utilize images icons vector graphics as opposed to words so let me show you how you can utilize icons to jazz up this first page of the brochure now i want to put an icon in each one of these three circles so what i’m going to do is i’m going to click on this first circle and what i can see immediately is that i’ve grouped these circles together so when i was moving these into position and aligning them i group them so the first thing i want to do is i want to ungroup these objects so i’m going to right click go to group and select ungroup everything is now an individual object so i’m going to click on the first circle i’m going to go up to insert and click on the icons button and what this will do is it will open up words icon gallery and you’ll see all of the icons that you have access to to insert into your document arranged by category and the categories are listed in alphabetical order so you can jump to any particular category that you want alternatively you can use the scroll bar on the right hand side just to have a browse through all of the different categories now there aren’t thousands and thousands of icons in this gallery but there are enough in there that you can usually find something that’s appropriate for what you want to do alternatively if you have an idea of what you want to insert you do have a search bar at the top where you can search so if i was searching for shopping i can type in shop and it gives me all of the relevant icons click the cross to clear the search now this first icon i want to insert is going to represent the about us section of this brochure so when i’m thinking about about us i’m thinking about people the people who work at this company so i’m going to type in people into my search box and straightaway it brings me back all of these options alternatively i might want to type in something like us and again i get a few different options now i quite like this icon pretty much represents the about us section so i’m going to select the icon and then click on insert at the bottom now you’ll see on my first page i have the boundary so this is where my icon actually is but i can’t see the icon because it’s hidden underneath the background layer that i have and you’ll see we have that little layout options box once again so here i want to change this from inline with text to in front of text and that’s going to pull that icon to the front so i now have my icon and the good thing about these icons is that you can edit them so if you don’t like the color you can definitely change the color utilizing that graphics tool format ribbon so what i might want to do here is change the color of this icon to white so i’m going to jump up to graphics fill and select white from the palette i also have outline options so i could outline it in black or a different color so maybe let’s try a bright blue something like that and i can also resize it so if i drag out and drag in again it’s a resizable graphic and it doesn’t distort in any way i’m going to drag it across and i’m going to place it in there now looking at it i don’t particularly like that blue outline so i’m going to go up to outline and i’m going to say no outline and to me that looks a little bit better so now i have my graphic i don’t really need my text so i’m going to go in and delete out my text box and i’m going to make this graphic slightly bigger and what i want to do now is align this graphic directly in the center of this circle so for this we can use our alignment tools i’m going to select the icon hold down my shift key and also select the shape i’m going to jump up to my format ribbon and in the align group i’m going to say align middle and also a line center and now i know that that graphic or that icon is dead in the center of that circle now let’s do the same for the next one this time i want an icon that represents shop so up to insert and into icons and i’m going to type in shop and i think i’m going to use this little icon just here the shopping basket and insert and once again we just need to change that layout to bring that to the front now this time i’m going to have a slightly different color let’s go up to graphics film and i’m going to have a nice bright blue color or aqua as it’s called now i need to resize this and really to keep things consistent i want this to be the same size as the previous icon that i inserted it’s a bit difficult to judge that when you’re just dragging those resize handles so one way that you can do this is if you click on the first icon and jump up to the graphic tools format ribbon in the last group it’s going to show you the size of that current icon so i can see it’s 5.08 centimeters high and wide so then what i can do is just click on the second icon and manually change it to match so we want 5.08 and there we go and i can now drag that down i’m going to delete out this text box that says shop i’m going to drag that over and i’m going to center it within the circle so let’s select the circle as well up to format down to a line a line middle and a line center like so and then finally i want an icon to represent contact so once again insert icons and this time let’s type in contact now i’m not too keen on those search results so i’m going to try something else so i’m going to type in phone and let’s just use this little image of a phone insert i’m going to pull it to the front by bringing it in front of text and i’m going to change the fill and this time i’m going to go into more fill colors because i want this kind of pinky red color i’m going to jump straight across to custom and let’s go over here i’m going to drag that down a little bit and yes that is the kind of color that i want click on ok close the layout options and once again i want to make sure that this is exactly the same size as the other two icons so i’m going to jump straight up to height and width and once again change this to 5.08 and hit enter let’s delete our text box that says contact drag our icon over and once again i’m going to select by holding down shift both the icon and the circle up to format into a line a line center and a line middle and there we go so very quickly we’ve been able to add these really nice looking modern icons which look so much slicker and cleaner than having text all over the screen so icons are a great way to add a visual element to your documents let’s now take a look at something a little bit different and that is 3d models so i’m going to scroll down onto page 2 of this brochure and this is where we have our product page and on the left hand side we just have a little text box that’s showing us some information about the x pro 5.0 hd laptop and it might be quite nice to have a picture of the laptop that you can move around and see all the different elements that make up that laptop and 3d models are exactly what they say on the tin they’re pictures that you can insert into your documents but they have an interactive element you can click on the picture you can spin it around and get a 360 view of the picture so let’s see how they work we’re going to jump up to insert and in the illustrations group we have a 3d models option i’m going to click the drop down and i can choose to insert one from a file so if i have some kind of 3d model saved off i can do that alternatively i’m going to select one from an online source and this brings up your online 3d model gallery and much like the icons all of the models are categorized so if you want to you can have a little browse through so if we click on animals you can see all the different 3d models that we can insert alternatively we do have a search bar at the top which allows us to search for whatever it is that we’re looking for so i’m going to click the back arrow to come out of the animals category and i’m looking for a picture of a laptop so i’m going to type in laptop and hit enter and here we go i have a whole host of different laptop images so i think i’m going to select this one and i’m going to insert it into my page now these 3d models are quite intensive when it comes to their size so sometimes there is a little bit of a delay from when you select the model to when it actually inserts into your document now mine was pretty quick which was good i’m going to make sure that i have my layout option set to in front of text which i do and i’m actually going to drag this down and place it on this second page now i’m going to resize this again so i’m going to drag it out like so and when i say these models have an interactive element i’m talking about this little round circle in the middle if i click i can literally drag the model around so i can see everything related to this particular picture so if i’m trying to demonstrate a product and i want to show the different ports on the side i can hold it at that angle or if i want people to see the front of it i can do exactly that now these 3d models also have their own contextual ribbons so if you click at the top on the format ribbon you can see we have lots of different options related to this 3d model so i can rotate it by using different views like so and i can also change my 3d model so i can go back in and select a different one from online sources i can reset the 3d model so if i’ve done lots of changes to this if i’ve resized it rotated it i just want to reset it back to how it was when i inserted it i can choose to reset the 3d model or reset 3d model and size and then i have all of the regular options that you’ll find when it comes to inserting pictures so things like bringing it to the front sending it to the back so sending it behind the background essentially which i don’t want to do so i’m going to bring that to the front and i can choose how i want my text to wrap around this particular object and also the position but currently i’m pretty happy with how that looks and i really like the fact that it is interactive so people can come in and they can move around the product so 3d models are another great way of adding visual elements into your documents and if i jump up to view and choose multiple pages i think you’ll see that this document is really starting to stand out and look a lot more interesting than it was before we added in these images that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is still derb and we are into section 5 where we’ve been looking at graphics and pictures in word documents in this module i want to introduce you to the concept of captions and this module really leads into the next module where we’re going to construct a table of figures because in order to construct a table of figures then every image in our document needs to have a caption now what you’ll see on the screen in front of you is i have a basic document here for a clothing company called pink moon and throughout this document i have some images or some figures as we’re going to call them in this module so if i scroll down you’ll see that i have a little excel chart and if i scroll down a little bit further i have essentially a table which is showing me the best selling products and the reason that we add captions to pictures is to essentially label them a caption is just a numbered label that you can apply to any objects equations and tables within your document and this makes your image easy to reference within your text as there is a label attached to the specific object so in this module i’m going to show you how you can caption your pictures in your word document so let’s go back up to the top to our first image and that is the image of the chart now this is an excel chart but i’m going to click on it i’m going to jump up to the references tab and right in the middle you see i have a group called captions and the first option we have there is insert caption if i hover over it says label your picture or object once you’ve added a caption you can reference your object anywhere in your document by inserting a cross reference and that’s another really important point as to why you might want to add captions to your objects if later on in this document i reference this table i can insert a cross reference that’s going to jump me back to this specific table and we’re going to talk more about cross references later on in this course but for now let’s insert our caption so i have the captions dialog window come up and the first thing it’s asking me for is the caption for this particular object and it’s automatically put in there for me figure one now if i want that label to say something different i can go down to my options underneath and i can choose equation figure or table so it really depends what it is you’re captioning now this is a chart but i don’t have a chart option but what i could do is i could create a new label [Music] call it chart and click on ok so now it says chart one i could also change the way it numbers as well so by default this is going to go chart 1 chart 2 figure 1 figure 2 so on and so forth but if i wanted something different i could click on numbering and i could choose a different way of numbering from the drop down so if i select abc and click on ok it’s now going to say chart a now i actually don’t like that i’m going to switch that back to 123 and click on ok i can then choose the position for this particular caption so at the moment i’m going to have it appearing below the selected items so below my chart but of course the other option i have in there is above the selected item i’m going to keep mine on below and if i really wanted to i could also exclude the label from the caption so if i don’t want it to say chart one then i could check this little checkbox and it will just get rid of that label so now i’ve got my options set i can type in a caption [Music] like so and click on ok and what you’ll see now if i scroll down i now have that caption appearing below my chart so let’s scroll down the page and let’s add some more captions to the rest of these images i’m going to select my image jump up to the references tab and insert caption now this isn’t a chart so i’m going to change my label to figure i’m still going to have it below [Music] and this caption is going to say flamenco dress and click on ok and let’s just finish these off hopefully you’re getting the idea now i’m going to keep this one on figure and we’re going to say [Music] biker jacket and okay and then finally insert caption [Music] slogan t and click on ok so super simple to insert captions and essentially label all of the images in your document and i would recommend that you do this as it does give your document a lot more of a professional feel like you’ve taken the time to really provide as much information as possible so it’s pretty much as simple as that now we’re going to move on from this in the next module where i’m going to show you how you can use these captions to create yourself a table of figures so please join me in the next module for that hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is deb and we are down in section 5 taking a look at how we can add pictures and images into our word documents and in the previous module i walked you through how you can add captions or labels to the objects in your word document and following on from that i’m now going to show you how you can use those captions and labels to create a table of figures now if you’re not sure what a table of figures is it’s basically what it says on the tin it’s a way of listing and organizing the figures pictures tables in your word document by creating a table of figures that looks very much like a table of contents so it basically lists out all of the figures that you have in the document and you have the option of adding a page number as a clickable link so that it makes it super easy for you to navigate and jump to specific images in your document now the only prerequisite for inserting a table of figures it’s pretty much what we’ve already done you need to make sure you go through your document and add captions to all of the objects that you want to pull up into that table of figures so we’ve already done that we have our captions for our chart just here and then we have our captions for our pictures a bit further down so i’m at the stage now where i can create a table of figures now in general you’ll either put this table of figures at the beginning or right at the end of the document in this example i’m going to put mine at the beginning of the document now i always like to put a table of figures a table of contents indexes on their own separate page keep them separate from the rest of the content so i’m going to click my mouse at the top of the document and just put a page break in here and a quick way of adding in a page break is control enter that’s going to push my content down onto page 2 and give me a blank page at the top and also what i’m going to do is i’m going to type in a little title that says table of figures and let’s do a little bit of formatting i’m going to change the font so it matches the document font and i’m also going to make it a little bit bigger and there we go so let’s enter in our table of figures up to the references tab and in the captions group we have an insert table of figures button and the screen tip there says add a list of captioned objects and their page numbers for quick reference so insert table of figures so the first thing you’ll see on this table of figures tab is that on the left hand side i have a preview of what my table of figures is going to look like and on the right hand side i have the same thing but it’s the web preview and then of course i have some options underneath which are going to allow me to modify the look and feel of this table of figures so currently it’s going to show my caption then the dotted tab leader and then the page number so if i didn’t want to show these page numbers i can untick the show page numbers box and if i didn’t want to right align the page numbers i could untick that and it moves them so they’re flush against the captions now i do want my right aligned so let’s turn that back on i then get to choose how i want my tab leader to look so i’ve got dots selected but i could choose to have no tab leader a dashed line or a solid line and i’m going to stick with my dotted line and then finally at the bottom i have some general options which are going to allow me to customize the style of my table of figures so if i click the drop down in the formats area i have a few different choices in here so you’ll see as i select each of these the print preview is going to change so that is classic format distinctive is slightly different we have centered formal and finally simple now i’m going to choose classic format but you can see there classic format doesn’t have a tab leader now i do want to tab leader so i’m going to select the dotted tab leader and then finally at the bottom here we have the caption label so this is where you specify what you want your table of figures to include and when i click the drop down you’ll see we have those different caption label categories so we have chart which is the one that i created equation figure and table now in my document i have an excel chart with the caption label of charts and then i have three pictures with the caption label a figure now unfortunately i can’t select them all in one go and put them in my table of figures i have to select what i want to insert first so that would be the chart click on ok and it’s going to pull through that chart caption so now i need to essentially go in and create another table of figures to pull through the rest of the images so up to insert table of figures i want to make sure i have my classic options selected and my tab leaders and this time i want to select figure as my caption label click on ok and it pulls through those other figures now one thing you need to remember when it comes to a table of figures and even with things like a table of contents you’re moving into the realm of working with fields and fields are essentially placeholders that store and display data so if i was to click on this first table of figures and right click you’ll see one of the options i get in here is toggle field codes if i click that it’s going to show me the underlying code that’s controlling this table of figures so this is essentially how word knows what to pull through into this table of figures and when you become a more advanced user of word knowing how to manipulate these underlying field codes is really important because it allows you to essentially customize things like tables of contents table of figures to your heart’s content utilizing these things here called switches now i’m not going to delve too deep into this at the moment but i just wanted you to be aware of exactly what’s going on under the surface when you insert a table of figures so what i’m going to do here is i’m just going to right click and toggle the field code to put that back again now once you’ve entered in your table of figures if you decide that you want to change anything about the style or maybe the tab leader then you can simply select the table of figures again right click and jump into edit field now the table of figures is considered to be a table of contents field so you can see that it’s highlighted in this long list of field codes so in order to edit it we’re going to click on table of contents and it jumps us back to our table of figures window and i can come in here and i can make my changes so i’m going to make sure that i still have my classic format selected but this time i want to have a solid fill tab leader i’m going to make sure it’s picking up my chart captions and i’m going to click on ok a word is going to immediately ask me if i want to replace the selected table of figures i’m going to say yes and there we go so i now have my updated table with my solid tab leader so pretty simple to insert a table of figures and also make changes to it and then update the final thing i want to show you in this module is how you update a table of figures when you add a new figure with a caption into your document now if we scroll down to the bottom of this document you’ll see that i’ve actually added a new image but currently this one doesn’t have a caption so let’s have a look at the whole process from start to finish i’m going to click on my picture up to references and insert caption i want the label to be figure and i want the position to be below selected item and my caption is going to say wonderlust hat and click on ok so i’ve added my caption i’m going to control home to jump up to my table of figures and now all i need to do is select this bottom table right click and say update field and it’s going to ask me if i want to update the page numbers only or update the entire table the kind of scenario where i would only update the page numbers would be if i’d moved an item around so for example if i had moved the flamenco dress picture onto a different page essentially i haven’t added a new item but the page number has changed so in that instance i could just update the page numbers only however in this scenario i’ve actually added an entire new image with a new caption so i’m going to want to update the entire table now what i always say to people is if in doubt just update the whole thing and it’s also worth knowing that there is a useful keyboard shortcut for this and that is the f9 key click on ok and as you can see it pulls through that figure so that is it that is how you create a table of figures in your word document i hope you enjoyed that i will see you in the next module hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re down to exercise 5 now and in this exercise we’re going to practice some of the skills that we’ve learnt in section 5 relating to pictures and graphics and on the screen here i have a finished document so this is what we’re aiming for and i essentially want you to recreate the different elements of this document so let’s take a look at the finished document first of all so i’ve opened the exercise five file from the exercises folder and you can see here we’re back on our seven facts about henry viii document but i’ve made some changes to this document that i’d like you to recreate so you can see here what i’ve done is first of all i’ve added a picture of henry viii to the top of this document this picture has a caption and it also has square text wrapping if we scroll down all the way through to page three what you’ll see is that i’ve now filled each of the circles with a picture of one of henry viii’s wives i’ve given these pictures a caption and i’ve also moved them into a two column by six row table now when you’re filling these shapes with these pictures i want you to make sure you’re utilizing that crop and fill utility so that the pictures aren’t distorted in any way another little tip is that it’s helpful to set the text wrapping for each of these pictures to inline with text as it makes it much easier to move them into the table you’ll also notice that i’ve given these pictures a caption as well and everything in this table is aligned to the middle and then finally i have a table of figures which just tells me which page each of my figures is located on so now we’ve seen what the finished document looks like let’s take a look at our starting point so this is our starting point you can see that we don’t have any of these images added in so we want our picture of henry viii to go at the top here with a caption and remember what i said about the text wrapping and then as we scroll down you’ll see that we just have these blue circles i want you to fill each of these with the wives of henry viii and all of these images are saved off into the exercise files folder i want you to make sure they’re not distorted by utilizing the crop and fill utility i then want you to insert a two column by six row table move all of these pictures into the table and make sure that everything has captions and then finally i want you to add a table of figures to the bottom of this document as always pause this video where needed because there is quite a lot of information to remember but if you want to see my answer then continue with this video so let’s take a look at how i transformed this document so the first thing i asked you to do was to add a picture of henry viii into the top of this document so i’m just going to place my cursor on a blank line jump up to insert and into pictures all of the pictures are saved off in the exercise files folder so i’m going to select good old henry viii and click on insert now this is quite large so i’m going to resize this picture down by holding down my shift key and just dragging that in and what i’m also going to do is i want this text to wrap around it so i’m going to change my text wrapping options to square i’m going to move my picture of henry viii into position like so now another thing i wanted you to do was to caption all of the pictures in the document so i’m going to click on my picture of henry viii up to references and click insert caption my label is going to be figure and i’m just going to type in henry viii i want it to appear below the picture click on ok and there we go so now let’s move down to the wives of henry viii and what i asked you to do was fill each of these circles with a picture of one of his wives so i’m going to click on the first circle right click and go down to format shape i want to click on fill with a picture i’m going to select insert i have all of my pictures saved off so i’m going to select from a file and click on the first one amberlynn now she looks like she’s sized pretty good but just to make sure there’s no distortion remember we have the crop and fill option and we can then move that into the correct position once we’re happy with it click on crop and we have a perfectly sized picture let’s do the next one picture or texture fill insert from a file i’m going to select anne of cleaves and once again i’m going to say fill and make sure that there’s no distortion in that picture and click crop again let’s do one more together and then i will do the rest off camera so insert from a file catherine howard this time i can see she looks a little bit distorted there so i want to go up to crop down to phil and adjust where necessary and click on crop now i’m going to fill the other three pictures in exactly the same way and i’ll see you back in a moment so now what i’m going to do is i’m going to insert a two column by six row table so let’s jump up to insert down to table two columns six rows now what i want to do is essentially move each one of these pictures into one row of this table now the easiest way of moving these pictures is to ensure that you have the text wrapping set in line with text so i’m going to quickly apply that to all of these pictures like so so now once we’ve done that we can drag them into this table fairly easily so let’s click on the first picture drag drop and you can see it kind of snaps into that table click drag and drop and we’re going to do that for each of these pictures like so now what i want to do is make sure that everything in my table is centered so i’m going to select my table up to my table tools layout ribbon and in the alignment group i’m going to click on align center so the final couple of things i’ve asked you to do in here is add captions to all of the pictures so we already have a caption for henry viii so let’s go through and do captions for his wives click on the first one up to references and insert caption this is figure 2 because henry viii is figure 1 and we can now type in our caption of anne berlin let’s do one more up to insert caption and this one is anne of cleaves click on ok up to caption this one is catherine [Music] howard click on ok now i’m going to do exactly the same for the other three but i’m going to do it off camera just to make this a little bit quicker and there we go so now that i’ve done this you’ll see that it’s actually moved this table down to the next page so i’m going to put in a page break just here ctrl enter just to keep everything together so now i have all of my figures in my document the last thing i want to do here is add in a table of figures so let’s do a page break ctrl enter to get onto the next page and i’m going to type in table of figures and let’s format this so on the home ribbon i’m going to say heading 1 for my table of figures so now all i need to do is insert my table of figures so up to references into the captions group and insert table of figures now i don’t mind how you insert it but for this example i’m going to choose the classic format i’m going to say that i want dotted tab leaders click on ok and there we go a lovely looking table of figures so that is the kind of thing that i wanted you to end up with and this whole exercise gives you a really good opportunity to practice all of those skills that we’ve learned in this section i hope you got on okay with that i will see you in the next section hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is deb and we are all the way down in section six now and in this section we’re going to explore the wonderful world of text boxes now i’ve already been using text boxes throughout this course but now is the time to focus in on them because there’s so much more to text boxes than just adding text now as we already know there are a couple of ways that you can enter text into a document you can click in your document and you can start typing but when you add text in that way you’re very much restricted to where you can place that text i type my text on a line i have a left and right margin but aside from that if i decided that i wanted to pick up this paragraph of text and move it somewhere else i am quite limited in where i can move it i can copy and paste it elsewhere but it’s always going to be flush with that left hand margin text boxes give you a lot more flexibility when it comes to the placement of your text and also the types of text that you can put into your document so in this first module i just want to introduce you to the textbox gallery and show you all of the options that you have when it comes to adding text boxes into your document now i have a very basic document in front of me here and this is all about going vegan i’ve got some regular text in here and i also have a picture and what i want to do is i want to add a text box next to this picture that lists out the benefits of a plant-based diet so you’ll find all of your text box options on the insert ribbon and all the way over in the text group you’ll see there you have a text box option and if we hover over the screen tip says got must see content put it in a text box a text box brings focus to the content it contains and it’s great for showcasing important texts such as headings or quotes and if we click the drop down this opens up the text box gallery and you’ll see that we have quite a few built-in options available for us to add so a lot of the time you might just reach for that simple text box but there is so many more things in here so if you’re adding a quote we have text boxes specific for quotes we have things like sidebars and text boxes that contain different formatting so throughout this section we’re going to dive in and out and utilize some of these and then i will leave the rest of them for you to have a play around with but just be aware that you do have a built-in gallery of options and it’s definitely worth taking a look in here as opposed to just grabbing that simple text box every single time and right at the bottom you have access to more text boxes from office.com and you’ll see as i hover over i have four more options available from the office website i also have the ability to draw my own text box so this is a good way to get the exact size of a text box that you want so what you’ll notice is that if i just add the simple text box it gives me a text box of a very specific size so if i now have a lot of text i want to add in i’m going to have to go in and adjust that however if i delete that out what i could do is draw my own text box and i can really specify the size that i want now what you’ll see is that when i draw that text box i get my layout options button and this is where i can choose how this object or this text box interacts with the text around it so if i click this you’ll see currently i have it set to in front of text and you can see here the different options that you have so these blue lines represent how text is going to wrap around that text box so if i was to select inline with text it’s going to push it all the way over to the margin and then any new text that i add is just going to push that text box down or i can click underneath the text box and carry on typing what i can’t do is click next to the text box and start to add text because the layout option i have selected is in line with text which means my text will be above and below the text box now i’m just going to undo all of that junk text that i’ve just put in and let’s take a look at some more of our layout options so this option just here this is square wrapping which means i can move it over and if i just pull it up to this first paragraph you’ll see what happens to the text it wraps around the text box in a square fashion if i change this to tight the text is still wrapped around the text box but i have a tighter margin so the gap between the text box and the text is smaller i then have through and that basically means these sentences are going to run through the text box so you can see it says according to a report compiled by global data called top trends so on and so forth the text basically runs through that text box i then have top and bottom which again is kind of similar to inline with text but the difference here is that with top and bottom i can still freely move my text box around whereas when i have it set to inline with text i can’t do that i then have a behind text option so that will allow the text to flow over the top of the text box and then finally we have the in front of text option so again this just allows me to place this text box on top of the text so those layout options are really important because it controls how your text flows around your text box now i’m going to make this text box a little bit smaller i’m just using my resize handle to drag that in and holding down my shift key to keep the aspect ratio like so i actually might just drag that out make it a little bit wider and place my text box utilizing those guidelines so now what i’m going to do is i’m going to add some text into my text box so i actually already have some text saved off to my clipboard so i’m going to click inside my text box press ctrl v to paste those in so now because this text box is its own individual object i can format it however i want to fit in with the rest of the format of the document so all i need to do is select the text box up to drawing tools and the format ribbon and i can utilize any of my formatting options on this ribbon so for example i can change the shape fill so let’s do a nice light green color i can choose a shape outline which i might choose to be dark green and let’s change the weight of that as well we could do a nice thick border something like that and i also have my shape effects option in there as well so if i want to add things like shadows reflections glows i can do that now i’m actually going to remove this border i think it’s going to look better with no outline like so so now very quickly the health benefits of a plant-based diet stands out from the rest of my text because i put it in a text box and then gone ahead and formatted that text box and putting it in a text box and choosing the correct layout option allows it to kind of float on the page which means i can place it exactly where i need it to be so let’s take a look at another example of a text box so you’ll see part way down this page i actually have a quote in my document and i want to make this quote look a little bit nicer and stand out a little bit more from the surrounding text so what i’m going to do is i’m going to cut this text out control x i’m going to press enter to give myself some space and i’m going to insert a quote text box from the text box gallery now i have a few options in here for quotes i have an austin quote there a banded quote and these are all a bit different in terms of their look and feel but i’m going to choose this one here the filigree quote which is quite a ornamental fancy style of quote so let’s click it and you can see that it’s added this text box in now it hasn’t added it in quite the correct position so i’m just going to move that like so now in this case i don’t really want this moving around all over the page i do want this flush with the margin so what i’d probably do here is change my layout option to inline with text and i’m going to drag the text box out so it goes across the whole page like so i think i need to add a little bit more room in underneath and give it some breathing room but i think you can agree it’s very very pretty so now what i can do is i can paste in my quote text control v now because i’ve just done a very simple paste it’s pasted it in with the formatting of the original document now i want this to match the formatting of this specific quote box so i’m going to choose my paste option and i’m going to say merge formatting like so and i also have an option underneath where i can cite my source so this quote has come from a website called rush so very quickly with a couple of clicks i’ve really been able to make this quote stand out from the surrounding text and each of these elements is editable so if i wanted to change the color to make it fit in with my green color scheme i can select the element up to picture tools and format but what you’ll notice here is that i don’t have an option to fill however we can get around this if i do want to change this to a greeny color i can do that by going to the adjust group and just adjusting the color and it’s this recolor group that i want to use i’m going to use a dark green accent i’m going to do the same for the rest of these and once i’ve filled those two pictures i can do the same for the text i can highlight it go to my home ribbon and select green accent 6 which is the same color like so i think you’ll agree that looks really really nice so the main point of this module is really just to introduce you to that text box gallery and show you that there’s so much more you can do with text boxes than just adding some simple text in the next module we’re going to explore this a bit further we’re going to utilize some other text box styles and i’m going to show you how you can do things like adjust the text box margins that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is deb and we are down in section 6 where we’ve been taking a look at utilizing text boxes in our documents in the previous module i showed you how to enter in a couple of different types of text box from the text box gallery and also how you can format those text boxes in this very short module i just want to expand that idea a little bit and just show you a few more formatting options when it comes to aligning text within your text box and also setting margins now i’m still working in my document about plant-based diets and if you remember this is the document where we added in our simple text box and also our quote text box so what i’m going to do now is i’m going to add in one more text box and this text box is going to contain another quote which i’m going to highlight in the document like so so let’s jump up to the insert ribbon and go across to our text box group i’m going to click the drop down to pull up the text box gallery and i’m going to select a different type of text box so let’s scroll through our list and i’m going to use this here the retrospect quote and you can see already from this preview that this is a quote box that is aligned to the right hand margin so let’s click it and there we go now again if you click on that text box you’ll see you get your layout options button pop out to the side and currently i can see that my text wrapping is set to square now i might be happy to keep that it just means that when i move this text box my text is going to wrap around it in a square fashion or if i actually wanted to move this text box over so that it’s flush with the left hand margin i could click in line with text like so now i’m actually quite happy having it as square i’m going to grab it and i’m going to move it over here so now what i’m going to do is i’m going to cut and paste into the text box the text that i want to use so let’s highlight the paragraph and ctrl x to cut i’m going to click within the text box and ctrl v to paste now you can see that it’s brought across with it that white background color so what i’m going to do is go to my paste options and i’m going to select keep text only to remove that and then i’m free to move my text box wherever i want to place it so i think i’m going to put it just there and i’m also going to make it a bit taller so now i have my text in my text box and i’ve set the size that i want for this particular text box you can see that the text is kind of bunched up towards the top so this is where i might want to modify my alignment options or change my margins and you’ll find all of these options in the right click menu so if we right click and go down to format shape we get our format shape pane open up on the right hand side now the first thing you’ll notice is that we have two tabs at the top shape options and text options so which one of these you choose really depends what it is you’re trying to format at any given time so if i stay clicked on shape options any changes i make are going to affect the actual shape of the text box now i want to make alignment changes to the text so i’m going to select text options and i’m not interested in changing the text fill or outline or the text effects but i do want to jump into the text layout and properties and this is where you’ll find all of your alignment and margin options so currently you can see that the vertical alignment for my text is set to the top of the text box so what i might want to do is set it to the middle like so i can also change the text direction so i have this set to horizontal which is exactly what i want but if you wanted to you could rotate your text 90 degrees or rotate alt text 270 degrees now in this case i just want horizontal you also have a couple of little check boxes under here this first one do not rotate text if i was to select this if i was to go in and rotate this text box instead of the text moving with it the text is going to stay where it is so that is what that little option controls i also have an option for resize shape to fit text and you’ll see if i click that what happens to my text box is that it resizes so that it accommodates the text without too much space above or below and then finally at the bottom i have options to adjust my margins so currently my left and right margins are both set to 0.25 centimeters but i could increase that and you’ll see my text move so i’m going to set these to one centimeter on each side i can also increase my top margin which i’m going to set to 0.7 and the same on this side like so and then my final option is wrap text in shape now this is selected already for me but if i untick this it’s just not going to wrap that text around so very quickly i’ve been able to make some alignment changes and control the way the text is looking within that text box one other thing i might want to do here which isn’t available in the format shape menu is just center align all of the text now for this i can just utilize my normal alignment tools on my home ribbon which i would use to center text so those are just a few additional options that you have when it comes to laying out how your text box and the text within it looks that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re down in section six where we’re exploring the wonderful world of text boxes in the previous modules in this section i’ve showed you how to insert different types of text boxes from the text box gallery format them and also how to adjust the alignment and the margins in this module we’re going to explore one other type of text box that we haven’t looked at yet and this is the sidebar so if we jump straight up to the insert ribbon and open up our textbox gallery what you’ll see is for the most part these text boxes that we have are simple text boxes quotes or sidebars and we have lots of different types of sidebar styles and of course all of these can be modified to match your existing color scheme now a sidebar differs very slightly from a quote text box a quote text box is really there to highlight any quotes that you might have in your document whereas a sidebar is something that you’re more likely to add which contains supplementary information so maybe some additional information that you want to add to the document that stands out from the body of the text and as you can imagine it’s very simple to enter a sidebar text box and modify it so let’s jump in and let’s choose this top sidebar just here the austin sidebar and i can see that this is a right align sidebar with accent bars at the top and the bottom so i’m going to select it to insert that in and you can see immediately what that’s going to look like and it runs all the way down from the top to the bottom of the page so this is a great way to add supplementary information so what i’m going to do now is i’m going to replace this test sidebar text with some text that i’ve got from the vegan society website i’m going to click to select and i’m going to do a ctrl v to paste that in i’m going to add in a sidebar title so i’m going to call this vegan stats and i’m going to do some formatting to this text so i want this text to match the text that i have in the document i can see that currently in this sidebar my font is calibri and the size is 11. the rest of my document is a different font with a different size so i’m going to highlight all of my sidebar text and i’m just going to change that so that it matches i’m just going to do a little bit of tidying up and remove some of these sauces that i don’t actually need in my document and right at the bottom i’m just going to add sauce the vegan society now i’m going to make this in italics just to differentiate it from the rest of the text now i also know that some of these are bullet points so i’m going to highlight and then just apply some bullets now one thing you can do with these text boxes is you can change the size of them so if i click you’ll see that i get my resize handle so if i wanted to give this a bit more room i can drag it out and i can also drag the bottom up if i wanted to now i’m quite happy having it running to the bottom of the page but just be aware that you can resize as you would a normal text box now if you do resize you may notice that this shape at the top doesn’t resize with it so you may have to do some minor adjustments just here so i’m just going to drag that out but i can also change this shape to a different color so that it matches more in with the color scheme of this document so i’ve been using a greeny colored color scheme so i’m going to jump up to drawing tools format and i’m going to change the shape fill to green accent 6. i’m also going to change this title text color to green as well and then the rest of this text let’s highlight it and let’s just make sure that that is black and there we go very quickly we’ve been able to add some additional information that really stands out from the document in a sidebar and as with the other text boxes if we want to make any changes to the alignment and the position of the text within the text box we can right click go down to format object and then we have add text options and we can make and modifications so for example with this top margin i’m going to take that down very slightly and also the bottom margin as well and right at the bottom i’m going to just drag this out on both sides and change the color of that to green and there we go so let’s zoom out a little bit and take a look and see what that looks like so i think you’ll agree using these different styles of text boxes for quotes and sidebars can really help important information stand out from the rest of the text in your document that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is still there but we are down in section 6 where we’re taking a look at text boxes and in the previous few modules we’ve seen how to add in text boxes of different types including simple text boxes quotes and sidebars we’ve seen how to format them and we’ve also seen how to align the text within a text box and also adjust the margins in this module i want to talk to you about linking text boxes together and the process of linking text boxes is a reasonably simple one and all we’re doing is creating multiple text boxes and setting the text to flow across all of the text boxes so for example you might have four or five different text boxes on your page and you want a paragraph of text to continue across all of the text boxes so let me show you how to do it and also show you some of the issues that you may come across when utilizing this feature so i’m still in my document about veganism and i’m going to work down on page number four now the first thing i’m going to do here is i’m going to work on a blank page so what i’m going to do is put in a couple of page breaks so i’m going to press ctrl enter to push that section down onto the next page and then i’m going to click again and control enter to push it down another page so essentially what i have now is a blank page in the middle i’m then going to copy to the clipboard the text that i want to put in my text boxes and that text is going to be these bullet pointed items under the heading a few tips so i’m going to highlight and i’m going to do a cut ctrl x and that’s going to place that on the clipboard ready for me to paste so my aim here is really just to add text boxes to make these key tips stand out from the document so i’m going to start to add in a few different text boxes so let’s jump up to the insert ribbon go across to text box and for this i’m just going to use those simple text boxes i’m going to take my first one and i’m going to place it where i want it to be and also make it the size that i want it to be so this one i’m going to drag down a little bit and i’m going to delete out the test text that’s in there i’m going to add another text box and you’ll see that we will be doing this a few different times and i’m gonna drag this one down and i’m gonna pull that across pull it down let’s add one more and put it on the other side now i’m not being too careful where i place these you can be a lot more intricate than i am and then i’m going to add one final text box which i’m going to place right at the bottom here let’s move that down very slightly drag it across and drag it down and i’m going to delete out all of the test texts from within these text boxes so i’ve kind of planned out where i want my text boxes to go now i’m going to click in the first text box and i’m going to paste in that text that we copied to the clipboard control v and what you’ll see is because of the size of the text box there’s not enough room to accommodate all of the text so it’s kind of flowing outside the text box and i can’t see the rest of it so what i’m aiming to do here is get this text to flow throughout the other text boxes so all we need to do is select that first text box jump up to the format ribbon and in the text group you have an option for create link let’s click it and you’ll see that your icon changes to a little mug at least i think it’s a mug that looks like it’s pouring something out of it so i’m just going to click on that second text box and you can see it now flows through i’m going to do exactly the same with the second one i’m going to select the text box create link and click on the third text box and let’s repeat this click on the text box create link click on the text box now this still doesn’t look amazing i might need to do some adjusting here what i’m aiming for is each point to be in a separate text box so this first one looks okay but i’m just going to drag that up a little bit and then drag these ones up and this is where you need to do a little bit of reorganizing click in the second text box and make sure that i’ve got all of that point which ends just there click in the third text box i’m going to drag that down now i can see here if i move this one out the way this one’s got quite a lot of text in it so i want to drag it all the way down to the end of that point and then this final text box contains the final point so i’m going to drag that down like so so now essentially i have my text flowing through these text boxes with a different point in each text box now i’m going to do some formatting to tidy this up and make it look a bit nicer i’m going to remove the bullet points like so just by clicking and then deselecting bullets and i might even want to jump in here and change these margins as you can see i have quite a bit of space between the left hand edge of that text box and where the text starts so remember you can click right click go into format shape and with your text options you have the ability to adjust your margins so let’s take that left hand margin down to zero and the same with the right hand margin and i’m going to select all of the text boxes that are remaining this time and do exactly the same so right hand margin and left hand margin like so now another thing you might want to do here to really make these stand out is you might want to format them in different colors so i’m going to select the first text box i’m going to jump up to my drawing tools format ribbon and i’m going to utilize my shape fill and i’m going to make this a light green color now there’s something you’ll notice when i do this whilst it’s filled the shape the text has this white background and the first time this happened to me it did drive me crazy for a little while trying to work out what’s going on here and you may come across this problem if you cut and paste information from an outside source so this information originally was cut and pasted from the vegan society website and what it’s done is it’s brought across with it whatever formatting was applied when it was on that website so what i’m going to need to do here is i’m going to need to clear the formatting in order to remove that white background but of course when i do that it’s also going to clear the rest of the formatting so i’m going to need to do some adjusting so what i’m going to do first so i can do these all in one go is hold down my shift key and select all of the text boxes once again now i’m going to go to my home ribbon and in the font group we have a clear or formatting button so let’s click it and you can see what it’s done there so it’s cleared the formatting i’ve got rid of that white background but it’s also changed the rest of the formatting so once again i’m going to go in and i’m going to reapply the formatting that i had so select all of the text boxes and let’s supply the correct font and let’s make it the correct size like so now you’ll see that once i’ve removed that formatting again i might have to do some minor adjustments i can now see that my text is very very close to the left hand side and that’s because i adjusted it previously before i removed the formatting so the first thing i’m going to do is i’m going to make these bold again so these first little items the key points were in bold like so now i’m going to select all of the text boxes once again i’m going to right click and go into my format object into my layout and options and i’m actually going to increase that left margin and i think about there is going to suit me and then of course you can go in and readjust the size of the text boxes if you need to so a little bit of fiddling around there but i wanted to show you what can happen in a realistic situation a lot of the times when we do things it doesn’t always work perfectly the first time and we need to do a little bit of adjusting so i thought that might be quite interesting for you to see more of a real life example now another thing you might find a bit odd is you might think that now you can come in and select that second text box jump up to the drawing tools format ribbon and change the shape fill but what happens is it’s going to change that first text box you need to change the color from your format shape pane so i’m going to go into my shape options into my fill and i’m going to change the color from here to a light blue i’m going to do the same for the next text box we’re going to have this one as a yellow and then finally at the bottom let’s select it and this one is going to be a light gray color so there we have it that is how you create multiple text boxes and get your text to flow through the text boxes now if you want to do the reverse of that if you decide you no longer want them to flow you can break the link so if i click on this second text box and jump up to my drawing tools format ribbon you’ll see now in the text group i have an option to break link and this says it’s going to break the link between this text box and the next one all of the text will be placed in the selected text box so essentially when i click this it’s going to break the link between the take notes text box and the understand your own expectations and it’s going to put all of this text into this first text box so let’s click on break link and that is exactly what has happened so then i could go in delete this text box and now i have everything back in this particular text box you’ll also see that it’s removed it from the final text box so it might be that i want these two points in that second text box then i want the rest of them to appear in this bottom one so let’s move that up and just make that a bit bigger click on the text box create link and click to select the bottom text box and then make any resizing adjustments that you need so pretty easy to do i hope you found that helpful i will see you in the next module hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’ve made it all the way down to exercise six and in this exercise i just want you to practice some of the skills we’ve learned in this section in relation to text boxes so i have up on the screen here my finished document and essentially what i want you to do in this module is recreate it so it looks something similar to this so this document is about the history of yoga and you can see throughout this document i have some different styles of text boxes so starting at the top here i have a quote text box i then have three plain text boxes in this document and these three text boxes are all linked together so that when i paste in the information it flows through these text boxes and then finally i’ve also added in a sidebar text box now i’m going to start you off with just this basic document but the information that’s contained within these text boxes you’ll find that in a file called yoga.txt that’s in the exercise files folder and i’ve put all of the text in there so that you can easily copy and paste it across so see how you go with that and if you want to see my answer carry on watching so we’re starting out with our plane document and we’re going to go in and add in those text boxes so the first one i wanted you to add was a quote text box so i’m going to place my cursor where i want this text box to go jump up to insert and all the way across in the text group i’m going to click the text box drop down now i didn’t really mind which quote text box you used but for reference the one that i used was this one here austin quote so now i have my text box and i want to add some text into this now as i mentioned there was a file called yoga.txt saved off to the exercise files folder so let’s pull that up and you can see here right at the top it has the yoga quote that i need to copy and paste so i’m going to select it ctrl c to copy click in the text box and ctrl v to paste that in simple as that the next thing i wanted you to do was add in three plain text boxes and link them all together now again i don’t really mind where you place these on the document so let’s just jump up to insert across the text box i’m gonna select simple text box i’m going to move that into position and i’m just going to drag that down a little bit like so and drag that across and i’m going to delete out the text that’s currently in there now i’m going to add in two more text boxes so let’s just add one here drag that down a bit and again drag that in and as i said it doesn’t really matter where you place these or the size of them and then let’s add in one last text box drag it over to the side and let’s just put it like that and once again i’m going to delete out all of the text that’s in these text boxes so to link these together you need to click on the first text box go up to the shape format ribbon and you’ll see in the text group there’s a create link option so let’s select create link and you’ll see as soon as you do that your cursor changes to a little cup so i’m going to scroll down and click in the second text box to link those two i then need to do exactly the same to link this text box with the third one so let’s select the text box create link scroll down and create that link you’ll see as soon as i do that in my text group i now have a break link option if i want to unlink those text boxes so now i’ve done that it’s time to copy and paste the text in and see if it flows through once again i have this text in the text file and it’s this text at the bottom that’s that says paste into linked text boxes select it ctrl c to copy go to that first text box and ctrl v to paste and you’ll see that that text flows through all three of those text boxes now the final thing i asked you to do was add in a sidebar so i’m going to put this on the second page i’m going to go up to insert across the text box and again i didn’t mind which one of these sidebars you choose but i’m going to choose this one i’m going to give this a title of yoga facts and then once again the text for this sidebar is located in that text file so i’m going to select it ctrl c to copy ctrl v to paste that in and that is pretty much what i was looking for as i said i’m not too concerned about the placement of these text boxes and if it looks exactly the same as mine the point really was to practice inserting the three different styles of text box and also linking text boxes i hope you got on okay with that i will see you in the next section hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is deb and we are now down into section seven and in this section i’m going to be talking about page layout and how to divide up your document now page layout is really just a term used to describe how each page of your document is going to look when it’s printed and in word you can adjust all of your page layout options so that might include things such as the margins the paper size the orientation how many columns of text you have how headers and footers appear and a host of other things a master in these is going to be really beneficial to you when it comes to putting together a really nice looking attractive well laid out document and we’re going to go through a lot of the options that you have in relation to page layout in this section but in this first module i really just want to start out by introducing you to the page layout ribbon because layout is where you’re going to find all of these options so it’s important that you understand what each group of commands means now before we jump across to that ribbon let’s just become familiar with the document that we’re going to be using over the course of this section and this is a book template so we’re going to pretend that i’m writing a book let’s jump up into view and go into multiple pages so we can see what we have so at the start here i have a dedication i have a blank page ready to insert a table of contents and then i have the contents of my book so we start with a forward and then we go into acknowledgements and introduction and then we start our different sections so part one we then have our different chapters which may or may not contain various different subheadings until we get all the way down to chapter nine where the book ends and then we have an appendix on the end now obviously i’m using test text in this but this is pretty much the type of layout you would have if you’re putting together a book now this layout is by no means finished we have lots of things that we need to sort out and fix in this document to make it flow a little bit better but i just wanted to give you an overview of what we’re dealing with here so let’s zoom back out to 100 and let’s jump across to the layout ribbon and take a look at some of the commands that are going to help us with this so we’re going to click on layout and it’s mainly these first two groups that we’re interested in so the first group here is the page setup group and this essentially controls how your text flows in your document so the first option that we have is our margins option so our margins are those bars of blank space that run down the left and the right hand side of the page and by default mine is set to normal and you can see the actual measurements of those normal margins but if i thought that that was a bit too wide i could jump into narrow and you’ll see how that changes the look and feel of my document i have moderate which is slightly different again wide margins which makes my text very small running down the center of the screen and then i have mirrored margins now you would use mirrored margins to set up facing pages for double-sided documents such as books or magazines so the margins on the left page are a mirror image of those on the right page which would mean the inside margins are the same width as the outside margins and then finally you have a custom margin options in here so if you don’t find anything in those inbuilt margin settings that suits you then you can come into here and you can set the measurements for each of your margins that’s top bottom inside and outside you also have the ability to set the gutter margin as well so the gutter margin is a term in word used to designate an additional margin added to a page layout to compensate for the part of the paper that’s made unusable by the binding process so if you imagine in facing pages in a layout so if you imagine a book the gutter margin is on the very inside of both pages because that’s where the book is bound now if you’re not intending to put your document into a book then you don’t necessarily have to have a gutter measurement but just be aware of what it is and how that can be useful to you moving along we then have orientation so i’m working in portrait mode for this book but if you wanted to you could switch to landscape mode but one thing to bear in mind is that if you don’t have any section breaks or page breaks in your document then every single page in your document is going to be flipped around into landscape mode now i’m going to show you a bit later on in this section how you divide up your document so that you can have some pages landscape and some pages portrait but for now i’m going to switch that back to portrait mode moving along we then have sizing options so this is related to the size of the paper if you intend to print this document now in the us letter size is fairly standard whereas in the uk we would choose something which is kind of similar in sizing but we call it a4 and we have lots of other different types of paper so if you work in the legal industry you use a very specific size of paper you have a legal option there and if you can’t find the paper size that you use in your particular industry or country we do have more paper sizes at the bottom where you can go in and define the width and height of the paper that you’re using so this is extremely important if you intend to print your document the last thing you want is to create your document in word on one paper size and then when you go to print it on your actual paper size bits of text will be cut off or the layout will look a little bit strange so always make sure you go in there and check you have the correct paper size selected we then have an option for columns now by default you’re going to be typing in a one column layout however if you want to you can switch to multiple columns which gives you more of a newspaper style layout let me show you a very quick example let me scroll down to a page that has more text on it i’m going to click my mouse go up to columns and let’s say two columns you can see now that the text flows around like a newspaper style and i also have an option in there for three column layouts now i probably wouldn’t want to add in any more columns in this particular layout because then the text is going to get a bit hard to read you also have a couple of other options in here you have a left column layout so that is going to give me a smaller left column and a larger right column all the opposite of that a right column layout and of course if you want to customize this if you jump down to more columns you have all of your preset options at the top or you can define how many columns you want and you can get really granular about this so i’ve got let’s select two columns and you can see below i have some width and spacing options so i could jump in here and specifically define the measurements for each of my columns how wide i want them to be and also how wide the spacing is in between the columns if i select the two column layout from the presets you can see the width of each column is going to be 7.62 centimeters with a 1.27 centimeter gap running down the middle i could also choose to separate my columns with a line and then underneath you’ll see that i have this equal column width option selected so when i select this option it means that both of my columns are going to be of an equal width now if i wanted one to be wider than the other i could untick this column and you can see now column number two has become active just above and i can jump in here and define exactly how large i want that second column but for now i’m happy with equal column width and finally i get to choose if i want to apply these columns to the whole document or just from this point forward so if i was to select this point forward it means from wherever my mouse is currently clicked now at this stage i’m going to say whole document click on ok and that is pretty much the result of the options that i’ve selected now i don’t want this page in two columns so i’m going to go back to my columns drop down i’m just going to say one moving along we have an option for breaks and this is where we come to insert our page and our section breaks and we’re going to be doing a lot of work on this over the next few modules so i’m going to hold off from talking about this too much at this moment we then have a line numbers option so if i select continuous you can see i get my line numbers and we actually utilize this earlier on in the course i also have some other options here so if i want to restart those line numbers on each page i can also do that i can restart them after each section or i can suppress them for the current paragraph and again as always we have more line numbering options just here so it’s going to jump you to the layout tab and right at the bottom we have an option for line numbers and you can come in here and define where those numbers start from so maybe you don’t want them to start at one you can definitely come in here and change that and you can also specify how much you want it to count by so if i didn’t want it to go one two three four five maybe i wanted it to go up in two so it goes two four six so on and so forth i can do that in here as well so a few options when it comes to line numbers now i’m actually going to say none because i don’t need them and then we have our hyphenation options and if we hover over it says when a word runs out of room word normally moves it down to the next line when you turn on hyphenation word hyphenates it instead so just like you see in books or magazines hyphenating helps create more uniform spacing and save space in your document so you have your hyphenation options in here i don’t have mine turned on but you could set it to automatic or manual and then of course you have some more hyphenation options at the bottom there so i could say automatically hyphenate my document click on ok and if you just look in the document add an example here i have a couple of words actually on this line it’s hyphenated the word passages because it’s split over two lines and the same thing with the word versions now i actually don’t like that because these aren’t true hyphenated words so i’m probably going to want to set this to none so it just pushes the word onto the next line as opposed to hyphenates it and then the final group that we have here are our paragraph options and these are also very important to understand so let’s go up to our first page where we have add dedication i’m going to click my mouse in front of the first line of text now if i wanted to indent this text i can choose to indent it like so and you’ll see as i do that it moves it in from that left margin i can also indent right which as you would expect goes the other way and then this is where i can adjust how much space i have before and after lines of text now sometimes when you’re working in a document you might find that some lines of text look closer to the title than maybe other lines of text on different pages and that is normally due to the before and after spacing that you have set so because i’m clicked on this line of text i can see that it has eight point spacing after and no spacing before so if i was to up the before spacing look what happens it gets further away from that title because i’ve got more space before the line where i’m clicked similarly if i was to click at the end of dedication it showed me that i have eight points after so there is a little bit of a wider gap between the title and the text but if i up that you can see again it pushes that paragraph down and i can pull it all the way up to zero points so it’s directly underneath or if i go down one more i’m going to set it to auto which will just invoke words auto setting for the spacing in this document also remember that with both the page setup group and the paragraph group we have additional options lurking underneath these little arrows in the corner so this one here is going to jump me into my paragraph settings where i get a few additional options to the ones that i have on the ribbon so i have an indents and spacings tab and you can see that currently i have this piece of text centered i don’t have any indentation on the right and the left i can also modify my spacing options i also have a line and page breaks tab at the top and again we’re going to be going more into these options as we go through the course and with page setup let’s just finish off by diving into there we have three tabs margin paper and layout this is where we can manually set all of our margins we can also change our orientation from here and also if we want to set up if we want mirror margins two pages per sheet or a book fold and you’ll see as i change these underneath it gives me a little preview our paper options we’ve seen this is where you adjust your paper size and then finally we have our layout options where we can control things like our headers and footers and our page alignment now as i said we’re going to be dipping in and out of all of these options as we move through this section but hopefully that gives you a good idea of the layout ribbon and these really two important groups of commands page setup and paragraph that’s it for this module in the next module we’re going to start to talk about page and section breaks so please join me for that hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re down in section 7 where we’re taking a look at how we can divide up our document using our page layout tools and in this module i want to talk to you about a really important subject and that is breaks and breaks is one of those subjects that i find people can get easily confused about now breaks are particularly useful if you’ve ever struggled to get the formatting of a long document looking like you want it to look in each section now you might be thinking to yourself well what do you mean what’s a section how do i create a section well in this module i just want to give you an overview and an introduction to breaks before we move into how we can apply the different styles of breaks to our document so what i have open on the screen here is a document just called intro to breaks and i’ve gone in and i’ve added some different types of breaks into this document so you can see how they work now i’m pretty much going to be working predominantly on the layout ribbon and all of the different types of breaks that you can select you’ll find listed under this breaks option in the page setup group and as you can see we have quite a few different types of break divided down into two sections page breaks and section breaks so let’s talk about section breaks first of all now when you’re working or when you create a document if you just open up a blank document and start typing you’re essentially working in section one page one and if you’re wondering what section and what page you’re currently typing in you can see that information in the bottom left hand corner in the status bar so currently i’m clicked in the first paragraph and you can see it’s telling me that i’m working in section one page one of eight now if you don’t see this down here in your status bar if you right click your mouse somewhere in a blank space on the status bar that’s going to pop up the customize status bar menu and this is where you can control the kind of information that you see in that status bar so you want to make sure that you have section and page number selected and then you’ll be able to see that additional information in the bottom left hand corner and this becomes more and more useful as you add more and more breaks into your document it really helps you visualize in your mind exactly where you’re at now if i move a bit further down the document i want you to keep your eye on the status bar in the bottom left hand corner look what happens if i click a bit further down that first page you can see that it’s changed to section three so i’m now working in section three on page one if i click my mouse a bit further up it’s telling you that i’m working in section two on page one so essentially what i have on this first page is three different sections now something else i would recommend you do when you are working with sections and breaks is go to the home ribbon and turn on your show hide markers because this is going to show you on the screen exactly where your section breaks and your page breaks are so this makes it a little bit clearer as to how this first page is divided up you can see above this section break i have my first section so essentially this first paragraph is in my first section i’ve then added a section break and i have section two which is this little section just here i’ve then added another section break on the end and this final couple of paragraphs is section three and then i have another section break which is jumping me to the next page now you might think okay i understand that but why is it necessary for me to add section breaks into my document well it’s necessary if you want to have a different format a different orientation different headers and footers in certain parts of your document so if you look here at section number two you’ll see that i have a three column column layout applied just to this section of the document if i hadn’t put a section break above and a section break just after when i selected the text and changed it to three columns the entire document would have changed to three columns so because i wanted to be very specific about which paragraph i was applying the columns to i needed to section it off first so now anything i do in this section is only going to affect that particular section so if i click in my section two where i have my columns jump up to the layout ribbon and go to my columns option i can now change that to two columns and it’s only affecting that particular section let me show you another example let’s scroll down now you can see at the end here i have another section break and then the next page is a completely different orientation so this page is portrait and this page is landscape and once again if i had a document that had no section breaks in it and i clicked on this page and i went up to orientation and changed it to landscape the entire document would change to landscape as opposed to just this specific page so i need to again section off the pages that i want to change the orientation of and then apply the orientation to those sections now in this case i only wanted one page to be landscape so i have a section break before and then i have a section break after and then on the next page we are back to portrait and then another final example of why it’s good to use section breaks is when it comes to things like headers and footers so if you look at my document in the footer i have some page numbers so we have the first page number one second page number two i then have a title and then this page is back to number one so on this page which is page three i actually wanted those page numbers to start again from number one and not continue through so in order to achieve that i had to put in a section break and then unlink this page number from the previous page number and once again we’ll get into this a little bit more when we get to that specific module but hopefully this is showing you some of the reasons why you might want to section up your document and when we look in our breaks drop down you’ll see that we have four different types of section break that we can add section break next page which will allow you to insert a section break and start the new section directly on the next page we have a continuous section break and you see that i’ve used that one just here and also just here so continuous we’ll put in a section break but it won’t push everything below it onto a new page it will keep it on the same page whereas the section break next page everything after it is going to be pushed onto the following page we then have a section break even page so it’s going to put a section break in after every even page and the same for odd page as well and then of course we also have page breaks and this is where essentially you can mark the point at which one page ends and the next page begins so if i show you very quickly let’s scroll down to let’s say here if i decided that after this second paragraph i wanted to push everything below it onto a new page i could add in a page break so i can jump up to breaks and say page break and you can see there it’s put in my page break marker and everything else is now on the next page if i control z just to undo that another quick way of adding a page break is to press ctrl enter on your keyboard and then we have a couple of other different types of page breaks we have a column break and this is for use if you do have your document divided up into columns it’s going to tell where to move the text following the column break in the next column and then we have an option for text wrapping and this is mainly related to web pages so these are all of the options that we’re going to be exploring in more detail over the next few modules but hopefully that gives you an overview as to what breaks are all about and why they can be useful to you that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re down in section 7 where we’re talking all about breaks in word documents and breaks really help us when it comes to laying out our document exactly how we want it to be and in the last module i gave you a brief introduction as to the difference between page and section breaks and also how you might use them and why they might be useful to you so what we’re going to do now is we’re going to work on our book template and i’m going to go through and do some tidying up now as i mentioned before if we go into view and multiple pages there are lots of things i need to do here with regards to the layout now i have added in some page and section breaks already but we’re going to go through and tidy up the rest and also add in some other things that you may not be familiar with to really jazz this document up so let’s zoom back out to 100 and start at the top of our document now i’m going to pull up the layout ribbon because again we are predominantly going to be working with this particular ribbon now the first page here i have my dedication now i wouldn’t really start my book with this on the first page i’m probably going to want to have some kind of cover page which shows the title of the book and possibly my name as the author now i could create this page manually but one thing you may or may not be aware of is that in word we have some inbuilt cover pages that we can insert so let’s jump across to the insert ribbon and in the first group here the pages group you can see that we have some cover page options and when i click i can see the cover page gallery and this has lots of different cover pages that i might want to add in and of course i can then further customize them to suit the color the font the size font that i want so i’m going to add in a cover page in a moment but before i do that i want to start adding in some section and page breaks now the first thing i’m going to do to help me with this is turn on my show hide markers and i can see that i already have a page break just here which is essentially pushing the table of contents onto its own page now because i’m going to put a cover page in before this dedication i want to make sure that i’ve clicked my mouse at the start of the title i’m then going to go to insert down to cover page and i’m going to select this one here the filigree and there we go now the good thing with cover pages is that they automatically put in a page break for you so you just have the cover page on that first page and because i’ve used this one before it’s kept in the title that i used last time which is perfect because that is what this book is going to be about however you can of course jump in here and change this title to whatever you want it to be the one thing i am going to do is i’m just going to change this text to a black font like so so very simply i now have my cover page i then have my dedication on the second page which is fine and then my third page i have a space for my table of contents now you always create your table of contents at the end once you’ve styled up your document so i’m going to come back to this a bit later add in my table of contents but i always want my table of contents to be on its own page hence why i have a page break after the dedication and then a page break after the table of contents let’s carry on scrolling down this is where my book really starts so i have my forward in here now something else that you can see which is quite common when it comes to books is that i have what we call a drop cap and that is the first letter of the first word is a lot larger than everything else and you’ve probably seen this in various different books that you’ve read over the years if you’re looking for this option you’ll find it on the insert ribbon all the way over in the text group you have drop cap so you can choose to have no drop cap dropped or you can drop it in the margin so that’s just a little fyi let’s scroll down now i can see here that i have the acknowledgements on this same page as the end of the forward and what i want to do is put this on the next page so the thing i probably want to do here would be to add in a page break now a few different ways that i can do this as i’m already on the insert ribbon in the pages group i have a page break option just here and you can see in the screen tip it shows you what that keyboard shortcut is control plus return i’m going to click it it’s going to put in my page break and push everything down onto that next page i then want the acknowledgements on one page the introduction i also want to add in another page break so this time i’m going to utilize that shortcut key control return to push it down let’s carry on scrolling through right so now i have a kind of a title page so this is my part one title page and i want this to be on its own blank page so once again i’m going to click underneath this last paragraph and let’s do it a different way this time i’m going to go up to that layout ribbon into breaks and i’m going to say page break like so and there we go now one other thing to note as we did mention this before if i click in front of where it says part 1 if you look up in your layout ribbon at the spacings option you can see that i have 186 points spacing before so that is essentially why we have all of this white space above where it says part one and that suits me because i wanted this to be somewhere in the middle of this page but i just wanted to point that out as it was something that we discussed previously so now we have chapter one let’s go all the way down to the bottom of this chapter and there we go now even though i don’t have a page break in here chapter two is naturally on the next page but what i want to do is make sure that i do have a page break in there i’m gonna delete out those carriage returns so i like to always make sure that i do have a page break after each chapter let’s scroll down again this one i need to add one in so we’ll do control enter and again you can just delete out any erroneous spacing at the top i’m going to do this for all of these different parts and chapters so again this part two needs to be on a new page ctrl enter and chapter four needs to be on a new page so let’s click in front of it control enter to push that down so i’m going to go through this document just adding in page breaks wherever necessary so let me do that and i’ll see you back here in a couple of moments so there we go i’ve now added in all of those page breaks now i’m right at the bottom of the document and i just wanted to show you another problem which you may find yourself with and that is if you ever find that you have just some blank pages at the end of your document it’s usually because you have some page breaks in there that you need to delete so you can see here i have a page break and just to show you how simple it is to delete one you highlight it press the delete key on your keyboard and it gets rid of that page break i have another one up here so let’s highlight and delete and another one just here because this is in fact the last page highlight and delete and you can see now this is the last page control home to jump to the top of the document so let’s now take a look at how we might add in some section breaks if i was compiling this book for real i’m probably not going to do things like add in columns or change the pages to landscape because my book is all in portrait layout but i’m going to show you how to do it if you did want to do that so i’m down on page four where i have my forward and underneath the forward i have some kind of quote listed just here and then i have the start of my forward now it might be that i want to put this into columns so i don’t want the whole page to show in columns i just want this section of text just here so the way that i need to do this is i need to section off these paragraphs from the rest of the document so i’m going to do that utilizing section breaks so i’m going to click just above this paragraph i’m going to go up to the layout ribbon into breaks and when it comes to selecting which section break i need for this one it’s going to be a continuous section break because i want this section to continue on the same page i don’t want it to move on to the next page but i do want a section break in there so you can see i’ve inserted it and it’s a continuous section break i now need to go to the bottom of these paragraphs click go up to breaks and i’m going to insert another continuous section break so now i’ve sectioned off this portion of text that means that i can click anywhere within this section make some formatting changes and it’s only going to apply to this specific section so in this case i’m going to jump up to columns and i’m going to put this in a two column layout now you can see there it’s put a line down the middle separating these columns and that’s because i had that setting turned on previously so what i could do is jump up to columns go down to more columns and remove the line between and you can see at the bottom here it’s only applying these columns to this particular section and click on ok so now that i have this section in columns if i scroll down you’ll see that as soon as that section ends everything goes back to that one column layout and we wouldn’t have been able to achieve that if we didn’t utilize section breaks so now we’re down to the acknowledgements page and it might be that i want this page to be landscape but the rest of the document in portrait so if i was just to click on the acknowledgements page go up to layout and change the orientation to landscape you’ll see it changes all of the pages to landscape now i don’t actually want that so again i need to utilize section breaks to section off this portion of the document so i’m going to click just before acknowledgments go up to breaks and again we’re doing a continuous break i’m going to go down to the bottom click at the end and again insert a continuous section break so now i can click in this section go to orientation change it to landscape and everything else remains in portrait another way i could utilize section breaks is if i wanted to change the margins on one specific page so let’s move down i’m going to delete out this page break so i no longer need that there and maybe i want the margins to be narrower on this introduction page so once again i’m going to click in front of introduction i’m going to go to breaks and continuous scroll down click at the end add another continuous section break to section off this portion of text i need to click in the section and now i can go to margins and i can change these margins to narrow and once again you can see it’s changed them for introduction and as we move down to the next pages we have those normal margins back now we’ve been working mainly with the section break continuous option and i do find that is the one that i use most often because a lot of the time i want to keep the text on the same page but just add in some section breaks but remember you do also have a section break next page option so let’s take a look at that i’m going to click at the end of this first paragraph and if i was to select breaks section break next page it’s going to add in a section break as opposed to a page break but it’s going to push everything down to the next page let me just undo that ctrl z and you have similar options when it comes to breaks for even and odd pages so again the even page is going to insert a section break and start the new section on the next even numbered page so currently i’m on page 11. if i insert an even page section break it’s going to push that down and start on page 12 and you have a similar option here for odd page so the key points to take away from this module is always remember when you’re working with breaks it’s useful to have your show hide markers turned on so you can see them make sure that you understand the difference between a page break and a section break and also what situations where you might use each one of these section breaks in the next few modules we’re going to be delving more into page breaks and column breaks so i will see you over there hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re down in section 7 where we’re taking a look at the different ways we can divide up our document using sections and page breaks and in this module i want to start talking to you a little bit about using headers and footers with section breaks so let’s dive straight into a very simple example now the document i have in front of me is just a test document with some test text in it it’s six pages long and what i want to do in here is i want to add a header now currently this document doesn’t have any section breaks or any page breaks it’s just a plain document that i’ve put text into now if you’re not familiar with headers and footers a header is this white area of space just above the title that you’ll see at the top of every page and the footer is the blank area space at the bottom of the document and these two areas are editable so you can add information into the header and the footer and it will appear on every page so for example a lot of people utilize the header area to add maybe something like a company logo or maybe to display the document title or maybe something like the date and time or the author name and it’s very simple to add a header and footer all you need to do is double click in the header area and it opens up the header section and immediately what you’ll see is that you get a header and footer tools can textual ribbon appear at the top and you can utilize the options in the insert group on this ribbon to insert various different things into this header for example i can insert the date and time like so i can insert document information so the author name the file name the file path the document title i can insert properties which we’re going to go more into a bit later on in the course and also fields i also have access to insert any quick parts so you can see there i have a logo saved off as a quick part i could select it to add that into my header now if this logo is all i wanted in the header i can close my header and footer ribbon and this is what it looks like so i might want to put a little bit of space in there but you’ll now see i have the logo up in the header and it appears on every single page if i want to edit the header i can double click to open it up and i get my ribbon back again so i’m going to jump in and just remove this logo and a quick way of doing that is to go over to the header and footer group i’m going to select the header drop down and right at the bottom i have an option to remove the header now another option i have in here is if i just wanted the company logo to be on this first page all i would need to do is select this little option here different first page i’m then going to go in and select my logo once more close my headroom footer i have my logo on the first page but not on any of the other pages double click to edit again and let’s go in and remove that header so that’s a very quick recap of how to add headers and footers in your document now you might be wondering well how does this relate to sections because that’s what we’re talking about in this section well if you have your documents sectioned up it can greatly affect how your headers and footers are displaying so let me give you an example using a page number so what i’m going to do is i’m going to add a page number onto every page and page numbers you’ll normally find in the footer area so let’s double click to edit our footer and in the first group you’ll see that i have an option specifically for adding page numbers i’m going to select bottom of the page and let’s keep things reasonably simple i’m just going to choose plain number two we’re just going to put my page number in the center of my footer like so i’m going to close my headroom footer and as you would expect i now have a number one on page one and then these will follow through so then we have page two page three page four page five so on and so forth so all looks good so far now remember this is a document that doesn’t contain any page breaks or any section breaks now if i was to add a page break into here so let me just click here do a control enter everything will re-number so this is now page two this is now page three so on and so forth just going to control z to undo that now when we start dividing up our document and creating sections it might be that we don’t always want the numbers just to flow through the pages one two three four five for example you might decide that you don’t want a page number on the first page and that’s particularly common if you have something like a cover page so let’s insert a quick cover page and i’m just going to choose facet from the gallery now most of the time you’re not going to want a page number on the cover page it might also be that your second page is a table of contents you might not want a page number on that either so essentially with this document just here i don’t want a page number on this page but i want this page to start at one so i’m going to double click on my footer i’m just going to remove this footer like so so let’s see what happens this time now that we have a cover page i’m going to double click in the footer area i’m going to untick different first page and i’m going to add in my page number now you’ll see here i get a zero on my cover page and then i have number one number two number three so on and so forth so what essentially i want to do here is i want to remove the page number from that first page now this is a pretty easy thing to do because it is the first page so all we would need to do is jump up to our design ribbon again and select different first page and you can see it’s removed the number from the cover page and my next page starts at number one so that’s a fairly straightforward thing to do if you just want a different first page so let’s now take a look at a scenario where it gets a little bit more complicated i’m going to add a blank page after this cover page so i’m going to click my mouse just above where it says company history i’m going to go to the insert tab and i’m going to utilize the blank page option in this pages group i’m going to click and it adds in a blank page and you can see it’s automatically put in a page break for me now it might be on this second page that i want to add a table of contents so i’m going to type in table of contents so now with the current way that i have my footers set up you can see that the table of contents page is labeled number one company history number two now essentially what i want to do is i don’t want to have a number on the table of contents page so you might think this is a pretty easy case of just double clicking on the footer and deleting out the page number but look what happens when i do this when i scroll down you’ll see that it’s deleted the page number on every single page and because the table of contents isn’t the first page that different first page option is not going to have any effect so how do we deal with this well you might think that if you go down to the company history page double click the footer and add in the page number it’s going to number correctly but again it doesn’t this is page two and you’ll see that it puts a number one on my table of contents page so this is all a little bit awkward and we need to utilize section breaks in order to get this to work so essentially what i want to do here is i want to section off where i want the page numbering to start so i want the page numbering to start after the table of contents now i already have a page break in there but i need to add a section break so i’m going to say layout tab we’re going to go to breaks and i’m going to put in a section break continuous i’m now going to go to my company history page double click in the footer and i’m going to add in my page number again now you can see here it’s put a zero and if i scroll up you’ll see that that table of contents page still has a number one and this is being controlled by this option just here on the header and footer tools ribbon the link to previous option and you can see here it says link to the previous section to continue using the same header or footer turn this feature off to create a different header or footer for the current section so essentially all of your headers and footers are linked throughout the document so if you want a different header or footer you need to unlink them so i’m going to go down to the company history page i’m going to highlight my page number and i’m going to unlink this page number from the other sections by clicking the link to previous button so now that it’s unlinked i can go back to my table of contents page and i can delete out that page number and you’ll see when i scroll down i still have my page numbers on the next pages now there’s one other thing i need to fix here and that is that this page is starting at zero and i actually want the company history page to start at number one so all i need to do here is a little bit of formatting on this page number so highlight the page number right click your mouse and go down into format page numbers and in here i can choose a different style or number format if i want to now i’m quite happy with one two three but at the bottom here under the page numbering group it says start at and then currently it has zero so i’m going to use my arrows and i’m going to put that up to 1 click on ok close my header and footer and now if we go to the top of the document we should have it looking how we want so i have my cover page it’s got no number table of contents that has no number and then my document actually starts with the correct page numbering so if you do divide your document up using sections and you need to sort out the page numbering or anything else in the header or footer remember to unlink from previous section if you want something different in the following section i hope that all makes sense to everybody that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is still deb and we are down in section 7 where we’re taking a look at dividing up a document using section and page breaks and in the previous module i showed you how you can work with headers and footers and section breaks and in this module i just want to show you another example but this time utilizing page borders so we’re still working in our company history document and we’re going to move down to page number two now what i want to do in here is i want to add a nice page border to this page and the following page only and once again i need to do this utilizing section breaks so page borders you will find on the design ribbon over in this end group the page background group and it’s the last option just here now as we’ve seen before if we don’t divide up our document into sections then our page borders are going to appear on all of our pages so if i click page border and i’m just going to do a basic box border just here and click on ok you can see this is the effect that i get so i have my page border and it’s on all of my pages now i’m going to control z to undo that because that’s not exactly what i want i only want to have a page border on the on this page and the following page so i need to add in some section breaks so i’m going to go to the page before this one i’m going to click my mouse at the end of the final paragraph and i’m going to insert a section break and we’re going to do a continuous section break and then i’m going to scroll down to the end of the second page and i’m going to add in another continuous section break so essentially now i’ve sectioned these two pages off and if we look down in our status bar in the bottom left hand corner you can see that i’m working in section three so now that i’ve sectioned it off i can safely go up to my design ribbon go to my page borders option i’m going to do a slightly fancier border so i’m going to choose the dotted style i’m going to set the color to purple and the width let’s make it two and a quarter points and you’ll see over in the preview pane exactly what that’s going to look like and this is an important section here so it says apply to whole document now i only want to apply it to this section and click on ok so now you can see i have my purple dotted border if i go to the page before i don’t have a border which is good if i go to the page after i do and then we’re back to no page border but now that i’ve done this because i’ve added in more sections you can see that my page numbering is now all messed up so if we go to the top of the document again the company history page is page number one but this page is now also page number one so the numbering has essentially restarted at this section we then go to page number two and then once again we’re back to page number one so essentially what word is doing is it’s restarting the numbering after every section break so we need to go in and fix this so i’m going to go to the first page that has the border and i’m going to double click to jump into my footer i’m going to select my page number i’m going to right click and i’m going to go into format page numbers and i’m going to select this option just here continue from previous section and click on ok so now you can see the number has changed to number two number three and then we’re back to one so we need to do exactly the same here i’m going to select the number right click format page numbers continue from previous section close my headroom footer and now i should have my page borders and also correct page numbering that flows through those sections so that is how you add page borders to specific parts of your document and also how you can update the numbering once you’ve added in more sections that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re doing section 7 where we’re taking a look at dividing up our document using section and page breaks and in the previous module i showed you how you can add page borders to a specific section in your document and then reorder the page numbering and in this module we’re going to take a look at another example we’re going to utilize our book template and we’re going to add headers and footers that contain document properties and fields and we’re going to get them to display on exactly the pages that we want utilizing as section breaks so just a reminder of this document that we’re working in it is our book template how to create an online training course and if you remember we have a cover page we then have a dedication a table of contents which is currently blank and then we have our document and this document is 44 pages long and currently i don’t have any page numbering i don’t have anything in the footer or in the header now i want to start out by talking to you about document properties and fields now both of these you’ll find under quick parts so let’s jump across to the insert ribbon across to the text group and we’re going to click the quick parts drop down and we’ve looked at some of these in previous modules we’ve seen how to save items off as a quick part and reuse them but what we haven’t really touched on are these two options here document property and field now these do differ very slightly if i hover over document property you’ll see that i have a list of different properties in the menu and i can utilize these and add them into my document now what you may have not noticed already is that when we inserted this cover page this cover page actually has its own document properties so if i scroll down to the bottom where we have this date the company name and the company address if i click on the date you’ll see just above it says date and it appears in this little rectangle box with a drop down which allows me to select the date i want to add this is a document property and this is the date property i have the same thing if i click on simon says it you can see that this is the company document property if i click on the address this is the address property so you’ll see these used quite frequently in any templates that you download or cover pages that you add now you can add your own document properties throughout your document and if i just show an example of why they’re useful let’s jump down to this page just here now maybe i wanted to add in the company name and the company address down here what i could do is jump up to quick parts go to document property select company and what you’ll see is that it will remember the company that you’ve set previously so simon says it was used earlier on in this document on that cover page just here so it’s recognized that document property and it’s automatically added it for me so that makes things a lot quicker and simpler if i then wanted to add in the company address i could go back to quick parts down to document property and select company address and again it’s going to pick up the last address that was used so this is a nice really quick way of adding in content that you’ve used previously now of course if i wanted to change this i could i can just come in here i can delete out what’s there and i can edit it with something else if i just press delete and click away it just says company address i’m going to do the same here i’m going to delete out simon says it and click away so if you are designing something like a template and you want people to enter something specifically into the document document properties are a great way of kind of adding in a placeholder and guiding people towards what they need to put in there so let’s delete these out and let’s utilize one of these in our header now i don’t want this to appear on the cover page the dedication or the table of contents so i’m going to double click on my header on the third page and in my header and footer tools design ribbon in the insert group you can see that i have document info and this will allow me to add in any of those document properties so maybe i want the author of this document’s name to be listed in the header so i’m going to select author and you can see there that it’s picked up my name i’m going to close my headroom footer and see what that looks like so let’s scroll up it looks like i’ve got it on the table of contents the dedication it’s not on that cover page but it is on a couple of pages that i don’t want it to be on so again we’re going to need to utilize as section breaks so i’m going to undo control z to remove that document property field and what i now need to do is essentially section off the rest of this document from the first few pages and then unlink my headers so let’s go up to the previous page where we have our table of contents and after the page break i’m going to insert a continuous section break now i want the author name property to appear throughout the rest of the document in that header i just don’t want it on the first few pages so i don’t need to add in any more section breaks just this one after the table of contents so now i have my section break after my table of contents i’ve essentially sectioned off the first three pages from the rest of the document so now if i want to add my document property into my header i can double click on the first page where i want to add it and you can see here it says first page header section two i’m going to go up to my header and footer tours design ribbon i’m going to untick different first page and then i’m going to add in my document property which is author so now i have my name as the author in the header and if i scroll up to take a look at what the previous pages look like you can see that i have it on the table of contents page the dedication page but i don’t have it on that cover page so essentially what i need to do is i need to remove it from the dedication and the table of contents page but keep it on the rest of the document so again we’re going to select our document property and we’re going to unlink this header from the previous section by toggling off link to previous so now when i scroll up i’m going to safely delete out the author on the table of contents page and you can see that that’s removed it from the other pages close my header and footer and now i should find i only have it from this page going forward now another thing that you can add into your documents are document fields and fields differ very slightly from document properties because fields are something that can be updated so if you’ve ever entered a table of contents into your document which we are going to do in the following modules you’ll know that a table of contents can be updated by right-clicking and selecting update field because essentially what is controlling that table of contents is a field called talk and that’s the only thing you really need to know about fields that they can easily be updated by right clicking or pressing the f9 key so let’s take a look at the different fields that we have access to i’m going to jump up to the insert ribbon go across to quick parts again and this time we’re going to select field now all of the fields and there are a lot of them are categorized into different groups so for example document information which is the category i currently have selected has all of these fields within it so things like author file name file size so on and so forth so all of these are things which can be updated so if i was to utilize the file size field obviously the more i add to my document the greater the file size is going to get so if i want to make sure that the file size is always showing as correct in my document i can just update the field now it’s also worth noting that aside from manually updating fields by right-clicking or pressing f9 fields will refresh or update when you save or open your documents and what i’ll do is i’m not going to go through all of these i’ll leave you to have a browse through all of the different field types that you have but what we are going to do is we are going to add one of them into our document but this time i only want to add it on the first three pages so i’m going to go down to my cover page footer double click to edit i’m going to go up to my headroom footer tools design ribbon and i’m going to jump into document info down to field which will open up my field dialog box and the information i’m going to add here is the information relating to the save date i’m going to select my date format and i want a short date format and click on ok and there we go we now have the date that i last saved this document listed in my footer and i can see that that is correct because i have saved this document today so if i scroll down i’ve got it on the first page but i don’t have it on the rest of the pages now that’s because i have different first page selected on the design ribbon so i’m going to untick that and add my field in once more click on ok and now if i scroll down i should see that i have it on all of my pages now remember i only want this on the first three so we’re going to need to do some sectioning so let’s close the header and footer and we need to section off these first three pages so i’m going to scroll down to the table of contents page and you can see that i already have a section break in there because we sectioned off the remaining document in the previous example so i don’t need to add in another section break so all i need to do is scroll down to the next page double click in the footer and unlink it from the previous section close my header and footer and if i scroll up i still have it there but it means that now i can safely delete it close my headroom footer and it will be deleted on the first three pages but i’m going to have it on the rest of my document now one final thing i want to go through with you here is how to add multiple items into your header and footer so currently in this footer i have my field which is showing the save date but if i also wanted to add in some page numbers if i double click go up to page number and select bottom of the page as we have been doing and if i select plane number three which is going to put the page number over on the right hand side you’ll see that it actually gets rid of that field so i can’t add my page number in that way what i could do is i could press my tab key to move across to the right hand side and then when i add my page number i could say current position and that’s going to add a page number wherever my cursor is currently clicked another thing i might want to do if i have maybe three pieces of information that i want to add is i could utilize one of the footer templates and you can see here the second one down is blank three columns and that’s going to give me three areas where i can add in information so i’m going to click on the first one that says type here and i’m going to add in my field which is going to be save date i’m going to click in the middle one and this time i’m going to add in a document property and that is going to be the title of the document and in the third one i’m going to add in my page number i’m going to say current position plain number and there we go now again you can see this page number is showing a zero so all i need to do is select my page number right click format page numbers and start that at one and click on close header and footer i’m going to turn off my show hide markers and let’s take a look at our document so we have a cover page with no header and no footer we have a dedication a table of contents which we’re going to complete later and then we have the start of our document which contains our header and our footer so that is how you can utilize document properties and fields in your headers and footers and how you can use templates to add in multiple pieces of information that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re down in section 7 where we’ve been looking at dividing up our documents using section breaks and page breaks and throughout this section we’ve been looking at how section breaks affect other elements in our documents and in this very quick module i just want to show you how you can utilize another style of break and that is the column break now as we’ve seen previously by default when we’re working in a word document we’re essentially working in a one column layout but we can change the entire document or sections of the document so that it flows in more of a column format and newspaper style and when it comes to breaks you have an option for column break and this is what i want to demonstrate to you very quickly right now so we’re back in our company history document which just contains some junk text and the first thing i’m going to do here is i’m going to create a section and i’m going to put that section into a different column layout so i want this first paragraph to be in one column which it is but i want the next three paragraphs to be in column layout so i need to section off these three paragraphs i’m going to click my mouse at the end of that first paragraph i’m going to jump up to break and i’m going to insert a continuous section break i’m going to go down to the end of the third paragraph in this section and i’m going to add in another continuous section break so essentially i’ve sectioned off these three paragraphs i’m now going to change the layout of this section i’m going to go up to columns and i’m going to say that i want a two column layout and there we go so the paragraph above is one column we then have two columns and then it goes back to one column after the section break now all that a column break is is if you want to essentially break these columns so i have this first little paragraph just here and it might be that i want to add in a break or a column break so that everything below is pushed into the next column and that’s all the column break it’s so i’m going to click my mouse at the end of this first paragraph in the first column i’m going to go up to breaks and select the column option and there we go you can now see that everything else has been pushed into that second column and we have our column break indicated after that first paragraph so now that i’ve done that i have this bit of blank space and just for fun i might want to add in a 3d model of whatever this document is related to and we’re just going to select the earth and i can then move that into the space that has been created and remember something else you might want to do here is if we go back up to layout and into columns i’m going to jump down to more columns and i might want a line between my columns like so so that is it just another tool for getting your document layout to look exactly as you want it to look thanks for watching and i will see you in the next module hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced this is still deb and we are down in section 7 where we’ve been taking a look at breaks predominantly section and page breaks in this module we’re going to take a look at a different way of dividing up your document and that is by using master and sub documents now you may or may not have heard of master and sub documents they have been around in word for a very long time but they tend to be something that are not as widely used mainly because i find people don’t really understand what they are and why they are useful and i will say they are only really useful if you are someone who works with very large documents i’m talking 100 pages plus so the most obvious example of this would be if you are writing a book so let’s use that as our example now if you are writing a book that’s several hundred pages long saving it as a single document can be impractical so when you started writing your book you just opened up a word document and you’ve written all of your chapters in one document causing your word document to be hundreds of pages long and what that means is that even performing simple tasks on that document like editing copying pasting searching even doing things like find and replace are less efficient the larger the document comes sometimes it’s a lot easier to manage a large document if you split it up into smaller documents and then essentially merge them together which is pretty much what the master and sub documents feature is all about and that is exactly what we’re going to do here so in this example we are going to run with that example of a book and this is my book template from earlier with a title page of how to create an online training course and then as i scroll down you’ll see at the start here i have a dedication i then have a forward some acknowledgements and then some introductory text i then have a part one cover page and what i hope to have after this are all of my chapters that make up part one now previously i just had all of my chapters in this one document what i’m going to do here and you can see that i’ve already deleted them out is that i’ve actually saved each chapter off into its own separate word document and you can see all of those files sitting just here so i’ve created a folder on my desktop called chapters and then i have chapter 1 chapter 2 chapter 3 so on and so forth so essentially i have a whole bunch of mini sub documents that i want to put into this master document and what this means is that in future going forward if i need to do any editing or if i need to do any formatting changes i have my document divided down into smaller chunks which is a lot easier to manage and also a lot easier for word to process efficiently so you might be thinking to yourself well if i’ve got everything saved off into different documents isn’t that going to make it a lot harder when i want to print or publish this book well no that is one of the features of master and sub documents so what we’re going to do here is after part 1 i’m going to go down onto this blank page and i’m going to insert the chapter 1 sub document now the first thing i need to do here is we need to work in outline view so let’s jump up to our view ribbon into our views group and click on outline so i’m going to scroll up and you can see here i now have this document in outline view i have my part 1 and it says write your part 1 title if you want to to make this a bit clearer to see you can also jump to home and turn on your paragraph marks so you can also see exactly where you have page breaks so i have a page break after this part one cover page so i want to make sure that my mouse is clicked just after that page break now as soon as i jump into outline view i get the outlining contextual ribbon and the group of commands we’re going to be working with are in this master document group and currently i only have one that’s available for me to access that is the show document button so when i click on this button you’ll see it gives me a couple of other options that i can use the first one is create and the second one is insert now in this example we’re going to be using insert because i already have my sub documents saved off so let’s click on insert and you can see it takes me to file explorer where i can then browse for my sub documents so it’s jumped me straight to the correct folder which is brilliant so i’m going to select chapter one and click on open and you can see it puts that chapter into the master document and in this particular view in outline view this does look kind of ugly but rest assured when you switch back to print layout view the document’s going to look completely normal and when you print or publish it it’s going to look absolutely fine as well now let’s just check that let’s close outline view to jump back to print layout view and see what our document now looks like so i have my part one cover page scroll down and there we go i have my chapter one but essentially i’m working within a sub document now when i’m clicking around in this area let’s go back to the view ribbon and into outline view and let’s insert our next chapter so i’m going to click underneath my first chapter up to show document click on insert and i’m going to select chapter 2 and click on open and there we have chapter 2. now my final two chapters i’m going to put in after this part 2 page so i want to make sure i’m clicked after the section break up to insert chapter 3 open insert chapter 4 open and i could carry on going if i close outline view again you can see that in the document this is all looking absolutely fine so nothing weird is going on here even though it does look a little strange when you’re viewing it in outline view and of course if you see anything that looks a bit strange like section breaks that shouldn’t be there you can of course delete those out now let’s jump back to our outline view one more time because i just want to show you what the difference is when it comes to this insert and create button so insert is if you already have a sub document saved off you would use the create button if you want to create a sub document on the fly essentially so if i click on create you can see it opens up this little box here and this is essentially a sub document so i could manually type my sub document directly into this section and what you’ll also see up in the master document group is that i also now have an unlink button and this is essentially if you want to remove your sub document so it says delete the link to the sub document and copy the sub document content into the master document so if i click unlink you can see that it’s got rid of the sub document the little box around the outside which denotes the sub document and this junk text that i’ve just typed in is now part of the main document i could do the same for the one above so if i’m clicked in this sub document just here so this is chapter four you can see that the unlink button now becomes active again and if i click it it’s going to remove this sub document and just make chapter 4 part of the master document again now another advantage of creating your document in this way is that you’re reducing the size of your main file so if you have a master document that has 350 pages that file size is going to be very large by breaking it down into smaller chunks you’re managing smaller file sizes so it means you’re going to have less of an issue with things running a little bit slowly or maybe a little bit of lag when you’re working in your documents when it comes time to print your book if we just close out of outline view you’ll see if we jump across to file and go down to print the document looks exactly as you would expect it to look so utilizing master and sub documents is something to consider if you work with extremely long documents and you want to do it in a way that’s really efficient and makes your life easier that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’ve made it all the way down to exercise seven and in this exercise i want you to practice the skills that you’ve learned in this module related to working with sections and breaks now as usual i want you to recreate what i have on the screen here so let’s run through the document so you know exactly what it is that you need to do now you’re going to start out with this template that i’ve created and this first page is just a cover page and then when we scroll past that cover page we have the rest of our document now some things i want you to note here and to make this a bit clearer i’m going to turn on my show hide markers so you can see here that after that cover page i’ve changed the orientation of page two so page two is in landscape now this is the only page in the document that’s in landscape you’ll see on page three it continues on in portrait mode so i want you to make sure that you’ve added the relevant section breaks in the correct places in order to be able to achieve this what you’ll also see is that on page two i have added a header all about coffee which is the document title and i’ve also added a three column blank footer and the information in here are all document fields so the first document field i have here is the date the second document field is the author and then i have the page number now remember when you’re inserting page numbers which one of the options you select is extremely important so if i just quickly remind you if we click the page number drop down make sure that you select the correct one of these so think about where you’re clicked and which option you need to use as we scroll down a bit further you can see we go back to portrait orientation and then finally on the last page we have our text in two columns so when you’re doing this exercise you really need to think about where you need to position those section breaks and the type of section break that’s most appropriate for what you’re trying to do now when you’ve done this you’re probably going to find that your page numbering looks a bit strange so you’re going to have to go in and format those page numbers to get them flowing through the document correctly and if this is the first time that you’re practicing this it can be a little tricky to get it right if you need to please go back and re-watch the video where we talked about adding headers and footers into documents if you need to please go back and refresh your memory by watching the video where we looked at adding headers and footers into documents now if you manage to do all of that correctly you should end up with a document that looks something like this so you can see all my page numbers are correct i have all my sections split up nicely i have that second page in landscape and also you’ll notice i don’t have a header or a footer on that cover page so that’s another important point to note see how you go with that this one can be a little tricky i will say that so if you want to check out my answer then carry on watching this video okay let’s take a look at the answer to this exercise so the first thing i would do here is i have my cover page and i know that i don’t want a header or a footer on this cover page so i’m going to scroll straight down to page 2 and double click in that header area now the first thing i’ll do so that i don’t get any headers and footers on that first page is i would go up to my header and footer ribbon and make sure that i have the check box different first page selected which i do so now i want to add in information into the header first of all and what we want in the header is the title of the document so again on the headroom footer ribbon in the insert group i’m going to go to document info and select document title now that’s all i’m going to have in the header let’s scroll down to footer and click now in this one i want to add in the three column template so on the header of footer ribbon in the header and footer group i’m going to go to footer and select blank three columns so now i can go through and complete the information so let’s click on the first field just here and what i want in here is the date and the time so up to insert date and time i’m going to choose the top format and click on ok the middle one here i want the author name so back up to document info and author and finally in the last one i want the page number so i’m going to go across to page number and i said be careful of which one of these you select and that’s because people have a tendency to go straight to bottom of page and then select one of these but because we’re using a template that’s not going to work we want to make sure we select current position so wherever we’re clicked that’s where the page number is going to enter that’s where the page number is going to display i’m just going to choose that plain number and it’s going to give me a one so if i now scroll up and just check that first cover page that’s all looking good i don’t have a header or a footer but i do have my header and footer on the next page and i can see that that’s all flowing through quite nicely so at this stage i’m going to close my header and footer now currently in this document we’re just working in one section i haven’t added in any section breaks whatsoever but that’s going to change because we want to change the page orientation of page two so for this i need to start adding in section breaks i need to isolate page two from the rest of the document in order to change the orientation so i’m going to click just before where it says an ethiopian legend and i’m going to say layout breaks and i’m going to insert a section break but i’m going to put in a continuous section break now you’ll see as soon as i do that the header and the footer disappear off of this page only and that’s because this is a new section so essentially this is page one of the new section and if i double click in the header because i have different first page selected it’s thinking that this is the first page and i don’t want a headroom footer so all i need to do here to pull that back is just deselect different first page and click close header and footer to pull that header and footer back again now don’t worry too much about the page numbers at this stage we’ll deal with those later if i turn on my show hide paragraph markers so we can see what we have so now i want to add in another section break to push any text that i don’t want on the landscape page onto the next page so on my landscape page i only really want the information for an ethiopian legend and the arabian peninsula so i’m going to click my mouse right at the end of the text for the arabian peninsula i’m going to go up to layout and into breaks and this time i’m going to add a section break but i want it to push everything else onto the next page so i’m going to say section break next page and now because i’ve essentially sectioned off this text i can click anywhere in this section go up to my layout ribbon across to orientation and switch that to landscape and i should be able to see that my cover page stays in portrait and every page thereafter is also in portrait so now we’ve done that let’s take a look at our page numbering because things are starting to go a little bit crazy so you can see here on page two my page number is currently saying zero and then on the final page i have one which doesn’t really make too much sense so what i’m going to do here is double click in this footer select the page number right click and say format page numbers i’m going to start this at page one and click on ok let’s scroll down and take a look so this page number is now correct but if i scroll down remember this is a brand new section it says zero now because this is the same section from this point forward all i need to do here is highlight the page number right click format page numbers and say continue from previous section and you’ll see that that will then follow on from whatever is in that previous section so now it goes one two and three so that’s looking perfect so the final thing i wanted you to do was to add in some columns for this last section called coming to america so once again i need to add in some section breaks so i’m going to click just above go up to breaks and say section break next page i’m going to click at the end of this section and add in a break and this time we’re going to do section break continuous so now i can just select all of this text click on columns and say two columns and there i have my newspaper style layout so that is pretty much what i wanted you to do i wanted you to really have a play around with this because out of all of the things that we’ve gone through in this course i find that this is usually something that people really struggle with and i understand it can be very very fiddly and take a little while to get the hang of what you need to do and when so as with all of these things practice makes perfect feel free to rewatch the video as many times as you like and utilize those exercise files to practice that’s it for this exercise i will see you in the next section hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’ve made it all the way down to section 8 and in this section i’m going to talk to you about different types of links or hyperlinks that you can add into your document now links enable you to link to external documents web pages email addresses and even different sections of a document and they’re extremely useful if you need to reference maybe something on the web if you want to provide a quick way for someone to jump to another word document or excel spreadsheet or even if you just want to help people navigate efficiently around your document so in this module i’m going to show you an example of each type of link that you can add into your documents so on the screen here i have opened the employment contract and this is a reasonably short document it’s only five pages long but we’re going to add in some links into this document to make it a little bit more informative and easy to navigate now there are a couple of different ways that you can add links into documents you can right-click your mouse and you’ll see that in the right-click menu you have an option for link alternatively if you jump up to the insert ribbon right in the middle there we have a group called links and one of the options that we have is link so i’m going to say insert link so now we get the insert hyperlink dialog box and on the left hand side we have three options that we can link to existing file or web page place in this document or email address and we’re going to go through each one of these so first let’s look at existing file or web page so you would use this option if you wanted to create a hyperlink to maybe another document so for example the document we’re in currently is an employment contract so maybe i want to link to a word document that contains the full description of this particular job i would do that from this option now alternatively i could link to a web page from this option as well and that’s the first thing that we’re going to tackle now you’ll see at the top here it says text to display so what do you want to display in the document so when you add the link to your document what do you want it to say now currently this field for me is blank so i could come in here and type in the text that i want to display alternatively if i click cancel on here maybe i want to link to the government website that contains all the information related to the employments rights act of 1996. so what i could do is select the text right click and jump into link and this time you’ll see that the text to display is now the same as the text that i got highlighted so that’s a more efficient way of doing things what i can then do is just jump straight to the address field at the bottom and type in the web address alternatively i have a browse the web option just here so this will open up an internet window and you can see mine has opened in internet explorer i can then choose to go to the employment rights act 1996 i can click on this link which takes me to the correct government web page and if i just close this down you’ll see that it automatically populates that address in the address field i can click on ok and there we go i now have a hyperlink created and you’ll see as i hover over it i get that little screen tip that says control click to follow the link now when you insert a link it’s going to show in this blue color and blue denotes that the link hasn’t been clicked yet you’ll see in a moment when we actually click on the link the link color will change now unfortunately you can’t change the color of the clicked link but you can change the color of the link prior to it being clicked so if i wanted this to be red as opposed to blue i can highlight the link right click my mouse and i have a font option and of course from here i can change the actual font the font style the size the color all of our usual font formatting options so i’m going to change this to red click on ok and it’s now appearing in red when i hover over the link i get a little screen tip that tells me hold down control and click to follow this link so if i hold down control you’ll see that my cursor changes to a hand icon click on the link and it’s going to open up a new window that jumps me straight to that specific web page and what you’ll see now is that now that i’ve clicked on that link the link has changed to a purple color now if i wanted to edit this link in any way if i right click my mouse i now have some additional options edit hyperlink open copy and remove so if i say edit hyperlink it’s going to pop open that box again and i can replace the web address or change the text to display now something else that’s worth doing is adding in a screen tip now you’ll see over on the right hand side we have a button for screen tip and we’ve talked about screen tips throughout this course every time we hover over an icon on our ribbon we get a screen tip and you can add your own screen tips to links so that people know exactly what’s going to happen when they click on that link so i’m going to click on the screen tip button and i’m going to add in some screen tip text click the link to jump to the employment rights act 1996 on the government website click on ok click on ok again and now when i hover over i get that information just above in that screen tip so it’s always recommended that you do add these in for informational purposes now another even quicker way that you can add in a link to a web page is simply by typing the web address so if you look at the line underneath it says you marcus bird began working for kramer martin chase llp and maybe i just want to add the web address of the company website after the company name so if i type in http://www.kmcllp.com all i need to do is press the spacebar or the enter key and it’s automatically going to make that a hyperlink and once again i could go in i could change the font color so that it matches the other hyperlinks that i have in my document now another thing i could do is link to an external document so if i move a bit further down my employment contract i have a section here for brief description of the job and it says underneath your responsibility as a set out in the job description attached to this statement so if i have the full job description saved off in another word document i can add that in as a link as well so let’s right click and click on link and we’re going to stay on the same option existing file or web page but this time we’re going to browse to find the file that we want to link to so i’m going to click on my so i’m going to click on the browse for file icon i can see my document sitting just here so i can select it click on ok i’m gonna add a screen tip that just says full job description click on ok again and okay and there we go now that link is kind of a little bit ugly so you might want to tidy this up by editing it so if i right click on the link and go to edit hyperlink instead of it displaying the full path of where i’ve picked that document up from i’m just going to change the text to display to job description and click on ok and that now looks a lot neater and if i hold down control it’s going to open up that document now another cool way that you can link in documents is that you can link to different sections of the same document so let’s scroll down a little bit and i’m going to go to this holiday entitlement section i’m going to add a piece of text underneath that says see other paid leave now i have a section further down this document called other paid leave so what i want to do is create a link that’s going to jump me down to that specific section so i’m going to select my text right click and select link and this time i want to choose the link to place in this document option and what this will do is it will pull in all of the headings within your document so again this is really important that you have your document styled correctly with heading styles so all i need to do now is scroll through my list of headings and find the heading that i want to link to and i can see that it’s this one just here other paid leave i’m going to add a screen tip [Music] click to jump to other paid leave benefits click on ok ok again and now i have a link i’m going to highlight it i’m going to right click and change the font color so that everything is consistent and now if i hold down my control key and click on the link it’s going to jump me to that specific section of the document and the final type of link i’m going to show you in this module is how to link to an email address so let’s scroll all the way down to the bottom of this document and you can see that under disciplinary rules and procedures it says if you’re unhappy with any disciplinary decision taken in relation to you you can appeal by writing to jane doe now it might be that i want the name jane doe to link to an email address so i’m going to right click and select link and this time in the link to area i’m going to say email address and what i can do here is type in the email address for jane doe and i can type in a default subject if i want to so i’m going to type in inquiry i’m going to add a screen tip that says click to email jane doe click on ok click on ok again and now i have a link so when you click on the link it opens your default mail app and you can see exactly what it’s done it’s populated the email address and also the subject now a couple of final points when it comes to adding in links when you’re linking to an external web page sometimes it’s nice to be able to control how that web page opens so for example this first link here that says employment rights act 1996 i’m going to right click and i’m going to edit that hyperlink and what i can actually do here is i can choose my target frame so if i want that to open in a brand new window i can click the drop down here and i can say new window and i’m going to set that as the default for all of my hyperlinks click on ok click on ok again and now when i click on my links they’re going to open in a brand new window and of course the final couple of options that you have if you right click on any of your links you can choose to open them from here you can copy a hyperlink or you can remove a hyperlink altogether which will just take it back to plain text now there is one option that we haven’t explored in this module and that is how to link to bookmarks but we have an entire section on bookmarks so i’m going to cover that then but for now that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to this course on word 2019 advanced we’re done in section 8 and in this section we’re talking about adding links into our documents and in the previous module i showed you all the different ways that you can add in hyperlinks to external web pages external files other sections of the same document and also email addresses and in this module i want to show you how you can link to and update excel spreadsheets from within word so i’ve created a document for the fresh fruit company and we have a nice little image at the top there and then we have some junk text and what i want to do is where we have the heading sales figures 2019 i want to create a column chart that’s going to display my data for quarter one and as always with microsoft there are a few different ways that you can do this so first let’s take a look at how you create an excel chart from scratch so i’m going to scroll down and click my mouse just under the sales figures heading i’m going to go up to the insert ribbon and in the illustrations group you can see there that we have an option for charts so if we click this it’s going to open up the insert chart dialog box and for any excel users out there you will know that this is exactly the same as what you get when you’re working in excel and trying to insert a chart so listed on the left hand side we have all of our different chart types and there’s a whole host of them in here for you to choose from now i’m going to keep things reasonably simple and we’re just going to select a column chart i’m going to click on ok and what happens is it inserts essentially a dummy chart into the document and it also opens a mini excel window which shows the spreadsheet that contains the data being displayed in the charts now whenever you do this you’re going to get a default series and category set and this is really just there so you can see what the chart’s going to look like but of course you can modify this so i’m going to change my categories to the different fruits that i’m selling [Music] and you can see as i click away if you look at the chart it automatically updates i’m now going to change my series and i’m going to say this is for january february and march because we’re just interested in the quarter one figures and again when i click away you can now see that that legend has updated with those months i can now add in my sales figures so let’s just add in some dummy data like so now obviously you could make this window bigger and you can add in as much data as you like once you’ve finished adding your data you can simply close that excel window down and you now have a lovely little chart in your word document displaying your data and if you want to make any edits to this chart if you click on the chart you’ll see that you get the chart tools contextual ribbon that’s showing the design and the format tabs so i might want to change the chart style or maybe even change the colors i can edit this chart title simply by double clicking on the text box and adding in a new chart title like so i can even go as far as to add different chart elements so once again i can utilize my design ribbon and this first group i can select a different element to add so for example i might want to add some data labels on the inside end of my chart and you can see that that actually adds the figures into those chart bars i might want to add something like an axis title which is then just a text box that i can edit and i might want to add another one of those axis titles for the primary vertical like so and i also have a whole host of different formatting options on the chart tools format ribbon so this is where i can go in select a specific element and format it so for example if i wanted to change the color of these green bars if i just select one of the green bars it’s going to select them all i can then jump up to shape fill and i can choose a lighter color green it’s also worth noting that a lot of these options you also have on these three little buttons that pop out to the side so if i click on the plus this allows me again to add different chart elements i could even do something like add a trendline i have a button here for different chart styles so i could choose some pre-formatted styles to apply to my chart and then right at the bottom i have some filter options as well so this is where you can edit what data points and names are visible on the chart another option i have up on the design ribbon is the ability to change the chart type so if i decide that i no longer want a column chart i could click change chart type i can select a different chart so let’s go for a bar chart click on ok and it’s going to change that for me now there are so many options when it comes to formatting your charts i’m not going to spend too much longer on this but hopefully that gives you an idea as to how you can create an excel chart and insert it into your word document from scratch let’s look at this in a different way now i’m going to click on my chart press delete to get rid of it what about if i already have a chart that exists in an excel spreadsheet well as luck would have it i do and this is it just here so i’m now working in excel you can see my data at the top and then a small column chart that i’ve created based on that data so because this data exists in an excel file already i don’t need to create it from scratch in my word document all i want to do is link to the charts now there are a couple of different ways that i can do this one way which is quite simple is i can select the chart in excel press ctrl c to copy it jump back to my word document and then essentially paste it in but instead of doing a regular paste i’m going to jump up to my home ribbon click the lower half of the paste button and i’m going to say paste special so now i have two options i can choose to paste or i can paste a link and i can also select exactly what it is that i’m pasting so i’m pasting a microsoft excel chart object now the difference between paste and paste link is that if i choose paste it’s going to insert this as a drawing and if i make any changes to the original source file they’re not going to update automatically in my word document whereas if i paste a link then any changes i make in the excel file will automatically update so let’s select the paste link option and click on ok and there we go so there is my chart so now what i’m going to do is i’m going to update the original source document so you can see how this works so let’s do a split screen like so and now let’s make one of these figures really crazy so it stands out let’s say 500 sales of pairs in january and hit enter so you don’t see this chart update as yet but if you click on it right click and say update link it’s going to pull through that new data let’s go in and delete out this chart and i’m going to show you one final way that you can insert charts into your word document if we go up to the insert ribbon all the way over in the text group we have an option to insert an object now from here we have two tabs create from you or create from file so if i wanted to create a brand new excel worksheet i could it doesn’t necessarily have to be a chart i could select microsoft excel worksheet click on ok and it’s basically going to open up this floating worksheet and i can then go in and add in my data so that is one way that you can do it let’s go back into object the other way is we can create from file so again if you have a file that already contains the data you want to use you can browse and select it and i can choose to create a link to the file or i can choose to display it as an icon so we haven’t done this one yet so let’s do display as icon click on ok and there we go so now we have it inserted as an icon and we can double click and it’s going to open that file up in excel so those are the different ways that you can create an excel file from within your word document or insert data from an excel file that already exists that’s it for this module i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to the course we’ve made it all the way down to exercise eight and in this section we’ve been taking a look at adding links into our documents so in this exercise i just want you to practice some of those skills that we’ve talked about in relation to adding different types of links into a document and also linking to other objects so let’s take a look at what i’d like you to do so the first thing i’d like you to do is open exercise 8 from the exercise files folder and you’ll see here what this document looks like when it’s finished now i haven’t completely finished off this document as i haven’t added a link for all of these bulleted items but i’ve done the first three so you can get the idea and that’s the first thing that i’d like you to do now what you’ll see here is in this bulleted list of items these basically relate to the headings that i have throughout this document so you can see here it says the following ribbon tabs are available in word 2019 then we have home and if you look further down the page you can see that we have a heading that says home tab we then have insert and a corresponding heading for that so on and so forth so essentially what i want these links to do is when you click on them it jumps you to the relevant heading within that document and you’ll see here if i hold down my control key and click on draw it’s going to jump me down to that specific heading so i want you to set up these links so they jump to the headings in the document now if you want to do a little bit of an extra practice what i would say to you is when you’re adding in these links also add in a screen tip and the screen tip can say whatever you’d like it to say so that’s the first part of the exercise let’s scroll down the document so then we get to the bottom of this document and you can see here it says commands on the ribbon and then i have a link in here to an excel chart and if i double click on this link it’s going to open up that chart in a separate window now this chart is contained in the exercise files folder so what i’d like you to do is just to create this link within the word document that links to this excel icon and then finally at the bottom you can see here it says for more information visit the microsoft website and if i hold down my control key and click on the link that’s going to navigate me through to the microsoft home page so this last part of the exercise really gets you to practice linking to external sources so that is pretty much it for this exercise and if you’d like to see my answer then carry on watching this video so let’s take a look at the answer to this exercise the first thing i asked you to do was to add in some links to these bulleted items that we’re going to jump to the relevant section when clicked so i’m going to double click on home to select it go up to the insert ribbon and in the links group i’m going to select link now for this one i am linking to another place in this document so i want to make sure i select that option in the link to menu and then i have all of my headings listed here so i want to link home to the section titled home tab and click on ok so let’s test that out if i hold down control and click it jumps me down to the correct section let’s do the next one so double click on insert you could also right click your mouse and go to link right at the bottom i’m going to link to the insert tab this time and remember i said there was an optional activity if you wanted to add a screen tip in you would click on screen tip and you might want to say something like please click here to jump to the insert section click on ok click on ok again and this time if i hover my mouse you can see there is my screen tip text and let’s make sure this works hold down control click to jump down to that section now that’s all i’m going to add into here you could have gone through and added links for the rest of these if you wanted to have a really good practice but hopefully just by demonstrating those two you’ve got the idea as to what i was looking for so let’s now scroll down this document because the next thing i asked you to do was to add in that excel chart now for this we want to stay on the insert ribbon and go all the way over to the text group and click the object drop-down i’m going to say i want to insert an object i don’t want to create a new one i want to create one from file and this is where i can go in and browse for my excel chart and as i said you will find that in the exercise files folder there it is i’m going to select it click on insert and to get it to show as just an icon i select the display as icon option click on ok and there is our chart let’s double click to make sure this works and i can see that it does the final part of this exercise was to link to an external website so once again i’m just going to double click on the word microsoft jump up to link and this time i’m going to link to an existing file or web page the text to display is microsoft and then i just need to type in the address [Music] like so once again i could add in a screen tip if i wanted to click on ok and there we go so that is pretty much everything i was looking for in this exercise if you’re not a subscriber click down below to subscribe so you get notified about similar videos we upload to get the course exercise files and follow along with this video click over there and click over there to watch more videos on youtube from simon says it
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This text is the transcript of a discussion regarding the traditional Islamic account of the first revelation received by the Prophet Muhammad. The speakers analyze the well-known story, particularly as it is narrated by Ibn Shahab Johri and Imam Bukhari, questioning its basis and internal consistency. They explore alternative perspectives from Islamic scholars and compare the account to the Quran’s description of prophethood. Key areas of scrutiny include the Prophet’s state before revelation, the nature of worship at Gare Hira, and the interpretation of the verses revealed. The discussion aims to reconcile historical narrations with theological principles and explore potential inconsistencies within the traditional understanding.
First Revelation: A Critical Study Guide
I. Study Guide Questions
A. Initial Understanding
What is the primary concern of the speaker regarding the traditional account of the first revelation?
Who is Ibn Shahab Johri, and why is his narration significant to the discussion?
According to the speaker, what are the two ways questions arise when considering a narration?
What is Mursal narration, and how is Ayesha’s narration characterized?
What are the different meanings of ‘tahannus’ (or ‘tahannuth’) that are being discussed?
What is Rizah, and what does it imply regarding the traditional narrative?
How does the Quran, specifically Surah Yunus, verse 16, challenge the traditional narrative of Muhammad’s preparation for prophethood?
What are some reasons the speaker feels the word Iqra (Read) may be misinterpreted in the traditional narrative?
What was the worship performed by Muhammad (pbuh) while in Gare Hira, as interpreted from the original narration?
How does the Holy Quran describe the character and conduct of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) in Surah Yunus?
B. Deeper Analysis
Explain the significance of the “sanad” of a narration, particularly in the context of Ibn Shahab Johri and Imam Bukhari.
How does the speaker use Quranic verses to challenge the idea that Muhammad (pbuh) was actively seeking or preparing for prophethood?
What is the speaker’s critique of the idea that Muhammad’s time in the cave of Hira was a form of Sufi-like spiritual practice?
Describe the speaker’s argument that Muhammad’s (pbuh) character and integrity were consistent throughout his life, even before receiving revelation.
How does the speaker utilize the Qur’an to understand the moment of prophethood, including the presentation of its verses for recitation?
II. Quiz
Answer the following questions in 2-3 sentences each.
Why does the speaker question the accepted narration of the first revelation in Hira?
What is the role of Ibn Shahab Johri in the traditional account of the first revelation, and what concerns does the speaker raise about him?
According to the speaker, what are the two primary sources against which narrations should be evaluated?
What is a Mursal narration, and why is it important in evaluating the narration of Ayesha about the first revelation?
Explain the concept of “tahannus” or “tahannuth” and what it implies about Muhammad’s (pbuh) activities before prophethood.
How does Surah Qasas, verse 86, challenge the traditional narrative of Muhammad’s (pbuh) preparation for prophethood?
What is the main point the speaker is making when he quotes Surah Yunus, verse 16?
Why does the speaker find the response “I am not educated” problematic in the traditional narration of the first revelation?
How does the speaker imply it can be problematic when one goes to Gare Hira and worships before the revelation?
What conclusion does the speaker make regarding the consistent character of Muhammad, (pbuh), as a prophet?
III. Quiz Answer Key
The speaker questions the traditional narration because it might contradict the Quranic portrayal of Muhammad (pbuh) and raises concerns about the chain of narration and the historical context. The speaker challenges the way one views the prophet by evaluating the text critically.
Ibn Shahab Johri is the primary narrator of the story, and the speaker is concerned about the reliability and potential interpretations added by Johri to the primary material. The speaker feels that his version should be analyzed.
The speaker asserts that narrations should be evaluated against the knowledge and context of the Muslim mind, the Quran, and the teachings of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), as the main basis of a strong argument. In other words, the narration must be logical and consistent with foundational principles.
A Mursal narration is when a companion of the Prophet narrates something about him without directly quoting him or being present, raising questions about potential gaps or interpretations in the transmission. The integrity of the narrative is threatened by the absence of a direct quote.
“Tahannus” refers to a form of worship or seclusion practiced by Muhammad (pbuh) before his prophethood, and the speaker questions whether it implies active seeking or preparation, which could contradict Quranic verses. This interpretation is based on Muhammad’s own actions.
The speaker is highlighting that the Holy Quran emphasizes the prophet’s character and conduct was consistent from his birth to his death.
Surah Qasas, verse 86, emphasizes that Muhammad (pbuh) did not desire or expect the revelation, implying that prophethood was a divine blessing rather than the result of personal effort or contemplation. In effect, it is a contrast to the Sufiana traditions.
The speaker finds it problematic because it implies a literal, book-based understanding of reading, whereas the Quranic revelation was about receiving and reciting divine verses directly revealed to the heart. He felt that the revelation did not indicate that he was shown a text, per se.
The speaker thinks it can be problematic to worship before the revelation because it suggests a struggle to achieve nirvana or Muraqqabat with a creation of Ghazini. Any such worship leads to a loss of direction.
The speaker concludes that Muhammad’s character, conduct, and honesty remained consistent throughout his life, even before prophethood, supporting the idea that he was chosen by Allah due to his inherent virtuous qualities. Such qualities were found in him at an early age.
IV. Essay Questions
Critically analyze the speaker’s arguments against the traditional account of the first revelation, considering both the Quranic evidence and the concerns raised about the narration of Ibn Shahab Johri.
Explore the speaker’s interpretation of Muhammad’s (pbuh) time in the cave of Hira, contrasting it with the Sufi-like spiritual practice perspective and discussing the implications for understanding prophethood.
Discuss the speaker’s use of Quranic verses to challenge the idea that Muhammad (pbuh) was actively seeking or preparing for prophethood, and evaluate the validity of this argument.
How does the speaker’s emphasis on Muhammad’s (pbuh) consistent character and integrity before prophethood contribute to the overall critique of the traditional narrative?
Compare and contrast the speaker’s perspective on the first revelation with the more traditional understanding, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of each viewpoint.
V. Glossary of Key Terms
Ijma: Consensus of opinion among Islamic scholars on a matter of Islamic law.
Ummah: The worldwide community of Muslims.
Rasa Sallam: An honorific title used after the name of Prophet Muhammad, meaning “Peace be upon him.”
Syeda Khadija: The first wife of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and a prominent figure in early Islam.
Waraq bin Naufal: A relative of Khadija who had knowledge of previous scriptures and recognized Muhammad’s (pbuh) prophethood.
Surah Alaq: The 96th chapter of the Quran, believed to contain the first verses revealed to Muhammad (pbuh).
Binay Iste Dalal: The basis of evidence or proof upon which an opinion or argument is established.
Nisaab: Curriculum or syllabus of study.
Rasalat Babu Sallallahu Wasallam: Reference to Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), emphasizing his role as a messenger.
Jibreel Amin: The angel Gabriel, who is believed to have delivered divine revelations to Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).
Sahih: Authentic or sound, often used to describe collections of Hadith considered highly reliable.
Sanad: The chain of narrators for a Hadith, used to assess its authenticity and reliability.
Mursal Narration: A narration where the chain of narrators is incomplete, typically when a companion of the Prophet narrates without directly quoting him.
Razi Allah aha: An honorific phrase used after the names of companions of the Prophet, meaning “May Allah be pleased with her/him.”
Ra: (Ghar-e-Hira) Cave of Hira, a location near Mecca where Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) meditated and received his first revelations.
Bidaat: Innovations or deviations from established Islamic practices.
Din Hanif: The monotheistic religion of Abraham, which predates Islam.
Nazool: Descent; In this context, the descent of divine revelation, a concept contrasting with Sad, or human effort.
Taziya: Condolence.
Sad: Effort.
Briefing Document: Analysis of Excerpts on the First Revelation
This briefing document analyzes excerpts from a text discussing the traditional Islamic account of the first revelation received by Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in the cave of Hira. The text questions the widely accepted narrative, particularly its foundation and the implications it carries regarding the nature of prophethood.
Main Themes:
Critique of the Established Narrative: The central theme revolves around questioning the standard account of the first revelation. The speaker highlights the common belief in this narrative across Muslim communities and challenges its basis.
Emphasis on Inquiry and Critical Thinking: The text encourages a critical examination of the source material rather than blind acceptance. It promotes a methodology rooted in intellectual investigation and Quranic understanding.
Source Criticism: A significant portion is dedicated to identifying and scrutinizing the source of the commonly accepted story – a narration by Ibn Shahab Johri, transmitted through Urwa bin Zubair.
Quranic Perspective on Prophethood: The discussion heavily emphasizes the Quran’s description of prophethood, particularly the concept that prophets are chosen by Allah and are not individuals striving for spiritual attainment through practices or intense contemplation.
Challenging Preconceived Notions: The speaker challenges the notion that the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) engaged in specific practices in Hira with the intention of achieving prophethood, suggesting such an idea contradicts the Quranic portrayal of divine selection.
Most Important Ideas and Facts:
The Traditional Narrative: The excerpts begin by outlining the commonly held belief about the first revelation:
Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) frequented the cave of Hira in solitude.
The angel Jibreel appeared and commanded him to “Read!” (Iqra).
The Prophet (peace be upon him) responded that he could not read.
The angel squeezed him repeatedly and revealed the first verses of Surah Al-Alaq.
The Prophet (peace be upon him), in a state of fear, returned to Khadija, who took him to Waraqah bin Naufal for interpretation.
Ibn Shahab Johri as the Primary Source: The speaker identifies Ibn Shahab Johri as the foundation of this narrative, mentioning that Imam Bukhari and Imam Muslim copied this narration in their Sahihs: “The basis of this reality is based on a narration of Ibn Shahab Johri…Imam Bukhari has copied this narration in his Sahih.”
Doubts about the Narration’s Accuracy: The speaker raises questions about the accuracy of the narration, asking whether it aligns with the knowledge of Muslim minds, the Quran, and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad: “Either it will happen that that thing appears to be against the knowledge of the Muslim mind… Or it happens that the book of Allah, the Holy Quran, is not accepted. If there is any disturbance in the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, questions arise.”
Mursal Narration: It’s pointed out that the narration from Ayesha (may Allah be pleased with her) is a “Mursal” narration.
“An Ayesha Razi Allah aha Sayyeda Ayesha Razi Allah aha narrates that Anna Kaltantu Vaj has happened that this is a Mursal narration what does Mursal Mursal narration mean that someone from among the Sahaba Karam is narrating the narration the narrati on is about Risalat Maab Sallam but it is not narrated i.e. it is not narrated in such a way that Rasulallah S.A. said this or I heard this from Rasulallah or Rasulallah said this on such and such occasion and I was present at that time there is no such thing in it”
Quranic Argument Against Striving for Prophethood: The most significant critique centers on the Quranic verses that depict prophethood as a divine blessing, not something attainable through personal effort.
Quoting Surah Qasas (28:86): “Tar Qari, you were not desirous that this book should be revealed to you, it is just a blessing of your God that He chose you for this responsibility.”
The speaker emphasizes that the Quran states the Prophet (peace be upon him) had no prior expectation or desire to receive revelation, directly challenging the idea that his time in Hira was a deliberate pursuit of prophethood.
Citing Surah Yunus (10:16): “Say, if Allah wanted, I would not have recited this Quran to you, nor would Allah have informed you about it… I have already spent a lifetime among you, then why don’t you use your brain?” This verse suggests that the Prophet’s entire life before prophethood showed no indication of him seeking or preparing for revelation.
Critique of “Tahs” in Gare Hira: The speaker questions the portrayal of the Prophet (peace be upon him) engaging in specific worship or contemplation (“tahs” or “tawbaat”) in the cave, implying it suggests he was seeking spiritual attainment: “…Some worry, some hope, its picture comes…”
The Question of “Iqra” (Read): The text highlights the apparent contradiction in the narrative of Jibreel commanding the Prophet (peace be upon him) to read, when the Prophet (peace be upon him) is described in both the narration and the Quran as being unlettered: “…I said I am not educated, there is no such mention in the narration that any book was presented before you, the Quran tells about Rasalat maa Salam that you were not educated, so this answer seems appropriate that if a book has been presented before you, then you will say that I am not educated…” The speaker questions how the Prophet (peace be upon him) could be expected to read without the presence of a written text.
Quotes:
“Peace be upon those eyes which are fixed on guidance, on those ears which wait for the mention of good things and on those feet which are on the path of guidance…”
“In this matter people want to know that why did you create a difference of opinion, why did you do it, when did you do it, how did you do it…”
“So, on what basis has it been based? It has been based on a narration of Ibn Shahab Johri.”
“This book Tabeer is in front of me. The title of this chapter is Chapter Awal Ma Bad Rasulallah Sallallahu A. Wasallam minal wahi roy sali means the first time when wahi was revealed to the prophet salam then these were good dreams, from here they have started this thing, now they copy the narration…”
“You were not desirous that this book should be revealed to you, it is just a blessing of your God that He chose you for this responsibility.”
“Say, if Allah wanted, I would not have recited this Quran to you, nor would Allah have informed you about it… I have already spent a lifetime among you, then why don’t you use your brain?”
“I said I am not educated, there is no such mention in the narration that any book was presented before you, the Quran tells about Rasalat maa Salam that you were not educated, so this answer seems appropriate that if a book has been presented before you, then you will say that I am not educated…”
Conclusion:
The excerpts present a critical re-evaluation of the traditional narrative of the first revelation, prompting a deeper inquiry into its source, internal consistency, and alignment with the Quranic portrayal of prophethood. The text underscores the importance of critical thinking, rigorous source criticism, and Quranic understanding in approaching religious narratives. The document ends at a cliffhanger, with the discussion poised to delve deeper into the nature of prophethood in the Quran and a further analysis of the verses revealed during the first encounter.
Critique of the Traditional First Revelation Narrative
Here is an 8-question FAQ based on the provided text:
FAQ
1. What is the central issue being discussed in this text? The text critically examines the widely accepted narrative of the Prophet Muhammad’s (peace be upon him) first revelation in the cave of Hira, particularly focusing on the narration from Ibn Shahab Johri as copied by Imam Bukhari and others. The discussion revolves around questioning the details and implications of this account.
2. Why is the traditional narrative of the first revelation being questioned? The narrative is being questioned because certain aspects of the traditional account seem to contradict Quranic verses about the Prophet Muhammad’s (peace be upon him) state of knowledge and disposition before prophethood. Specifically, the Quran suggests the Prophet (PBUH) had no prior expectation or desire for prophethood, and that it was purely a divine selection. The traditional story involving seclusion in the cave and worship practices can be interpreted as contradicting this idea.
3. What is the main source of the traditional narration of the first revelation, and what are the issues with this source? The main source is a narration from Ibn Shahab Johri, transmitted by Urwa bin Zubair. While this narration is included in respected Hadith collections like Sahih Bukhari, the text points out that it is a mursal narration (a narration where a Sahabi narrates a statement in Seega Ghaib), and raises questions about the reliability and interpretation of Ibn Shahab Johri’s accounts. The text also mentions that Ibn Shahab Johri had a habit of Idara which means he would add his own explanations and interpretations into the narration without clearly indicating that they were his own additions.
4. How does the Quran describe the moment when a Prophet attains prophethood? According to the text, the Quran presents prophethood as a divine gift, a love bestowed by Allah. It emphasizes that a prophet isn’t someone who strives for or earns prophethood through personal efforts or intellectual pursuits, but rather someone chosen and divinely prepared for the role. This contrasts with interpretations of the traditional narration suggesting some form of preparation or seeking by the Prophet (PBUH) in the cave of Hira.
5. According to the Quran, what is the state of knowledge of a Prophet before the first revelation?
The Holy Quran tells that Risalat Maab Sallam Sallam before the revelation of the Quran, before the revelation of the Wahi, was not the opinion of anything, well ma kunta tarj alka iqal kitab, i.e. it never even came to your mind that you But this book will be revealed, you will be made a prophet, no such thing was present before you, this is explained in the holy Quran.
6. What specific aspect of the traditional narration of the first revelation is considered problematic in relation to this understanding? The depiction of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) engaging in worship in the cave of Hira before the revelation is seen as potentially implying that he was seeking or preparing himself for prophethood, which contradicts the Quranic assertion that prophethood was entirely a divine choice, with no prior inclination on the Prophet’s part.
7. What questions arise from the angel’s command “Read!” in the traditional narration? The text questions the Prophet’s (PBUH) response, “I am not educated,” when the angel commands him to read. It argues that since the Quran states that the Prophet (PBUH) was unlettered, this answer seems appropriate. Also, the text points out that Jibreel Amin keeps revealing it on the Prophet’s heart and from there you used to read it and recite it to people, so you have read it all your life, after that, what is this answer, I do n’t understand?
8. What is the significance of examining alternative interpretations of the first revelation? The text underscores the importance of critically examining established narratives in light of the Quran and reason. It suggests that revisiting these narratives allows for a deeper and more accurate understanding of the Prophet Muhammad’s (peace be upon him) life and the nature of divine revelation. Furthermore, the critique encourages a balanced approach, avoiding emotional responses and instead focusing on intellectual exploration and Quranic guidance.
Gare Hira: The Prophet Muhammad and the First Revelation
Gare Hira is discussed in the context of the first revelation to the Prophet Muhammad. The source presents different perspectives and questions regarding the events that took place there.
Key points about Gare Hira from the source:
Solitude and Worship: Before the first revelation, the Prophet Muhammad had become fond of solitude and used to live in Gare Hira. He would go there to worship, taking food and drink with him.
First Revelation: The traditional narration describes the angel Jibreel appearing to the Prophet in Gare Hira and commanding him to read. This event is said to have been the first revelation, with the verses of Surah Alaq being revealed.
Questions and Interpretations: The source raises questions about the nature of the worship performed in Gare Hira and whether it was an effort to achieve prophethood. It questions the common interpretation that the Prophet’s time in Gare Hira was a period of contemplation or striving for spiritual achievement, arguing that this contradicts the Quranic view of prophethood as a divine blessing bestowed without prior effort or desire.
Quranic Perspective: According to the source, the Quran states that before the revelation, the Prophet was unaware that he would receive the book or become a prophet. The Quran presents this lack of prior expectation as evidence of the divine nature of prophethood.
Unknown Word: The source mentions that the word “Nus” or “Nus” is used in relation to the Prophet’s time in Gare Hira, but its meaning is not clear in the Arabic language. Some scholars suggest it refers to following the traditions of Din Hanif, the religion of Prophet Ibrahim.
Distance: Gare Hira is located on a mountain called Jabal al-Noor, about two to three miles away.
The First Revelation: A Critical Analysis of Traditional Narrations
The source discusses the first revelation to Prophet Muhammad, focusing on the traditional narration of the event and raising questions about its interpretation.
Key points regarding the first revelation:
Traditional Narration: The common account describes the angel Jibreel appearing to Prophet Muhammad in Gare Hira and commanding him to read. When the Prophet responded that he was not educated, the verses of Surah Alaq were revealed. The Prophet, in a troubled state and with a trembling heart, then went to his wife Syeda Khadija, who took him to Waraq bin Naufal. Waraq bin Naufal told him that he was visited by the same angel who had come to Moses.
Source of the Narration: The basis of this account is a narration from Ibn Shahab Johri, which was copied by Imam Bukhari in his Sahih and by Imam Muslim.
Questions and Doubts: The source raises questions about this narration, particularly regarding the nature of the worship performed in Gare Hira and the Prophet’s response to the command to read. It suggests that the traditional interpretation may imply the Prophet was striving for spiritual achievement, which contradicts the Quranic view of prophethood.
Quranic Perspective: The source emphasizes the Quranic view that before the revelation, the Prophet was unaware that he would receive the book or become a prophet. This lack of prior expectation is presented as evidence of the divine nature of prophethood. The Quran states that it never even occurred to the Prophet that the book would be revealed to him and that he would be made a prophet.
The meaning of Iqra: According to the source, when Allah gives prophethood to his prophet, then there must be an example of him in the Quran. The word Iqra, the word Utal has been mentioned in the 10th maqama of the Holy Quran, in fact it has been mentioned in dozens of maqamas, so what is the meaning of the meaning in them, it means that you should read and recite the Quran which has been revealed to you, this Quran was never presented to you in the form of a book, or it was not given to you by printing it on a sheet, it was not given to you by putting it on the shoulder, it was revealed by Jibreel Amin on your heart, this thing has also been stated in the Quran that Jibreel Amin kept revealing it on the Prophet’s heart and from there you used to read it and recite it to people, so you have read it all your life, after that, what is this answer, I do n’t understand.
Verses of Surah Alaq: The source questions whether the verses revealed during the first revelation can be considered the first verses of the Quran.
Prophet’s Character: The source emphasizes that the Prophet’s character and behavior before prophethood support the idea that he was not seeking or expecting this role. The Holy Quran presented it as an argument for prophethood. The race of Prophets does not pass through all these stages, there is no such will in him, and he does not seem to live with any such thoughts.
Ibn Shahab Johri’s Narration: The source notes that Ibn Shahab Johri would explain something in the middle of narrating and add something new based on his knowledge.
Ibn Shahab Johri: Narration of the First Revelation
Ibn Shahab Johri is a key figure in the narration of the first revelation to Prophet Muhammad. The source material refers to him and his narration in the following ways:
Source of the Narration: The traditional account of the first revelation is based on a narration from Ibn Shahab Johri. This narration was then copied by Imam Bukhari in his Sahih and by Imam Muslim.
Sanad of the Narration: The chain of narrators (sanad) includes many disciples of Ibn Shahab Johri. Dr. Shahzad Salim Sahib has done detailed work on the personalities in this chain, including Ibn Shahab Johri himself.
Relationship to Urwa bin Zubair: Ibn Shahab Johri narrates this account from Urwa bin Zubair, who is the nephew of Syeda Ayesha.
Critical Examination: The validity of the traditional account is questioned in the source, with Ibn Shahab Johri’s narration being the focal point of this critique.
Idraj (Explanatory Insertion): It is noted that Ibn Shahab Johri had a habit of “Idraj,” meaning that while narrating, he would explain something in the middle of it, adding something new based on his knowledge without clearly indicating that it was an interpretation or additional information from another source.
Explanation of “yatahanas”: Ibn Shahab Johri provides an explanation for “yatahanas”.
Quranic Verses on the First Revelation and Prophethood
The sources discuss several Quran verses in relation to the first revelation to Prophet Muhammad and the nature of prophethood.
Key points:
Surah Alaq: The verses of Surah Alaq are said to have been revealed during the first encounter with the angel Jibreel in Gare Hira. The source questions whether these verses can be considered the first verses of the Quran to be revealed.
Surah Qas (28:86): This verse is cited to support the idea that the Prophet Muhammad had no prior desire or expectation of receiving the book or becoming a prophet. The verse states: “you were not desirous that this book should be revealed to you, it is just a blessing of your God that He chose you for this responsibility”. Ustad Imam interprets this verse to mean that prophethood is a divine gift, not something attained through personal striving or desire.
Surah Yunus (10:16): This verse is presented as an argument for the prophethood of Muhammad. It quotes the Prophet saying, “if Allah wanted, I would not have recited this Quran to you, nor would Allah have informed you about it…I have already spent a lifetime among you, then why don’t you use your brain”. This verse suggests that the Quran was not something the Prophet had been preparing for or wishing for, but rather a divine revelation that came unexpectedly.
Quranic Perspective on Prophethood: The source emphasizes the Quranic view that prophethood is a divine blessing bestowed without prior effort or desire. This contrasts with the traditional understanding of the Prophet’s time in Gare Hira as a period of contemplation or striving for spiritual achievement. The Quran presents the lack of prior expectation as evidence of the divine nature of prophethood.
The meaning of Iqra: According to the source, when Allah gives prophethood to his prophet, then there must be an example of him in the Quran. The word Iqra, the word Utal has been mentioned in the 10th maqama of the Holy Quran, in fact it has been mentioned in dozens of maqamas, so what is the meaning of the meaning in them, it means that you should read and recite the Quran which has been revealed to you, this Quran was never presented to you in the form of a book, or it was not given to you by printing it on a sheet, it was not given to you by putting it on the shoulder, it was revealed by Jibreel Amin on your heart, this thing has also been stated in the Quran that Jibreel Amin kept revealing it on the Prophet’s heart and from there you used to read it and recite it to people, so you have read it all your life, after that, what is this answer, I do n’t understand.
Relevance of Quran: The source suggests that narrations about the first revelation should be reviewed and interpreted in light of the Quran.
The Reality of Cave Hira | Part 1 | غار حرا کی حقیقت | Javed Ahmed Ghamidi
The Reality of Cave Hira | Part 2 | غار حرا کی حقیقت | Javed Ahmed Ghamidi
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“Mastering Social Dynamics: 13 Psychological Strategies to Command Any Situation”
Introduction Effective communication often hinges on the subtle art of influencing perceptions and behaviors. Whether navigating tense conversations, impressing strangers, or defusing conflict, psychological strategies can empower individuals to steer interactions with confidence. Below are 13 science-backed techniques to help you gain control of any social scenario.
1. The Power of Silent Observation When met with an unclear or dishonest response, resist repeating your question. Instead, hold steady eye contact without speaking. This silent scrutiny creates discomfort, prompting the other person to elaborate or clarify their statement, often revealing the truth.
2. Maintaining Composure Under Fire If confronted with hostility, avoid reacting impulsively. By staying calm during an outburst, you deny the aggressor the emotional escalation they seek. Once their anger subsides, guilt often compels them to apologize, leaving you in control.
3. Proximity as a Shield Against Negativity Position yourself close to someone likely to criticize you. Physical nearness reduces their inclination to attack, as people instinctively soften their demeanor when personal space is shared.
4. The Calming Effect of Simulated Safety Chew gum during stressful encounters. The act mimics eating, tricking your brain into associating the situation with safety. This lowers anxiety, boosting your confidence and clarity.
5. Reframing Anxiety Through Familiarity Before high-pressure moments like job interviews, visualize the interviewer as a close friend. This mental shift eases tension, fostering relaxed and authentic communication.
6. Decoding Social Bonds Through Laughter After a group laughs, observe where individuals glance. People instinctively look toward those they admire or wish to connect with, offering insight into hidden social dynamics.
7. Amplifying Positivity for Lasting Impressions When meeting someone new, radiate extra warmth—smile broadly, use their name warmly, or express genuine enthusiasm. This positivity lays the groundwork for mutual rapport.
8. The Mirror Effect: Encouraging Positive Behavior Place a mirror behind your workspace. People who see their reflection often self-regulate behavior, becoming more polite and cooperative to align with their self-image.
9. Strategic Gaze for Captivating Attention To attract someone’s interest, gaze at a spot just beyond their shoulders. When they notice, meet their eyes and smile. This playful tactic sparks curiosity and connection.
10. Regulating Physiology to Conquer Stress Combat stress by consciously slowing your breath. Deep, rhythmic breathing stabilizes your heart rate, helping you project calmness even in chaotic moments.
11. Intensifying Connection Through Visual Engagement Note the eye color of someone you wish to bond with. This simple focus naturally extends eye contact, fostering trust and signaling genuine interest.
12. The Door-in-the-Face Negotiation Tactic Begin with an exaggerated request likely to be rejected, then present your true (smaller) ask. The contrast makes your real goal seem reasonable, increasing compliance.
13. The Illusion of Confidence as a Social Tool Even if unsure, mimic confident body language—stand tall, smile, and maintain eye contact. Others will perceive self-assurance, granting you implicit influence.
Conclusion Mastering these psychological strategies requires practice, but their impact on personal and professional interactions is profound. By leveraging silence, proximity, perception reframing, and tactical negotiation, you can navigate social landscapes with poise and authority. Remember: Control isn’t about dominance—it’s about understanding human behavior and using that insight to foster connection, resolve conflict, and achieve mutual goals. Start small, observe the shifts, and watch your influence grow.
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The provided text explores the significance of Bethlehem and the Church of the Nativity across Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. It highlights the Quranic mentions of Jesus’ birth and Mary, emphasizing their importance in Islam. The narrative details the historical events surrounding the Church, including its construction, destruction, and preservation through various empires. Furthermore, it addresses the modern-day conflicts and political tensions in the region, focusing on the shared sacredness of Bethlehem. The author appears to argue for mutual respect between the three religions, emphasizing their shared history. Ultimately, the text reflects on the unfortunate prevalence of hatred over love in the region.
A Study Guide: Afzal Rehan’s Perspective on Bethlehem, Christmas, and Interfaith Relations
I. Quiz
Answer the following questions in 2-3 sentences each, based on the provided text.
According to Afzal Rehan, what is unique about Jesus Christ’s birth in relation to other prophets?
What is the significance of Bethlehem (Baitul Laham) for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, according to the author?
Where is Bethlehem located?
According to the Quran, how was Mary chosen, blessed, and blessed with blessings?
Who is Syedna Dawood (David) and why is he important, especially to the Jewish people, according to the text?
What event in the Quran is said to make believers happy?
What is the meaning of “Baitul Laham” in both Arabic and Hebrew, and what is the significance of those meanings?
According to the author, what is the purpose of mentioning the oaths taken on the three olives?
What action did Israel take at the Church of the Nativity that elicited much world-wide concern?
Why does the author discuss the virtues of Maryam (Mary)?
II. Quiz Answer Key
Afzal Rehan states that Jesus Christ’s birth is described in detail not only in the Bible but also in the Quran Majeed, unlike the births of other prophets. This detailed account elevates Jesus’ status in the eyes of those who believe in both scriptures.
For Christians, Bethlehem is the birthplace of Jesus Christ and home to the Church of the Nativity. For Jews, it’s significant as the birthplace of Syedna Dawood (King David). The author suggests it should also be a sacred place for Muslims, though this is implicit rather than explicitly stated as a common belief.
Bethlehem (Baitul Laham) is located approximately 5 miles or 8 kilometers southeast of Jerusalem.
In the Quran, the angels told Mary that God had blessed her, chosen her as a star, and made her the world of faithfulness. God favored her over all the women of the world.
Syedna Dawood (King David) is the great personality who laid the foundation of a Sultanate by conquering the Ba Muthar Jewish tribes, and he is important because he founded the first Israeli state.
The Quran states believers will be happy when the Rumi Messiah will come.
In Arabic, Baitul Laham means “House of Meat,” while in Hebrew, it means “House of Bread.” These names reflect the area’s historical abundance of food, both from hunting and agriculture.
The oaths taken on the three olives are meant to suggest that Baitul Laham and Tur Sina should not be the sacred vows of only Christians or Jews but of Muslims also, who should keep their respect in their hearts for those places.
Israel surrounded and blockaded the Church of the Nativity where approximately 300 Palestinians took shelter. The Israelis believed they were also part of the group who had brought peace to the world.
The author discusses the virtues of Maryam to confirm her pure dignity. The author uses verse number 42 which states that Maryam had been blessed by God, was chosen by God, and that God blessed her with blessings on all the women of the worlds.
III. Essay Questions
Consider these questions for essay-format responses. Your answers should demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the text.
Analyze Afzal Rehan’s approach to interfaith dialogue as it relates to Christmas and the significance of Jesus Christ in Islam. How does the author use the Quran to build bridges between Islam and Christianity?
Discuss the historical and religious significance of Bethlehem, as presented by Afzal Rehan. How does the author balance the narratives of Christians, Jews, and Muslims concerning this holy city?
Critically evaluate Afzal Rehan’s interpretation of Quranic verses related to Mary (Maryam) and Jesus (Syedna Masih). What specific verses does the author use and how does the interpretation support the author’s overall argument?
Explore the author’s perspective on the relationship between love, hatred, and the shared sacred spaces of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. How does Afzal Rehan portray the challenges and possibilities for interfaith harmony?
Based on Afzal Rehan’s writing, what are the potential obstacles and opportunities for fostering greater understanding and respect among Muslims, Christians, and Jews regarding shared religious sites and figures?
IV. Glossary of Key Terms
Afzal Rehan: The author of the source text, who presents a particular viewpoint on the topics discussed.
Baitul Laham: The Arabic name for Bethlehem, meaning “House of Meat.”
Church of the Nativity: A significant church in Bethlehem, traditionally believed to be built on the site of Jesus’ birth.
Syedna Masih: Arabic term referring to Jesus Christ, used respectfully in the text.
Syedna Dawood: Arabic term referring to King David, revered in both Judaism and Islam.
Quran Majeed: The Holy Book of Islam.
Ruhollah: A term used to refer to Jesus Christ.
Kalma: A holy word or phrase that refers to Jesus Christ.
Salaam Alaiya Yoma: Phrase in the Quran in reference to Jesus which means, “Salaam on the day you were born.”
Tur Sina: The location where God spoke to Moses, and is also related to oaths in the Quran.
Aale Imran: A verse that speaks of Mary and is used to establish her pure dignity.
The Rumi Messiah: This makes believers happy, according to the Quran.
Arz Muqaddas: Holy Land, during Iranian ruler Kisra’s attack.
Halaka Halen Arje: Came to visit the holy place and planned to build a church.
Constantine: Roman Emperor’s Church which was built in the shape of a sleigh.
Justinian: Rumi Emperor who got constructed the Church of the Nativity.
Bani Israel: The Sultanate of Israel.
Sahib Jabur: Prophet Dawood.
Saida Maryam: Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Israeli Awaaz scandal: Event that preceded control going to the Palestinian Authority.
West Bank: Part of Palestine.
Ba Muthar Jewish tribes: Jewish tribes who were conquered.
Taj Mahal: The church is marked by the three Alawadi and Olive Hills dates from the date of this Khita.
Najashi: Shah of Islamic belief.
Jaafar bin Abi Talib: Narrator of the Shah Najashi.
Mabad King Dubbed City: Village of Prophet David.
Mausoleum: Grave of Syeda Rachel.
Betul Makad: Dream of Syedna Dawood.
Takaal: Syedna Sulman got the title.
Hujra in Haikal Mount: Mary’s place of residence.
Aaron’s sister: Mary, according to the people.
Jabar: Allah
Kule Malama Iyas: What Mary said that she won’t say anything to anyone.
Black tree: The tree that was close to Mary.
Bethlehem, Jesus, and Christmas: An Islamic Perspective
Okay, here’s a briefing document summarizing the main themes and ideas from the provided text:
Briefing Document: Analysis of “Pasted Text” on Baitul Laham (Bethlehem) and Christmas from an Islamic Perspective
Date: October 26, 2023
Subject: Understanding the Islamic perspective on Bethlehem, Christmas, and the significance of Jesus (Syedna Masih) and Maryam (Mary) within the Quran.
Executive Summary:
The article, written from a Pakistani Muslim perspective, aims to foster understanding and respect for Christian traditions, particularly Christmas, by highlighting the shared religious significance of Jesus Christ (Syedna Masih) and Bethlehem within Islam and Christianity. It emphasizes the detailed mentions of Jesus’ birth in the Quran, the sacredness of Bethlehem for Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and advocates for religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence. It also touches upon historical events and political complexities surrounding Bethlehem and the Church of the Nativity.
Main Themes and Ideas:
The Quranic Significance of Jesus (Syedna Masih) and His Birth:
The author emphasizes that Jesus’ birth is detailed in the Quran, even more so than the births of some figures not questioned within Islam.
Quote: “Jesus Christ has the honor among all the prophets that his birth has been described in detail not only in the four verses of the Bible but also in the Quran Majeed.”
The Quranic verse “Salam Alaiya Yoma said, Salaam on the day you were born” is cited as proof of the blessed nature of Jesus’ birth.
The author questions why celebrating Christmas is questioned when the Quran itself mentions Jesus’ birth.
Bethlehem (Baitul Laham) as a Sacred Site for Multiple Faiths:
The article underscores that Bethlehem holds importance for Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
Quote: “Baitullah is a beautiful town. It is a blessing for the Christians all over the world because Syedna Masih was born here… but at the same time it should also be noted that Betul Laham is also one of the most sacred places for the Jews…”
It identifies Bethlehem as the birthplace of Prophet David (Syedna Dawood Nabi) and highlights the presence of his and Prophet Solomon’s (Syedna Sulman) mausoleums there, further solidifying its importance in Judaism.
The text also refers to the burial site of Rachel (Syeda Rachel), the mother of Prophet Joseph (Syedna Yusuf), in Bethlehem.
Historical Context and Political Conflict:
The article references the siege of the Church of the Nativity in 2002, where Palestinians sought refuge. It acknowledges the potential for violence and the need for a peaceful resolution involving Vatican City, Palestinians, and Israelis.
It briefly recounts the historical events, including the Roman Emperor’s acceptance of the Byzantine Empire and the construction and reconstruction of the Church of the Nativity by various rulers, including Roman Emperor Constantine.
The text mentions the Six-Day War and the subsequent shift of control of Bethlehem to Israel, and later to the Palestinian Authority.
Interpretation of Quranic Verses Related to Maryam (Mary) and Jesus:
The article provides a detailed interpretation of Quranic verses (Surat Maryam) describing Mary’s experience giving birth to Jesus.
It highlights Mary’s purity and the miraculous nature of Jesus’ birth as affirmed in the Quran. Verses describing Mary’s seclusion and the angel’s announcement of a “pure boy” (Ghulam Zakiya) are cited.
It discusses the significance of the Quran’s confirmation of Mary’s pure dignity.
Quote: “When the scholars of that era accused pure Maryam, then the Quran confirmed her pure dignity.”
Advocacy for Religious Tolerance and Understanding:
The author implicitly argues for respecting Christmas and Christian beliefs based on the shared reverence for Jesus within Islam.
It criticizes the opposition to Christmas among some Muslims as being unfounded and potentially harmful.
It stresses that while historical conflicts and territorial disputes exist, Muslims should maintain respect for sacred sites like Bethlehem, emphasizing the common heritage and figures revered by all three Abrahamic religions.
The article expresses hope for a future where Muslims do not forcefully occupy places of worship belonging to other faiths.
Linguistic and Historical Analysis of “Baitul Laham”:
The article explains the meaning of “Baitul Laham” in both Arabic (“House of Meat”) and Hebrew (“House of Bread”), connecting it to the historical context of the region and its agricultural significance.
It suggests that “Laham” in ancient Canaan meant “the one who nurtures or the one who gives food.”
Key Quotes:
“Jesus Christ has the honor among all the prophets that his birth has been described in detail not only in the four verses of the Bible but also in the Quran Majeed.”
“Baitullah is a beautiful town. It is a blessing for the Christians all over the world because Syedna Masih was born here… but at the same time it should also be noted that Betul Laham is also one of the most sacred places for the Jews…”
“When the scholars of that era accused pure Maryam, then the Quran confirmed her pure dignity.”
“Salam Aya Yoma Wadat Yoma Amu Yoya, Salam is upon me on the day I was born and the day I will die, the day I will be raised again, so on and so on, this is the prayer with the essence.”
Potential Discussion Points:
The significance of interfaith dialogue and understanding in a world marked by religious conflict.
The role of religious texts in fostering tolerance and respect for other faiths.
The complex political and historical context surrounding Bethlehem and its impact on interfaith relations.
The potential for shared religious heritage to serve as a bridge between different communities.
The challenge of balancing religious beliefs with political realities.
How the Quran is interpreted regarding Christmas.
Conclusion:
The article offers a valuable perspective on Bethlehem and Christmas from an Islamic viewpoint. By emphasizing the shared religious heritage and the Quranic accounts of Jesus and Mary, the author promotes a message of understanding, respect, and peaceful coexistence between Muslims and Christians. It highlights the need to recognize the sacredness of Bethlehem for all Abrahamic faiths and to strive for religious tolerance in a world often divided by conflict.
Bethlehem: Significance in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam
Here is an 8-question FAQ based on the provided text:
FAQ
Why is Bethlehem significant to multiple religions?
Bethlehem holds significance for Christians as the birthplace of Jesus Christ. The Church of the Nativity marks the traditional site of his birth. It is also important to Jews as the birthplace of King David (Syedna Dawood Nabi), who established the foundation of the ancient Israelite kingdom. The text further suggests Bethlehem is important to Muslims because Jesus’s birth is mentioned in the Quran.
How does the Quran describe the birth of Jesus (Syedna Masih)?
The Quran, in Surat Maryam, recounts the story of Maryam (Mary) leaving her family and going to a distant place. It describes the appearance of a spirit in human form and the announcement that she will bear a “pure boy.” It speaks of the difficulties she faces and how a voice comforts her and provides sustenance. The Quran also confirms Jesus’s status as a prophet and a servant of Allah.
What is the Church of the Nativity and what is its historical significance?
The Church of the Nativity, located in Bethlehem, is considered one of Christianity’s holiest sites, built over the grotto where Jesus is believed to have been born. Its construction was initially commissioned by Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century AD. Although it was damaged and rebuilt over the centuries, the core structure largely remains from the time of Emperor Justinian in the 6th century AD.
How has the Church of the Nativity been protected during times of conflict?
The text mentions that the Church of the Nativity has been protected in various conflicts. In one instance, during an Iranian invasion in 614, the church was spared destruction. More recently, during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Church offered sanctuary to Palestinians.
What is the meaning of the name “Bethlehem”?
The name “Bethlehem” has different meanings in different languages. In Arabic (Baitul Laham) it translates to “House of Meat,” while in Hebrew it translates to “House of Bread.” This is attributed to the abundance of resources in the area, supporting both hunting and agriculture in ancient times.
What is the Quran’s perspective on the sanctity of Bethlehem and similar sites?
The Quran recognizes the sacredness of Bethlehem (Baitul Laham) and other religious sites, such as Mount Sinai, for Christians and Jews. The text emphasizes the importance of Muslims respecting these sites and avoiding any intentions of forceful capture or conversion.
How does the Quran describe Maryam, the mother of Jesus?
The Quran confirms Maryam’s pure dignity and states that God has blessed her, chosen her as a star, has made you the world of faithfulness, and has blessed her with blessings on the women of all the worlds and has given her preference over the women of all the worlds.
What is the importance of Syedna Dawood in Islam?
Syedna Dawood, also known as King David, is revered in Islam as a virtuous and respected prophet who laid the foundation for the Israeli Sultanate. He is considered a prophet of the book and saw the dream of building the church in Baitul Makad.
The Birth of Jesus Christ in the Quran
The birth of Jesus Christ is a significant event, detailed in both the Bible and the Quran.
Key points regarding the birth of Jesus (Syedna Masih) as mentioned in the sources:
The Quran describes the birth of Jesus Christ in detail, similar to the Bible.
Quranic Verse: The Quran mentions, “And peace be upon him the day he was born…”.
Mary’s Story in the Quran: Surah Maryam in the Quran narrates the story of Maryam (Mary). She leaves her people and distances herself.
An angel appears to her in the form of a man.
The angel announces the birth of a pure son.
Maryam expresses disbelief, questioning how she can have a son when no man has touched her.
The angel replies that it is easy for God and that this birth will be a sign and mercy.
Maryam goes to a distant place and experiences pain near a palm tree.
A voice comforts her, telling her not to be sad and that God has provided a stream. She is instructed to shake the palm tree for fresh dates.
Maryam returns to her community with the child, facing accusations.
The infant Jesus speaks and declares himself a servant of Allah, a prophet, and blessed.
Birthplace: Syedna Masih was born in Baitul Laham.
The Church of the Nativity marks the traditional site of his birth.
The Quran confirms Maryam’s pure dignity. Verse 42 of Aale Imran states that Mary was blessed and chosen above all women.
The Quran refers to Syedna as Messiah, Ruhollah, and Kalma Tullah.
Church of the Nativity: History and Significance
The Church of the Nativity holds significant religious and historical importance.
Here’s a breakdown of what the sources say about it:
Location: The Church of the Nativity is located in Baitul Laham. Baitul Laham is situated approximately 5 miles (8 kilometers) from Jerusalem.
Religious Significance:
The Church of the Nativity is considered the most sacred place for Christians because Syedna Masih (Jesus Christ) was born there.
The church marks the traditional site of Jesus’ birth.
Historical Significance:
The Church of the Nativity is also one of the most sacred places for Jews.
The church is built on a site where a tree was located, where Hail Mary reached and where Jesus Christ was born.
Emperor Constantine’s Church: The Roman Emperor planned to build a church on the occasion of the birth of Syedna Masih. The church is built in the shape of a sleigh, with a cave and basement below it.
Historical Events:
In 529 AD, the Church of the Nativity was burned during a revolt by the Jews.
Rumi Emperor Justin Tyene reconstructed it.
In 614, the Iranian ruler Kisra attacked Arz Muqaddas, causing destruction, but the Church of Nativity remained safe.
Later Modifications: While repairs were done later, the actual building is the same one that King Justin Tyne had built. In the era of Toman, two of the church’s three doors were closed, and the third was made very low to prevent entry by families or soldiers.
Contemporary Status:
Various Christian organizations of the world now manage this sacred place.
Control of the Church:
It was under Jordan’s control until 1967.
After the Six-Day War in 1967, it came under Israeli control.
Later, control shifted to the Palestinian Authority.
In 2002, around 300 Palestinians took shelter in the Church of the Nativity, which was then surrounded by Israel.
Baitul Laham: Religious and Historical Significance
Baitul Laham is a town of significant religious and historical importance to Christians and Jews.
Here’s what the sources say about Baitul Laham:
Location: Baitul Laham is located approximately 5 miles (8 kilometers) from Jerusalem.
General Information:
It is considered a beautiful town.
The town is situated in a hilly area about 2600 feet above sea level.
Its population is around 40,000.
The surrounding area is considered special.
Religious Significance:
For Christians: Baitul Laham is a blessing for Christians worldwide because Syedna Masih (Jesus Christ) was born there.
For Jews: It is also one of the most sacred places for Jews.
For Muslims: The Palestinian leader stated that Baitullah is a sacred place for Muslims as well as for Christians.
Historical Significance:
Syedna Dawood Nabi (King David), who founded the Israeli Sultanate, was from Baitul Laham, referred to by Jews as King David.
It was initially known as Dawood Nabi’s village or city.
Syedna Dawood spent his life in the valley near Judah.
The tombs of Syedna Dawood and Syedna Sulman are located in Baitul Laham.
Syedna (Prophet) Yakub buried his beloved wife, Syeda Rachel, there.
Name Significance:
Baitul Laham in Arabic means “House of Meat”.
In Hebrew, it means “House of Bread”.
In ancient Canaan, Laham meant “the one who nurtures” or “the one who gives food”.
Church of the Nativity:
The Church of the Nativity, which marks the traditional site of Jesus’ birth, is located in Baitul Laham.
Syedna Dawood: Religious and Historical Significance
Syedna Dawood (King David) is a significant figure with religious and historical importance.
Key points about Syedna Dawood from the sources:
Religious Importance:
He is considered a prophet in Islam.
He is a very virtuous and respected prophet.
Sahib was a prophet of the book.
He saw the dream of building the church in Baitul Makad.
Historical Significance:
He laid the foundation of the Israeli Sultanate.
His son, Syedna Suleiman, further expanded the kingdom.
He laid the foundation of a great Sultanate by conquering the Ba Muthar Jewish tribes.
He is the founder of the first Israeli state.
He is referred to as King David by the Jews.
Connection to Baitul Laham:
Baitul Laham was initially known as Dawood Nabi’s village or city.
He spent his life in the valley near Judah.
His tomb is located in Baitul Laham.
Mention in the Quran:
The Quran states that God forced Dawood to live.
The Quran mentions that God blessed the prophets on the eagles.
Other Details:
He is considered a great personality.
He lived about a thousand years before the birth of Syedna Christ.
The Story of Maryam (Mary) in the Quran
The Quran contains a Surah titled Maryam which narrates the story of Mary, the mother of Jesus (Syedna Isa). Key aspects of Maryam’s story in the Quran, based on the sources, include:
Announcement of Jesus’ Birth: The Quran recounts the annunciation where an angel appears to Maryam in the form of a man and proclaims that she will give birth to a pure son. Maryam expresses disbelief because no man has touched her. The angel responds that it is easy for God, and this birth will be a sign and mercy.
Departure and Isolation: Maryam leaves her people and distances herself, going to a remote place. While in this distant place, she experiences pain near a palm tree.
Divine Comfort and Provision: A voice comforts her and tells her not to be sad, as God has provided a stream. She is instructed to shake the palm tree to receive fresh dates.
Return and Accusations: Maryam returns to her community with the child, facing accusations. The community questions how she could have a child.
The Infant Jesus Speaks: The infant Jesus speaks and declares himself a servant of Allah, a prophet, and blessed. He states that he has been given the book and ordered to perform prayer and charity.
Confirmation of Maryam’s Dignity: The Quran confirms Maryam’s pure dignity. Aale Imran, verse 42, states that Mary was blessed and chosen above all women.
Reverence for Maryam: According to the Quran, Syedna is the Messiah, Ruhollah, and Kalma Tullah. The scholars of that era confirmed her pure dignity.
Quranic Verse: The Quran mentions, “And peace be upon him the day he was born…”.
Significance of Baitul Laham: In verse, it has been stated that Murad Baitul is important from a distant place, but Maryam’s departure from her calf was a simple task, so she left her Hujra in Haikal Mount and went towards this direction and reached here there was a grave on which later the Church of Nativity was built.
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This course material introduces prompt engineering, focusing on practical application rather than rote memorization of prompts. It explains how large language models (LLMs) function, emphasizing the importance of understanding their underlying mechanisms—like tokens and context windows—to craft effective prompts. The course uses examples and exercises to illustrate how prompt design impacts LLM outputs, covering various techniques like using personas and custom instructions. It stresses the iterative nature of prompt engineering and the ongoing evolution of the field. Finally, the material explores the potential of LLMs and the ongoing debate surrounding artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Prompt Engineering Study Guide
Quiz
Instructions: Answer the following questions in 2-3 sentences each.
What is the main focus of the course, according to the instructor?
Why is prompt engineering a skill, not a career, in the instructor’s opinion?
How did the performance of large language models change as they got larger?
What is multimodality, and what are four things a leading LLM can do?
What is the purpose of the playground mentioned in the course?
What are tokens, and how are they used by large language models?
What is temperature in the context of language models, and how does it affect outputs?
Explain the “reversal curse” phenomenon in large language models.
What are the two stages of training for large language models?
How does the system message influence the model’s behavior?
Quiz Answer Key
The main focus of the course is working with large language models, teaching how to use this new technology effectively in various aspects of work and life. It is not focused on selling pre-made prompts but on understanding the models themselves.
The instructor believes that prompt engineering is a skill that enhances any job, not a standalone career. He argues that it’s a crucial skill for efficiency, not a profession in itself.
As models increased in size, performance at certain tasks did not increase linearly but instead skyrocketed, with new abilities emerging that weren’t present in smaller models. This was an unexpected and non-linear phenomenon.
Multimodality is the ability of LLMs to understand and generate not only text, but also other modalities like images, the internet, and code. LLMs can accept and generate text, accept images, browse the internet, and execute python code.
The playground is a tool that allows users to experiment with and test the different settings of large language models. It is a space where one can fine-tune and better understand the model’s outputs.
Tokens are the way that LLMs understand and speak; they are smaller pieces of words that the model analyzes. LLMs determine the sequence of tokens most statistically probable to follow your input, based on training data.
Temperature is a setting that controls the randomness of the output of large language models. Lower temperature makes the output more predictable and formalistic, while higher temperature introduces randomness and can lead to creativity or gibberish.
The reversal curse refers to the phenomenon where an LLM can know a fact but fail to provide it when asked in a slightly reversed way. For example, it may know that Tom Cruise’s mother is Mary Lee Pfeiffer but not that Mary Lee Pfeiffer is Tom Cruise’s mother.
The two stages are pre-training and fine-tuning. In pre-training, the model learns patterns from a massive text dataset. In fine-tuning, a base model is adjusted to be an assistant, typically through supervised learning.
The system message acts as a “North Star” for the model, it provides a set of instructions or context at the outset that directs how the model should behave and interact with users. It is the model’s guiding light.
Essay Questions
Instructions: Answer the following questions in essay format. There is no single correct answer for any of the questions.
Discuss the concept of emergent abilities in large language models. How do these abilities relate to the size of the model, and what implications do they have for the field of AI?
Explain the Transformer model, and discuss why it was such a significant breakthrough in natural language processing. How has it influenced the current state of AI technologies?
Critically analyze the role of the system message in prompt engineering. In what ways can it be used to both enhance and undermine the functionality of an LLM?
Explore the role of context in prompt engineering, discussing both its benefits and potential pitfalls. How can prompt engineers effectively manage context to obtain the most useful outputs?
Discuss the various strategies employed throughout the course to trick or “break” an LLM. What do these strategies reveal about the current limitations of AI technology?
Glossary of Key Terms
Artificial Intelligence (AI): A broad field of computer science focused on creating intelligent systems that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence.
Base Model: The initial output of the pre-training process in large language model development. It is a model that can do language completion, but is not yet conversational.
Context: The information surrounding a prompt, including previous conversation turns, relevant details, and additional instructions that help a model understand the task.
Context Window: The maximum number of tokens that a large language model can consider at any given time in a conversation. Also known as token limit.
Custom Instructions: User-defined instructions in platforms like ChatGPT that affect every conversation with a model.
Deep Learning: A subfield of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks with multiple layers to analyze data.
Emergent Abilities: Unforeseen abilities that appear in large language models as they scale up in size, which are not explicitly coded but rather learned.
Fine-Tuning: The process of adapting a base model to specific tasks and use cases, usually through supervised learning.
Large Language Model (LLM): A type of AI model trained on vast amounts of text data, used to generate human-like text.
Machine Learning: A subset of AI that enables systems to learn from data without being explicitly programmed.
Mechanistic Interpretability: The field of study dedicated to figuring out what’s happening when tokens pass through all the various layers of the model.
Multimodality: The ability of a language model to process and generate information beyond text, such as images, code, and internet browsing.
Natural Language Processing (NLP): A branch of AI that enables computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language.
Parameters: The internal variables of a large language model that it learns during training, affecting its ability to make predictions.
Persona: The role or identity given to a language model, which influences its tone, style, and the way it responds.
Pre-Training: The initial phase of large language model training, where the model is exposed to massive amounts of text data to learn patterns.
Prompt Engineering: The practice of designing effective prompts that can elicit the desired responses from AI models, particularly large language models.
System Message: The initial instructions or guidelines provided to a large language model by the model creator, which establishes its behavior and role. Also known as meta-prompt or system prompt.
Temperature: A parameter in large language models that controls the randomness of the output. Higher temperature leads to more diverse outputs, while lower temperatures produce more predictable responses.
Tokens: The basic units of text processing for large language models. They are often sub-word units that represent words, parts of words, or spaces.
Transformer Model: A neural network architecture that uses the “attention” mechanism to process sequences of data, such as text, enabling large language models to consider context over long ranges.
Prompt Engineering: Mastering Large Language Models
Okay, here is a detailed briefing document summarizing the key themes and ideas from the provided text, incorporating quotes where appropriate:
This document summarizes the main concepts discussed in a course focused on working with Large Language Models (LLMs), often referred to as “prompt engineering.” The course emphasizes practical application and understanding the mechanics of LLMs, rather than rote memorization of specific prompts. It highlights the importance of viewing prompt engineering as a multi-disciplinary skill, rather than a career in itself, for most individuals.
Key Themes and Ideas:
Prompt Engineering is More Than Just Prompts:
The course emphasizes that true “prompt engineering” is not about memorizing or using pre-made prompts. As the instructor Scott states, “it’s not about teaching you 50 promps to boost your productivity…you’re going to learn to work with these large language models.”
Scott believes that “there are plenty of people out there trying to sell you prompt libraries I think those are useless. They’re single prompts that are not going to produce exactly what you need for your work.” Instead, the course aims to teach how LLMs work “under the hood” so users can create effective prompts for their specific use cases.
Prompt Engineering as a Multi-Disciplinary Skill:
The course defines prompt engineering as “a multi-disciplinary branch of engineering focused on interacting with AI through the integration of fields such as software engineering, machine learning, cognitive science like psychology, business, philosophy, computer science.”
It stresses that “whatever your area of expertise is…you are going to be able to take that perspective and add it to the field.” This is because the field is new and constantly evolving.
Understanding How LLMs Work is Crucial:
The core idea of the course is that to effectively use LLMs, you need to understand how they function internally. This includes concepts like tokens, parameters, and the Transformer architecture.
“you need to understand what’s going on behind the scenes so that you can frame your prompt in the right light.”
The course emphasizes that LLMs are not simply coded programs that have pre-set responses but rather “trained on data and after that training certain abilities emerged.”
Emergent abilities, new capabilities that appear as models scale in size, demonstrate that these are not simply predictable increases in performance. This “scaling up the model linearly should increase performance linearly, but that’s not what happened.”
LLMs are not perfect:
The course emphasizes that, despite the impressiveness of LLMs, they are still prone to making mistakes due to a few reasons including user error and their design.
“it’s because we’re not dealing with code or a computer program here in the traditional sense. We’re dealing with a new form of intelligence, something that was trained on a massive data set and that has certain characteristics and limitations.”
The concept of “hallucinating”, where the LLM produces confident yet false statements, is also important to keep in mind.
Multimodality and Capabilities:
LLMs can handle more than just text. They can process and generate images, browse the internet (to access current information), and execute code, particularly Python code.
“it can accept and generate text, it can accept images, it can generate images, it can browse the internet…and it can execute python code.”
The course walks through an example of an LLM creating and refining a simple game by using Python.
Tokens are the Foundation:
LLMs understand and “speak” in tokens, which are sub-word units, not whole words. “one token is equal to about 0.75 words”.
The model determines the most statistically probable sequence of tokens based on its training data, giving the impression of “guessing” the next word.
A high temperature setting increases the randomness when picking tokens, leading to more casual and sometimes nonsensical outputs, while a low temperature setting produces more formal output.
The Importance of Context and its Limitations:
Providing sufficient context in prompts improves accuracy.
However, there is a limitation to the amount of context LLMs can handle at a given time (the token or context window).
“every time you send a prompt your entire conversation history is bundled up and packed on to the prompt…chat GPT is essentially constantly reminding of your entire conversation.”
Once the context window fills, older information starts to be forgotten and accuracy can be compromised. This happens without the user necessarily realizing it.
Information provided at the beginning of a prompt has a larger impact and is remembered better than information provided at the end, in effect creating a “Primacy Effect”. Information in the middle is more readily forgotten. This process mimics how the human brain handles context.
The Power of Personas:
Giving an LLM a specific persona or role (“you are an expert mathematician,” or even a character such as Bilbo Baggins) provides it with crucial context and improves the quality of responses. This allows the user to better interact with and leverage LLMs.
Personas are often set via the system message or by custom instructions.
Custom Instructions
Users can provide instructions that the LLM uses as its “North Star” much in the same way as a system message.
These “custom instructions” are used for any new chat, however users may forget about these instructions which may cause problems.
LLMs and “Secrets”:
LLMs are not designed to keep secrets and are susceptible to being tricked into revealing private information given the right prompt.
The way these LLMs “think” with tokens also enables the spilling of tea by crafting prompts that circumvent normal parameters.
The LLM Landscape:
The course breaks down the LLM landscape into base models, which are trained on data and then further fine-tuned to create chatbot interfaces or domain specific models. The Transformer architecture enables LLMs to pay attention to and incorporate a wider range of context.
Different companies, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, create various models, including open-source ones like Llama 2.
Practical Applications:
The course focuses on practical applications of prompt engineering. It uses examples such as making a game and generating music using an AI.
The skills learned in the course can be used to create chatbots, generate code, understand complex documents, and make other helpful outputs to assist in work, study, or just general life.
Conclusion:
This course aims to provide a deep understanding of LLMs and how to effectively interact with them through thoughtful prompt engineering. It prioritizes practical knowledge, emphasizing that it is a “skill” rather than a “career” for most individuals, and that this skill is important for everyone. It is constantly updated with the latest techniques for effective prompting. By understanding the underlying mechanisms and limitations of these models, users can leverage their immense potential in their work and lives.
Prompt Engineering and Large Language Models
Prompt Engineering and Large Language Models: An FAQ
What exactly is “prompt engineering” and why is it important?
While the term “prompt engineering” is commonly used, it’s essentially about learning how to effectively interact with large language models (LLMs) to utilize their capabilities in various work and life situations. Instead of focusing on memorizing specific prompts, it’s about understanding how LLMs work so you can create effective instructions tailored to your unique needs. It’s a multi-disciplinary skill, drawing from software engineering, machine learning, psychology, business, philosophy, and computer science, and it is crucial for harnessing the full potential of AI for efficiency and productivity. It is considered more of a skill that enhances various roles, rather than a job in and of itself.
Why is prompt engineering necessary if LLMs are so advanced?
LLMs aren’t just programmed with specific answers; they learn from vast datasets and develop emergent abilities. Prompt engineering is necessary because we’re not dealing with traditional code or programs. We’re working with a form of intelligence that has been trained to predict the most statistically probable sequence of tokens, given the prompt and its training data. By understanding how these models process information, you can learn to frame your prompts in a way that leverages their understanding, yielding more accurate results. Also, prompting techniques can elicit abilities from models that might not be present when prompted in more basic ways.
Are prompt libraries or pre-written prompts helpful for prompt engineering?
While pre-written prompts can introduce you to what’s possible with LLMs, they are generally not very useful for true prompt engineering. Each user’s needs are unique, so generic prompts are unlikely to provide the results you need for your specific work. You’re better off learning the underlying principles of how to interact with LLMs than memorizing a collection of single-use prompts. It’s about developing an intuitive understanding of how to phrase requests, which enables you to naturally create effective prompts for your situation.
What is multimodality in the context of LLMs and how can it be used?
Multimodality refers to an LLM’s ability to understand and generate text, images, and even code. This goes beyond simple text inputs and outputs. LLMs can take images as prompts and give text responses to them, browse the internet to access more current data, or even execute code to perform calculations. This means prompts can incorporate diverse inputs and generate diverse outputs, greatly expanding the potential ways that LLMs can be used.
What is the “playground” and why might someone use it?
The playground is an interface provided by OpenAI (and other companies) that allows you to experiment directly with different LLMs, as well as test advanced settings and features such as temperature (for randomness) and the probability of the next token. It’s an important tool for advanced users to understand how the underlying technology works and to test techniques such as different system messages before implementing them into their products or day-to-day work with AI. It’s relatively inexpensive to use the playground and is a good place to go for more in-depth experimentation with AI tools.
What are “tokens” and why are they important?
Tokens are the fundamental units that LLMs use to understand and generate language. They’re like words, but LLMs actually break words down into smaller pieces. One token is approximately equivalent to 0.75 words. LLMs do not see words the way humans do; instead they see tokens that have a numerical ID which is part of a complex lookup table. The LLM statistically predicts the most probable sequence of tokens to follow your input, which is why it is often described as a ‘word guessing machine’. A word can consist of multiple tokens. Understanding this helps you see how LLMs are processing information on a basic level. This basic understanding of tokens will help guide your prompts more effectively.
What is the significance of “system messages” or “meta prompts” in prompt engineering?
A system message is an initial, often hidden, instruction or context that’s provided to the LLM before it interacts with the user. It acts as a “North Star” for the model, guiding its behavior, tone, and style. The system message determines how the model responds to user input and how it will generally interpret all user prompts. Understanding system messages is vital, particularly if you are developing an application that incorporates an LLM. System messages can be modified to tailor the model to various tasks or use cases, but it’s important to be aware that a model will always be pulled back to its original system message. Also, adding specific instructions to the system message will help the model with complex instructions that you want the model to remember for each and every interaction.
What is context, and why is it important when prompting, and why does the rule of more context being better not always hold up?
Context refers to all the information or details that accompany a prompt, including past conversation history, instructions or details within the prompt itself, and even the system message. More context usually leads to better, more accurate responses. However, LLMs have a limited “token window” (or a context window) which sets a maximum amount of text or context they can manage at any one time. When you exceed this limit, older context tokens are removed. It is imperative that the most important information or context is placed at the beginning of the context window because models have a tendency to pay more attention to the first and last part of a context window, and less to the information in the middle. Additionally, too much context can actually decrease the accuracy of an LLM, because the model will sometimes pay less attention to relevant information, or become bogged down by less relevant information.
Prompt Engineering: A Comprehensive Guide
Prompt engineering is a critical skill that involves developing and optimizing prompts to efficiently use artificial intelligence for specific tasks [1, 2]. It is not typically a standalone career but a skill set needed to use AI effectively [1, 3]. The goal of prompt engineering is to use AI to become more efficient and effective in work and life [2, 3].
Key aspects of prompt engineering include:
Understanding Large Language Models (LLMs): It is essential to understand how LLMs work under the hood to effectively utilize them when prompting [3]. These models are not simply code; they have emergent abilities that arise as they grow larger [4, 5]. They are sensitive to how prompts are framed, and even slight changes can lead to significantly different responses [2].
Prompts as Instructions: Prompts are essentially the instructions and context provided to LLMs to accomplish tasks [2]. They are like seeds that grow into useful results [2].
Elements of a Prompt: A basic prompt has two elements: the input (the instruction) and the output (the model’s response) [6].
Not Just About Productivity: Prompt engineering is not just about using pre-made prompts to boost productivity. Instead, it is about learning to work with LLMs to utilize them for specific use cases [3, 7, 8].
Multi-Disciplinary Field: Prompt engineering integrates fields such as software engineering, machine learning, cognitive science, business, philosophy, and computer science [9].
Importance of Empirical Research: The field is undergoing a lot of research, and prompt engineering should be based on empirical research that shows what works and what doesn’t [10].
Hands-On Experience: Prompt engineering involves hands-on demos, exercises, and projects, including coding and developing prompts [10]. It requires testing, trying things out, and iterating until the right output is achieved [11, 12].
Natural Language: Prompt engineering is like programming in natural language. Like programming, specific words and sequences are needed to get the right result [6].
Beyond Basic Prompts: It’s more than just asking a question; it’s about crafting prompts to meet specific needs, which requires understanding how LLMs work [6, 7, 13].
Applied Prompt Engineering involves using prompt engineering principles in the real world to improve work, career, or studies [13, 14]. It includes using models to complete complex, multi-step tasks [8].
Why Prompt Engineering is Important:
Maximizing Potential: It is key to using LLMs productively and efficiently to achieve specific goals [8].
Avoiding Errors and Biases: Proper prompt engineering helps to minimize errors and biases in the model’s output [8].
Programming in Natural Language: Prompt engineering is an example of programming using natural language [15].
Future Workplace Skill: Prompt engineering skills will be essential in the workplace, just like Microsoft Word and Excel skills are today [3, 10]. A person with the same skills and knowledge but who also knows how to use AI through prompt engineering will be more effective [16].
Tools for Prompt Engineering:
Chat GPT: The user interface to interact with LLMs [16, 17].
OpenAI Playground: An interface for interacting with the OpenAI API that allows for more control over the LLM settings [16, 18].
Replit: An online integrated development environment (IDE) to run coding applications [19].
Key Concepts in Prompt Engineering:
Tokens: The way LLMs understand and speak. Words are broken down into smaller pieces called tokens [20].
Attention Mechanism: This allows the model to pay more attention to more context [21, 22].
Transformer Architecture: An architecture that allows the model to pay attention to more context, enabling better long-range attention [22, 23].
Parameters: The “lines” and “dots” that enable the model to recognize patterns. LLMs compress data through parameters and weights [24, 25].
Base Model: A model resulting from the pre-training phase, which is not a chatbot but rather a model that completes words or tokens [25].
Fine-Tuning: The process of taking the base model and giving it additional text information so it can generate more helpful and specific output [25, 26].
System Message: A default prompt provided to the model by its creator that sets the stage for interactions by including instructions or specific context [27]. It is like a North Star, guiding the model’s behavior [27, 28].
Context: The additional information provided to the LLM that helps it better understand the task and respond accurately [29].
Token Limits: LLMs have token limits, which are the maximum amount of words they can remember at any given time. This also acts as a context window [30, 31].
Recency Effect: The effect of information being more impactful when given towards the end [32, 33].
Personas: Giving the model a persona or role can help it provide better, more accurate responses [34, 35]. Personas work because they provide additional context [35].
This summary should provide a clear overview of what prompt engineering is and its key components.
Large Language Models: An Overview
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a type of machine learning model focused on understanding and generating natural language text [1, 2]. They are characterized by being trained on vast amounts of text data and having numerous parameters [2]. LLMs are a subset of Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is a branch of Artificial Intelligence focused on enabling computers to understand text and spoken words the same way human beings do [1, 3].
Here’s a more detailed breakdown of key aspects of LLMs:
Size and Training: The term “large” in LLMs refers to the fact that these models are trained on massive datasets, often consisting of text from the internet [2, 4]. These models also have a large number of parameters, which are the “lines” and “dots” that enable the model to recognize patterns [4, 5]. The more tokens and parameters, the more capable a model generally is [6].
Parameters: Parameters are part of the model’s internal structure that determine how it processes information [5, 7]. They can be thought of as the “neurons” in the model’s neural network [7].
Emergent Abilities: LLMs exhibit emergent abilities, meaning that as the models become larger, new capabilities arise that weren’t present in smaller models [8, 9]. These abilities aren’t explicitly programmed but emerge from the training process [8].
Tokens: LLMs understand and process language using tokens, which are smaller pieces of words, rather than the words themselves [10]. Each token has a unique ID, and the model predicts the next token in a sequence [11].
Training Process: The training of an LLM typically involves two main phases:
Pre-training: The model is trained on a large corpus of text data to learn patterns and relationships within the text [7]. This results in a base model [12].
Fine-tuning: The base model is further trained using a more specific dataset, often consisting of ideal questions and answers, to make it better at completing specific tasks or behaving like a helpful assistant [12, 13]. The fine tuning process adjusts the parameters and weights of the model, which also impacts the calculations within the model and creates emergent abilities [13].
Transformer Architecture: LLMs utilize a transformer architecture, which allows the model to pay attention to a wider range of context, improving its ability to understand the relationships between words and phrases, including those separated by large distances [6, 14]. This architecture helps enable better long-range attention [14].
Context Window: LLMs have a limited context window, meaning they can only remember a certain number of tokens (or words) at once [15]. The token limit acts as a context window [16]. The context window is constantly shifting, and when a new prompt is given, the older information can be shifted out of the window, meaning that the model may not have all of the prior conversation available at any given time [15, 16]. Performance is best when relevant information is at the beginning or end of the context window [17].
Word Guessing: At their core, LLMs are essentially “word guessing machines”, determining the most statistically probable sequence of tokens to follow a given prompt, based on their training data [11, 18].
Relationship to Chatbots: LLMs are often used as the underlying technology for chatbots. For example, the GPT models from OpenAI are used by the ChatGPT chatbot [2, 19]. A chatbot is essentially a user interface or “wrapper” that makes it easy for users to interact with a model [20]. The system message provides a default instruction to the model created by the creator of the model [21]. Custom instructions can also be added to change the model’s behavior [22].
Task-Specific Models: Some models are fine-tuned for specific tasks. For example, GitHub Copilot uses the GPT model but has been further fine-tuned for code generation [19, 20].
Limitations: LLMs can sometimes provide incorrect or biased information, and they can also struggle with math [23, 24]. These models can also hallucinate (make things up) [25, 26]. They may also learn that A=B but not that B=A, which is known as the “reversal curse” [27]. Also, the model may only remember information in the context window and can forget information from the beginning of a conversation [16].
In summary, LLMs are sophisticated models that process and generate language using statistical probabilities, trained on extensive datasets and incorporating architectures that allow for better context awareness, but are also limited by context windows, and other factors, and may produce errors or biased results..
AI Tools and Prompt Engineering
AI tools, particularly those powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are becoming increasingly prevalent in various aspects of work and life [1-4]. These tools can be broadly categorized based on their underlying model and specific functions [5, 6].
Here’s a breakdown of key aspects regarding AI tools, drawing from the sources:
LLMs as the Foundation: Many AI tools are built upon LLMs like GPT from OpenAI, Gemini from Google, Claude from Anthropic, and Llama from Meta [5-8]. These models provide the core ability to understand and generate natural language [5, 6].
Chatbots as Interfaces:
Chatbots like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Bard use LLMs as their base [5, 6]. They act as a user interface (a “wrapper”) that allows users to interact with the underlying LLM through natural language [5, 6].
The user interface makes it easier to input prompts and receive outputs [6]. Without it, interaction with an LLM would require code [6].
Chatbots also have a system message, which is a default prompt that is provided by the chatbot’s creator to set the stage for interactions and guides the model [9, 10].
Custom instructions can also be added to chatbots to further change the model’s behavior [11].
Task-Specific AI Tools:
These tools are designed for specific applications, such as coding, writing, or other domain-specific tasks [6, 7].
Examples include GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer (for coding), and Jasper AI and Copy AI (for writing) [6, 7].
They often use a base model that has been fine-tuned for their specific purposes [6, 7]. For example, GitHub Copilot uses a modified version of OpenAI’s GPT model fine-tuned for code generation [7].
Task-specific tools may also modify the system message or system prompt to further customize the model’s behavior [6, 12].
Custom AI Tools: AI tools can also be customized to learn a specific subject, improve mental health, or complete a specific task [13].
Multimodality: Some advanced AI tools, like ChatGPT, can handle multiple types of input and output [14]:
Text : They can generate and understand text [14].
Images: They can accept images and generate images [14-16].
Internet: They can browse the internet to gather more current information [17].
Code: They can execute code, specifically Python code [17].
Prompt Engineering for AI Tools:
Prompt engineering is the key to using AI tools effectively [13].
It helps maximize the potential of AI tools, avoid errors and biases, and ensure the tools are used efficiently [13].
The skill of prompt engineering involves crafting prompts that provide clear instructions to the AI tool, guiding it to produce the desired output [4, 13].
It requires an understanding of how LLMs work, including concepts like tokens, context windows, and attention mechanisms [2, 12, 18, 19].
Effective prompts involve more than simply asking a question; they involve understanding the task, the capabilities of the AI tool, and the science of prompt engineering [4].
Using personas and a unique tone, style and voice with AI tools can make them more intuitive for humans to use, improve their accuracy, and help them to be on brand [20, 21].
By setting up a tool with custom instructions, it’s possible to effectively give the tool a new “North Star” or behavior profile [11, 22].
Importance of Training Data: The effectiveness of an AI tool depends on the data it has been trained on [23]. The training process involves both pre-training on a vast amount of text data and then fine-tuning on a specific dataset to enhance its capabilities [24, 25].
In summary, AI tools are diverse and powerful, with LLMs acting as their core technology. These tools range from general-purpose chatbots to task-specific applications. Prompt engineering is a critical skill for maximizing the effectiveness of these tools, allowing users to tailor their behavior and output through carefully crafted prompts [13]. Understanding how LLMs function, and having clear and specific instructions are key for success in using AI tools [4, 12].
Prompt Engineering: Principles and Best Practices
Prompt engineering involves the development and optimization of prompts to effectively use AI for specific tasks [1]. It is a skill that can be used by anyone and everyone, regardless of their job or technical background [2]. The goal of prompt engineering is to use AI to become more efficient and effective in work by understanding how Large Language Models (LLMs) function [2]. It is a multi-disciplinary branch of engineering focused on interacting with AI through the integration of fields such as software engineering, machine learning, cognitive science, business, philosophy, and computer science [3, 4].
Key principles of prompt engineering include:
Understanding LLMs: It’s important to understand how LLMs work under the hood, including concepts like tokens, the transformer architecture, and the context window [2]. LLMs process language using tokens, which are smaller pieces of words [5]. They also use a transformer architecture, allowing them to pay attention to more context [6].
Prompts as Instructions: A prompt is essentially the instructions and context given to LLMs to accomplish a task [1]. It’s like a seed that you plant in the LLM’s mind that grows into a result [1]. Prompts are like coding in natural language, requiring specific words and sequences to get the right result [3].
Prompt Elements: A basic prompt consists of two elements, an input (the question or instruction) and an output (the LLM’s response) [3].
Iterative Process: Prompt engineering is an iterative process of testing, trying things out, evaluating, and adjusting until the desired output is achieved [7].
Standard Prompts: The most basic type of prompt is the standard prompt, which consists only of a question or instruction [8]. These are important because they are often the starting place for more complex prompts, and can be useful for gathering information from LLMs [9].
Importance of Context: Providing the LLM with more information or context generally leads to a better and more accurate result [10]. Context includes instructions, background information, and any other relevant details. It helps the LLM understand the task and generate a more helpful response. More context means more words and tokens for the model to analyze, causing the attention mechanism to focus on relevant information and reducing the likelihood of errors [11]. However, providing too much context can also be detrimental, as LLMs have token limits [12, 13].
Context Window: LLMs have a limited context window (also known as a token limit), which is the number of tokens (or words) the model can remember at once [12, 13]. Once that limit is reached, the model will forget information from the beginning of the conversation. Therefore, it is important to manage the context window to maintain the accuracy and coherence of the model’s output [12].
Primacy and Recency Effects: Information placed at the beginning or end of a context window is more likely to be accurately recalled by the model, while information in the middle can get lost [14-16]. For this reason, place the most important context at the beginning of a prompt [16].
Personas: Giving an LLM a persona or role can provide additional context to help it understand the task and provide a better response [17-19]. Personas help to prime the model to think in a certain way. Personas can be functional and fun [20, 21].
Tone, Style, and Voice: A persona can also include a specific tone, style, and voice that are unique to the task, which can help produce more appropriate and nuanced outputs [21].
Custom Instructions: Custom instructions are a way to give the model more specific information about what you want it to know or how you want it to respond [21]. This is similar to giving the model a sub system message.
In summary, prompt engineering is about understanding how LLMs work and applying that understanding to craft effective prompts that guide the model toward accurate, relevant, and helpful outputs. By paying attention to detail and incorporating best practices, users can achieve much more with LLMs and tailor them to meet their specific needs and preferences [22].
Mastering Prompt Engineering with LLMs
This course provides an in-depth look at prompt engineering and how to work with large language models (LLMs) [1]. The course emphasizes gaining practical, real-world skills to put you at the forefront of the AI world [1]. It aims to teach you how to use AI to become more efficient and effective in your work [2]. The course is taught by Scott Kerr, an AI enthusiast and practitioner [1].
Here’s an overview of the key components of the course:
Focus on Practical Skills: The course focuses on teaching how to work with LLMs for specific use cases, rather than providing a library of pre-made prompts [2]. It emphasizes learning by doing, with numerous exercises and projects, including guided and unguided projects [1]. The projects include coding games and using autonomous agents, among other tasks [3].
Understanding LLMs: A key part of the course involves diving deep into the mechanics of LLMs, understanding how they work under the hood, and using that knowledge when prompting them [2].
This includes understanding how LLMs use tokens [4], how they use the transformer architecture [5], and the concept of a context window [6].
The course also covers the training process of LLMs and the difference between base models and assistant models [7].
Prompt Engineering Principles: The course teaches prompt engineering as a multi-disciplinary branch of engineering that requires integrating fields such as software engineering, machine learning, cognitive science, business, philosophy, and computer science [8]. The course provides a framework for creating complex prompts [9]
Standard Prompts: The course starts with the most basic prompts, standard prompts, which are a single question or instruction [10].
Importance of Context: The course teaches the importance of providing the LLM with more information or context, which includes providing relevant instructions and background information to get more accurate results [11].
The course emphasizes placing key information at the beginning or end of the prompt for best results [12].
Managing the Context Window: The course emphasizes the importance of managing the limited context window of the LLMs, to maintain accuracy and coherence [6].
System Messages: The course discusses the importance of the system message, which acts as the “North Star” for the model, and it teaches users how to create their own system message for specific purposes [13].
Personas: The course teaches the use of personas to give LLMs a specific role, tone, style and voice, to make them more useful for humans to use [14, 15].
Applied Prompt Engineering: The course emphasizes using prompt engineering principles in real-world scenarios to make a difference in your work [16]. The course shows the difference in responses between a base model and an assistant model, using LM Studio, to emphasize the importance of applied prompt engineering [7].
Multimodality: The course introduces the concept of multimodality and how models like Chat-GPT can understand and produce images as well as text, browse the internet, and execute python code [17-19].
Tools and Set-Up: The course introduces different LLMs, including the GPT models by Open AI, which can be used through chat-GPT [20]. It also teaches how to use the Open AI playground to interact with the models [20, 21]. The course also emphasizes the importance of using the chat-GPT app to use on a daily basis [22].
Emphasis on Empirical Research: The course is grounded in empirical research and peer-reviewed studies conducted by AI researchers [3].
Up-to-Date Information: The course is designed to provide the most up-to-date information in a constantly changing field and is dedicated to continually evolving [23].
Projects and Exercises: The course includes hands-on demos, exercises, and guided and unguided projects to develop practical skills [3]. These include coding games and using autonomous agents [1].
Evaluation: The course introduces the concept of evaluating and testing prompts, because in order to be scientific, the accuracy and success of prompts needs to be measurable [24].
In summary, the course is structured to provide a blend of theoretical knowledge and practical application, aiming to equip you with the skills to effectively utilize LLMs in various contexts [1]. It emphasizes a deep understanding of how these models work and the best practices for prompt engineering, so that you can use them to your advantage.
Learn Prompt Engineering: Full Beginner Crash Course (5 HOURS!)
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This text recounts the life and career of Mohammed Rafi, a renowned Indian playback singer. It details his humble beginnings, his early exposure to music, and his journey from a small village to becoming a celebrated artist in Lahore and Mumbai. The narrative highlights his remarkable vocal talent, his collaborations with famous actors and musicians, and the impact of his songs on listeners. Specific anecdotes illustrate his dedication, humility, and the emotional depth of his performances. Finally, the piece includes reflections on Rafi’s unique style and lasting legacy in Indian music.
Mohammed Rafi: A Study Guide
Quiz
Instructions: Answer each question in 2-3 complete sentences.
Describe Mohammed Rafi’s early life in Kothari Sultan Singh.
Who was the fakir and what impact did he have on young Rafi?
What was Rafi’s initial experience when he was sent to Lahore?
How did Rafi get his first opportunity to perform in public in Lahore?
Who was Shyam Sunder and why was he significant in Rafi’s career?
What was the significance of Rafi’s first song with Zeenat Begum in the film Gul Baloch?
Describe Rafi’s emotional connection to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and its impact on his career.
Explain how Rafi’s voice was able to portray the emotions of various actors.
Discuss how Rafi handled the challenge of singing both classical and popular music.
How did Lata Mangeshkar and other prominent figures describe Mohammed Rafi’s persona?
Quiz Answer Key
Mohammed Rafi was born in Kothari Sultan Singh to a poor but hardworking family. He was the fifth of six brothers, and from a young age, he was blessed with a remarkable voice and was drawn to music, despite his schooling.
A happy fakir visited the village and sang songs, which captivated young Rafi. The fakir’s voice drew Rafi to follow him and inspired him with the prediction that he would become a musical star.
Rafi was sent to Lahore to work at his brother’s hairdressing shop, but his passion was for music. Despite the challenges and discouragement from his brother, his musical aspirations led him to seek performing opportunities.
Rafi was brought on stage at a musical program in Manto Park after the main singer, K.L. Saigal, had technical issues. He impressed the audience with his voice, which eventually led to musical opportunities.
Shyam Sunder was a musician who recognized Rafi’s talent and helped him get a chance to go to Mumbai. He was one of the people who realized Rafi’s unique vocal abilities.
Rafi’s first song with Zeenat Begum, “Soniye Niriye Ki Milkar Di Tu Kar Li Ravi Sab Maya Nagari,” was his start in film music and a stepping stone towards his future success. It is where the public began to hear his amazing vocal range.
Rafi was deeply moved by the murder of Mahatma Gandhi and sang a song in his memory. The emotional impact of this song touched Pandit Nehru and solidified Rafi’s place as a singer of profound emotional depth.
Rafi had a special ability to mold his voice to fit different characters, which made him popular with film actors, such as Shammi Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, Rajinder Kumar, and Dev Anand. He could portray both joy and sorrow through his singing.
Rafi demonstrated versatility in singing both classical songs and popular music, making his unique voice a perfect complement to any style of music. His control over his voice was extraordinary.
Lata Mangeshkar and other prominent figures described Mohammed Rafi as a saintly, god-like figure. They acknowledged his unique talent and the emotional depth and spiritual quality of his voice.
Essay Questions
Instructions: Develop a thoughtful essay for each question.
Analyze the role of fate and destiny in Mohammed Rafi’s journey from a village boy to a renowned singer. Consider the influence of key individuals, chance encounters, and his own ambition.
Explore the range and versatility of Mohammed Rafi’s voice. How was he able to sing so many diverse styles, and what impact did this have on his career in the Indian film industry?
Discuss the emotional depth conveyed in Mohammed Rafi’s singing. Analyze specific examples of songs, and consider how they capture different emotional states and the human experience.
Discuss the relationship between Mohammed Rafi and his peers, specifically examining the perspectives of those who worked with him, like Lata Mangeshkar. What can this say about the type of person he was?
Assess Mohammed Rafi’s legacy and enduring impact on Indian music. What sets him apart from his contemporaries, and how has his music continued to resonate with audiences over time?
Glossary of Key Terms
Ranvaee: A Punjabi term likely referring to a poor, hardworking individual.
Fakir: A Sufi or Muslim ascetic, often known for their spiritual practices and sometimes for singing.
Andurun Bhati Gate: A specific area or neighborhood within Lahore, historically significant.
Glukar: A Punjabi term for a singer or vocalist.
Saminon Sekin: Likely refers to disappointed listeners or audiences.
Bapu of Azad Hind: A respectful term referring to Mahatma Gandhi.
Shiva of infidelity: A poetic phrase referring to the extreme of disloyalty, possibly a reference to the destructive aspect of the Hindu god Shiva.
Gopi: Refers to a female milkmaid in Hindu mythology, often associated with Krishna.
Bulbulay Hind: A poetic title, likely referring to “The Nightingale of India”, an honor often applied to famous singers.
Shikar-e-Azam: An Urdu phrase, meaning “the greatest hunter” or “one who conquers the heart,” often used to honor significant figures.
Mohammed Rafi: A Voice for the Ages
Okay, here’s a detailed briefing document based on the provided text, focusing on the key themes and important details:
Briefing Document: The Life and Art of Mohammed Rafi
Introduction:
This document provides a review of the key themes and important facts presented in the provided text about the life and career of the legendary Indian playback singer, Mohammed Rafi. The text offers a biographical overview, tracing his journey from a humble beginning to becoming one of the most iconic voices in Hindi cinema. It emphasizes his dedication to his craft, his versatility as a singer, and the deep emotional impact his voice had on listeners.
Key Themes & Ideas:
Humble Beginnings and Divine Inspiration:
Birth & Early Life: Rafi was born on December 24, 1924, in a village near Amritsar. The text describes him as a “precious child” and a “hardworking ranvaee” (possibly meaning a common laborer). He was the fifth of six brothers.
The Fakir’s Influence: A pivotal moment in his childhood was his encounter with a traveling fakir (a Sufi mendicant) whose singing deeply affected him. The fakir’s blessing that Rafi would “become the sun of Muski and shine not only in India but in the whole world” suggests an early belief in his extraordinary talent.
Early Struggles: Despite his passion for music, he faced opposition from his family, particularly his elder brother, who expected him to pursue a more conventional livelihood. He experienced “bitter and burning words” and even physical abuse for his musical aspirations.
Dedication and the Triumph of Talent:
“True Dedication”: The text stresses the power of Rafi’s dedication, stating, “if there is true dedication then even mountains turn into dust.” This highlights his relentless pursuit of his musical dreams despite obstacles.
Early Performances: His early singing experiences in Lahore, including being called upon to perform when K.L. Saigal’s performance was interrupted, showcased his talent to a wider audience.
Early Recognition: The text notes that Rafi’s performance was so powerful that it captivated listeners, even famous musicians like Shyam Sunder, leading to a chance to pursue his dreams in Mumbai.
Radio Debut: He began broadcasting on All India Radio Lahore in 1941.
A Voice for Every Emotion:
Versatility: The text emphasizes Rafi’s mastery of various styles, enabling him to embody the emotions of different actors and characters. “It was up to Rafi sahab to mold his voice, how much command he had over his noise.”
Emotional Depth: The writer describes how Rafi could infuse sorrow, pain, and devotion into his songs. His voice was able to “mould words of sorrow and pain” in a way that made the listener feel as if their “blood of the heart has taken a bath in the Ganga”.
Connection with Actors: Rafi’s voice was so well suited that it was difficult to believe it wasn’t the actor singing it himself: “…the listeners of Rafi sahib feel that it is none other than Shammi who is singing or the tragedy king Dilip Kumar sahab is self-respecting.”
Immortal Songs: The text states his music became “immortal,” and that he could convey such deep meaning that even politicians, like Pandit Nehru, were moved to tears.
The Impact of Tragedy & Social Context:
Gandhi’s Assassination: The text mentions Rafi’s poignant song following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. The song deeply moved Pandit Nehru and showcases Rafi’s ability to evoke raw emotion and address a nation’s collective grief.
Partition: There is reference to the post-partition period, with the implication that this upheaval had an impact on his work as well.
Spiritual and Saintly Descriptions
The text describes Rafi as “God’s man” stating that “Perhaps no one like him will come for centuries.” This idea that his talents are from a higher power is supported by statements that say “God has blessed you, I guess you were the only breath of love in this world of hate.”
It makes comparisons of his works to classical works stating that his songs do not seem less effective than Geeta, indicating an importance of the spiritual in his work.
The fakir’s prediction that Rafi would become a “sun” emphasizes the spiritual aspect of his talent and influence.
Rafi’s Legacy and Comparisons
Rivalry/Respect with Lata Mangeshkar The text mentions the need to discuss the “distance between these two great personalities” while also presenting Lata’s high praise that he “is not of this world”.
Unique qualities The text describes that “the elegance and pride that he has achieved… it has no rhythm.”
Universal impact: The text talks about his music as a universal experience, suggesting that in listening, people can “melt all my sorrows.”
Important Quotes:
“This child was blessed with a voice.”
“Son, you will become the sun of Muski and shine not only in India but in the whole world.”
“if there is true dedication then even mountains turn into dust”
“the listeners of Rafi sahib feel that it is none other than Shammi who is singing or the tragedy king Dilip Kumar sahab is self-respecting.”
“Rafi sahab is not of this world, he is God’s man… Perhaps no one like him will come for centuries.”
“You are the life of the snake, the people of sight do not call your songs of the heart for nothing Companions are not called companions for nothing, I am sad a million times but still I am distraught with pain, the dew of your voice melts all my sorrows.”
Conclusion:
The text paints a vivid picture of Mohammed Rafi as more than just a talented singer. It shows him as a person driven by passion, who overcame adversity, and possessed a unique ability to touch the hearts of millions through his voice. The document highlights key aspects of his life, emphasizing his dedication, versatility, and the spiritual dimensions of his musical gift. His story is not just of a successful singer but of an artist who left an immortal mark on Indian culture.
Mohammed Rafi: A Life in Song
FAQ on the Life and Career of Mohammed Rafi
What were the early circumstances of Mohammed Rafi’s life and how did his passion for music develop? Mohammed Rafi was born in 1924 in a village near Amritsar, India, into a humble family. Despite attending school, he was captivated by a fakir’s singing, which sparked his passion for music. This led him to follow the fakir, with the fakir even prophesying that Rafi would become a world-renowned musical star. He eventually moved to Lahore where he worked in his brother’s barber shop, but his true desire lay in music.
How did Mohammed Rafi get his first major opportunity in music? Rafi’s first significant break came at a music program in Lahore’s Manto Park. When the main singer, K.L. Saigal, was either delayed or had a power outage, Rafi was brought on stage to appease the crowd. His captivating performance impressed the audience and especially musician Shyam Sunder, which ultimately led to an opportunity for him to go to Mumbai. This event marked the start of his professional career.
What was significant about Rafi’s early work in Lahore before moving to Mumbai? In Lahore, Rafi had the opportunity to sing his first song with Zeenat Begum in the film “Gul Baloch”. He also had a broadcasting opportunity at All India Radio Lahore. These experiences contributed to his growth and prepared him for the larger world of the Mumbai film industry.
How did Mohammed Rafi’s singing touch people and portray emotions, particularly during times of national tragedy? Rafi’s voice had the power to deeply touch people through its emotional expression. His heartfelt rendition of songs related to national tragedies, such as the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, moved listeners deeply. It’s said that Pandit Nehru was brought to tears by one of Rafi’s songs and asked him to perform it at a memorial event. His ability to convey pain and sorrow through his voice was one of his defining characteristics.
How did Mohammed Rafi’s voice lend itself to different actors and styles of songs? Rafi had a remarkable ability to modulate his voice to fit a diverse range of actors and styles, making it seem as if it was the actors themselves singing. He seamlessly embodied the voices of actors like Shammi Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, and Dev Anand. Furthermore, he could masterfully sing songs spanning from classical to melancholic to upbeat, exhibiting exceptional versatility.
What were some of the specific songs and films that highlighted Mohammed Rafi’s vocal range and versatility? Songs from films like “Baiju Bawra” and “Deedar” are mentioned for their raw emotion and complexity. His performance in the classical song mentioned demonstrates his ability in traditional forms. His ability to sing in different styles and for different actors shows his adaptability and talent. One film even used his voice for songs while the actor Kishore Kumar lip-synced to them.
How did Mohammed Rafi’s contemporaries and colleagues view him as both a person and an artist? Rafi was greatly respected by his colleagues. Lata Mangeshkar considered him otherworldly and saintly, stating that no one like him would come for centuries. Other artists also acknowledged his kindness and praised his voice as one that had the power to melt away sorrows. He was regarded not only as a phenomenal singer but also a kind and humble human being.
What is the lasting legacy of Mohammed Rafi? Mohammed Rafi’s legacy is one of unparalleled versatility, immense emotional depth, and sheer vocal talent. He remains an iconic figure in the history of Indian music, remembered for the numerous timeless songs he sang and for the impact he had on countless listeners. He is remembered for his beautiful voice, his versatility, and his capacity to sing in a variety of styles with authentic emotion.
Mohammed Rafi: A Life in Song
Okay, here’s the timeline and cast of characters based on the provided text:
Timeline of Events
December 24, 1924: Mohammed Rafi is born in the village of Kotli Sultan Singh near Amritsar, India. He is the fifth of six brothers.
Early Childhood: Rafi is drawn to music, particularly a fakir’s singing, whom he follows. The fakir blesses him, foretelling that he will become a star.
Move to Lahore: Rafi moves to Lahore, where his older brother has a barber shop in Bhati Gate, to help support his family.
Pursuit of Music: Despite family obligations and discouragement from his brother, Rafi pursues his passion for singing. He performs in streets, markets, and fairs.
Manto Park Performance: Rafi gets an opportunity to perform at Manto Park in Lahore after a delay/power outage during a K.L. Saigal show. His performance gains recognition.
Recognition: Musician Shyam Sunder helps Rafi gain a chance to reach Mumbai (then Bombay).
1941: Rafi has his first radio broadcast on All India Radio Lahore and sings his first film song in the movie “Gul Baloch” with Zeenat Begum.
Post Partition: Following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, Rafi sings a deeply emotional song in his memory.
Pandit Nehru Recognition: Pandit Nehru is moved to tears by the song and invites Rafi to perform at a memorial for Gandhi.
Career Peak: Rafi becomes a highly sought-after playback singer, known for his versatility and ability to mold his voice to different actors, including Shammi Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, Rajendra Kumar, Dev Anand, and even Kishore Kumar.
Collaborations: The text highlights the contrast between Rafi’s singing and the acting of others, including a situation where Kishore Kumar acts but Rafi’s voice is used.
Continued Acclaim: Rafi is recognized for songs including those from Baiju Bawra, Deedar and Gopi.
Cast of Characters
Mohammed Rafi: (Born December 24, 1924) The main subject of the text. A highly gifted and popular playback singer who rose from humble beginnings in Punjab to become a legendary figure in Indian cinema. He is portrayed as deeply dedicated, with a versatile voice that could convey a range of emotions, and the text emphasizes his innocence, devotion to music, and spiritual nature.
Mohammed Ali: Rafi’s father.
Bibi Allah Rakhi: Rafi’s mother.
Sultan Singh: The text implies this is the village chief who named Rafi ‘the 11th radish’ due to how many children had been born at the same time.
Fakir (unnamed): A traveling mystic with a sweet voice whose singing captivated young Rafi and ultimately inspired him to pursue music. He also gave a prophetic blessing to Rafi.
Rafi’s Elder Brother (unnamed): He ran a barber shop in Lahore. He was initially discouraging and abusive towards Rafi’s musical aspirations, wanting him to focus on earning a livelihood.
K.L. Saigal: A well-known singer of that era, at whose concert Rafi got his break when a problem caused him to need a replacement performer.
Shyam Sunder: A musician who recognized Rafi’s talent and helped him get to Mumbai.
Zeenat Begum: A singer with whom Rafi sang his first film song.
Mahatma Gandhi: The assassinated leader of India, whose death prompted a very emotional song by Rafi.
Pandit Nehru: India’s first Prime Minister, who was deeply moved by Rafi’s song about Gandhi and invited Rafi to perform at the memorial for Gandhi.
Shammi Kapoor: A popular actor known for his energetic performances, whose songs were often sung by Rafi.
Dilip Kumar: A famed actor known as the “Tragedy King,” whose songs were often sung by Rafi.
Rajendra Kumar: An actor often associated with romance, whose songs were also sung by Rafi.
Dev Anand: A popular actor whose songs were sung by Rafi.
Kishore Kumar: An actor and singer, who was known for his acting and whose songs were sometimes sung by Rafi.
Lata Mangeshkar: A highly acclaimed singer, whom the text mentions alongside Rafi as a fellow legend, and speaks of his personal life in an almost saintly way.
Nishad Ji: Spoke of Rafi in beautiful words calling him “the life of the snake”.
This breakdown should give you a good understanding of the key events and characters presented in the source text. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Mohammed Rafi: The Voice of India
Mohammed Rafi was born on December 24, 1924, in the village of Kothari Sultan Singh near Amritsar [1]. His father’s name was Mohammed Ali, and his mother’s name was Bibi Allah Rakhi [1]. He was the fifth of six brothers [1].
Rafi was drawn to music from a young age [1]. He was inspired by a fakir (a Muslim or Hindu mendicant or holy person) with a sweet voice who would come to his village [1]. The fakir blessed him, saying he would “become the sun of Muski and shine not only in India but in the whole world” [1]. Rafi started following this fakir and the “strings of his heart remained connected with the voice” [1].
Rafi was sent to Lahore to work at his elder brother’s hairdressing shop, but his passion was for music [1].
He was brought on stage at a music program in Manto Park in Lahore [1].
He got a chance to reach Mumbai through musician Shyam Sunder [2].
In 1941, he got a broadcast on All India Radio Lahore [2].
He sang his first song in the film Gul Baloch with Zeenat Begum [2].
After the partition of India, Mahatma Gandhi was murdered, which led Rafi to sing a heart-wrenching song [3]. When Pandit Nehru heard it, he was moved to tears and asked Rafi to perform at a memorial for Gandhi [3]. Rafi was known for his ability to mold his voice and sing in different styles [4]. He was able to capture the essence of the characters he was singing for, such as Shammi Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, Rajinder Kumar and Dev Anand [3]. He sang songs in many films including Baiju Bawra, Deedar, and Gopi [4, 5]. Rafi’s voice was described as innocent and heart-touching [3]. Lata Mangeshkar called him “God’s man,” saying “perhaps no one like him will come for centuries” [6]. Another person, Shikar-e-Azam Nishad, said, “the dew of your voice melts all my sorrows” [6].
Mohammed Rafi: A Life in Music
Mohammed Rafi was born on December 24, 1924, in the village of Kothari Sultan Singh near Amritsar [1]. His father’s name was Mohammed Ali, and his mother’s name was Bibi Allah Rakhi [1]. He was the fifth of six brothers [1].
From a young age, Rafi was drawn to music [1]. A fakir (a Muslim or Hindu mendicant or holy person) with a sweet voice would come to his village, and this inspired Rafi [1]. The fakir blessed him, saying he would “become the sun of Muski and shine not only in India but in the whole world” [1]. Rafi started following this fakir and the “strings of his heart remained connected with the voice” [1].
Rafi was sent to Lahore to work at his elder brother’s hairdressing shop [1].
His passion, however, was music [1].
Rafi’s voice was first heard in Manto Park of Lahore during a music program [1, 2].
He got a chance to reach Mumbai through musician Shyam Sunder [2].
In 1941, he got a broadcast on All India Radio Lahore [2].
He sang his first song in the film Gul Baloch with Zeenat Begum [2].
The sources describe Rafi as an “innocent and naive child” [1]. In addition to his musical passion, Rafi was also attending school [1].
Mohammed Rafi: A Musical Legacy
Mohammed Rafi’s singing career began with a fascination with a fakir’s voice in his childhood [1]. The fakir blessed him, stating that he would become famous [1]. Though sent to Lahore to work in his brother’s hairdressing shop, Rafi’s passion was music [1, 2].
Here are some of the key events and aspects of his singing career:
Rafi got his first opportunity to perform on stage at a music program in Manto Park in Lahore [1].
He got a chance to go to Mumbai through the musician Shyam Sunder [2].
In 1941, Rafi had a broadcast on All India Radio Lahore [2].
He sang his first song with Zeenat Begum in the film Gul Baloch [2].
Rafi’s singing was so captivating, it made listeners “famous” [2].
Rafi’s voice was described as having an “innocence-heavy” quality [3].
After the partition of India, Mahatma Gandhi’s murder led Rafi to sing a heart-wrenching song. Pandit Nehru was so moved by the song, that he asked Rafi to perform at a memorial for Gandhi [3].
Rafi was known for his ability to mold his voice [3, 4]. He could capture the essence of the characters he was singing for, such as Shammi Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, Rajinder Kumar and Dev Anand [3].
He sang songs in many films including Baiju Bawra, Deedar, and Gopi [4, 5].
Rafi’s songs were so versatile that even when an actor like Kishore Kumar was acting in a film, the singing would be done by Rafi [3].
Lata Mangeshkar called him “God’s man,” saying “perhaps no one like him will come for centuries” [6].
Shikar-e-Azam Nishad said, “the dew of your voice melts all my sorrows” [6].
Rafi’s command over his voice is highlighted by the fact that he could sing a range of styles, from sad to joyful, and could express pain and sorrow as if it was coming from his heart [4, 5].
Mohammed Rafi: Collaborations and Vocal Mastery
Mohammed Rafi’s musical career involved collaborations with a variety of artists and spanned numerous films.
Here are some of his key collaborations:
Zeenat Begum: Rafi sang his first song with Zeenat Begum in the film Gul Baloch [1].
Shyam Sunder: This musician helped Rafi get a chance to reach Mumbai [1].
K.L. Saigal: Rafi performed at a music program where the great singer K.L. Saigal was also performing [2].
Lata Mangeshkar: Lata Mangeshkar spoke of Rafi as a “God’s man,” and that “perhaps no one like him will come for centuries” [3]. The source also mentions the need to review the “leather article” to understand the distance between these two great personalities and their story [3].
Rafi’s voice was versatile and he was able to capture the essence of the actors for whom he sang [4]:
Shammi Kapoor: Rafi’s voice was often used for Shammi Kapoor, and he was able to mold his voice to fit the actor’s style [4, 5].
Dilip Kumar: Rafi’s voice was also used for Dilip Kumar, who was known as the “tragedy king” [4].
Rajinder Kumar and Dev Anand: Rafi’s voice was also used for these actors [4].
Kishore Kumar: Though Kishore Kumar was an actor, his singing was sometimes done by Rafi [4].
Rafi’s ability to mold his voice and sing in different styles allowed him to work with a variety of actors and musicians [4, 5].
Mohammed Rafi: A Legacy in Indian Music
Mohammed Rafi’s legacy is marked by his versatility, emotional depth, and impact on Indian music.
Here are some key points regarding his legacy:
Vocal Versatility: Rafi had an exceptional ability to mold his voice to suit different styles and actors [1, 2]. He could convey a wide range of emotions, from joy to sorrow, making his singing unique [2]. His voice was used for actors like Shammi Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, Rajinder Kumar, and Dev Anand, each with their distinct style [1]. He was also able to sing for actors like Kishore Kumar, who was himself a famous singer [1].
Emotional Impact: Rafi’s songs often resonated with listeners on a deep emotional level. His voice was described as innocent and heart-touching [1, 3]. He could express pain and sorrow in a way that felt as if it was coming from the heart [2]. One person, Shikar-e-Azam Nishad, said, “the dew of your voice melts all my sorrows” [4].
Cultural Influence: Rafi’s songs became an integral part of Indian culture, and he was loved by fans across the world [5]. After the partition of India, Mahatma Gandhi’s murder led Rafi to sing a heart-wrenching song that moved Pandit Nehru to tears and led him to ask Rafi to perform at a memorial for Gandhi [1].
Praised by contemporaries: Lata Mangeshkar called him “God’s man,” saying “perhaps no one like him will come for centuries” [4].
Timelessness: Even though he is no longer alive, his songs are still cherished and listened to [1]. The source notes that there is a “temple of justice in immortality” and that “love is immortal” [6].
Rafi’s legacy is not just about his technical skill, but also his ability to connect with listeners on an emotional level, making him one of the most beloved singers in the history of Indian music.
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A collection of articles, mainly from the Saudi Arabian newspaper Al Riyadh, covers various topics concerning the Kingdom and the region. Many articles highlight Saudi Arabia’s celebration of its Founding Day with cultural events, historic reviews, and national pride. Several articles focus on economic matters, including oil prices, investment summits, and a green hydrogen project in NEOM. Other articles discuss political issues such as prisoner exchanges, regional conflicts, and international relations. Furthermore, sporting events like the Saudi Cup horse race and youth soccer tournaments are also reported. Finally, the text touches upon social issues such as empowering women and improving life for citizens.
The Kingdom’s Foundation: A Study Guide
I. Quiz
Answer the following questions in 2-3 sentences each, based on the provided texts.
According to the texts, what values underpinned the establishment of the Saudi state three centuries ago?
How did the media contribute to the celebration of Founding Day?
What was the value of the prizes for the Saudi Cup race?
What were some of the topics discussed at the Riyadh meeting attended by leaders from multiple countries?
What did King Salman affirm in his statement about the founding of the Saudi state?
What is the significance of naming various squares in Riyadh after imams and kings?
How does the article connect the Founding Day celebration to Vision 2030?
What is “NEOM Green Hydrogen” doing to celebrate Founding day?
What products are mentioned as examples of the innovation and growing demand in the baby care industry?
According to the article, what is the role of the “Saudi Council of Engineers” in the future?
II. Quiz Answer Key
The Saudi state was founded on the principles of security, justice, and pure faith (“al-aqidah al-khalisa”). These values have continued to guide the country’s progress since its establishment.
The media participated in the Founding Day celebrations by covering the popular festivities, broadcasting national songs, and highlighting expressions of love for the homeland. The media was also responsible for sharing details about the historical sites and efforts to restore buildings before the 300th anniversary.
The Saudi Cup race had total prize money of $38.1 million, with $20 million awarded to the winner of the main race. It is considered the world’s richest race.
The Riyadh meeting focused on various regional and international issues, especially developments in Gaza and support for the Palestinian cause. The leaders also consulted and exchanged views on matters of mutual interest.
King Salman expressed pride in the establishment of the Saudi state three centuries ago, emphasizing its foundation on security, justice, and pure faith. He affirmed that this approach remains firmly rooted as the nation advances in various fields.
The naming of squares after imams and kings is a tribute to the legacy of the leaders who founded the state. It symbolizes the enduring connection to the past and honors their contributions to the country’s unity and development.
The article links Founding Day to Vision 2030 by presenting it as an inspiration for future engineers and architects. It connects the values and successes of the past to the aspirations and goals of the Kingdom’s ambitious plan for the future.
“NEOM Green Hydrogen” is celebrating by achieving 60% of it’s goal to establish hydrogen production, wind and solar power for the year 2026. The project aims to establish a future powered by clean energy.
The article mentioned “Feather Diapers,” gentle washes, body lotions, sunscreen, and body sunscreen. This is just a short list.
The article says the day is an inspiration to engineers to be part of the renaissance and armed with science, creativity and innovation.
III. Essay Questions
Consider the following questions and formulate well-organized essay responses.
Analyze the significance of Founding Day in relation to Saudi Arabia’s national identity and historical narrative, using examples from the provided texts.
Discuss the different ways in which the Saudi government and various organizations are commemorating and celebrating Founding Day, highlighting the themes and messages they convey.
Examine the connection between the historical foundations of the Saudi state and the goals and aspirations of Vision 2030, as portrayed in the provided texts.
Evaluate the role of media and cultural events in promoting national pride and unity during the Founding Day celebrations, providing specific examples from the articles.
Critically assess the extent to which the provided texts present a unified and consistent narrative of Saudi history and national identity, identifying any potential tensions or alternative perspectives.
IV. Glossary of Key Terms
Founding Day (يوم التأسيس): The annual commemoration of the establishment of the Saudi state, celebrated on February 22nd.
Vision 2030 (روؤية 2030): Saudi Arabia’s strategic framework to reduce the country’s dependence on oil, diversify its economy, and develop public service sectors such as health, education, infrastructure, recreation, and tourism.
al-aqidah al-khalisa (العقيدة الخالصة): Pure faith; one of the core values upon which the Saudi state was founded.
NEOM (نيوم): A planned cross-border city in the Tabuk Province of northwestern Saudi Arabia; it is designed to incorporate smart city technologies and function as a tourist destination.
Diriyah (الدرعية): The historical capital of the First Saudi State and a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Saudi Cup (كأس السعودية): The world’s richest horse race, held annually in Saudi Arabia.
King Salman (امللك سلمان): The current King of Saudi Arabia and the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.
Prince Mohammed bin Salman (االأمري حممد بن سلمان): The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and the architect of Vision 2030.
Al Saud: The ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia.
“X” : The social media platform previously known as Twitter, used here by King Salman to share a message about Founding Day.
Killedoff: a term used in the article to suggest the Ukraine President is looking for a Western country to solve his problems.
Saudi Arabia: Themes of Nation, Vision, and Regional Leadership
Okay, here’s a detailed briefing document summarizing the main themes and ideas from the provided sources.
Briefing Document: Analysis of Saudi Arabian News Articles
Date: October 26, 2023
Subject: Key Themes and Ideas in Recent Saudi Arabian News Coverage
Sources: Excerpts from “20697.pdf”
Executive Summary:
This document analyzes a collection of news articles, primarily from the newspaper Al Riyadh, covering a range of topics relevant to Saudi Arabia in early 2025. The main themes include:
National Identity and Patriotism: Strong emphasis on Saudi national identity, particularly surrounding the celebration of Founding Day and its connection to the Kingdom’s history and future.
Vision 2030 & Economic Development: Continued focus on the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 plan, highlighting progress in various sectors (including renewable energy, tourism, and technology) and international partnerships.
Regional Leadership & Diplomacy: Saudi Arabia’s active role in regional diplomacy and its efforts to promote stability and resolve conflicts are featured.
Cultural Preservation & Modernization: Balancing the preservation of Saudi cultural heritage with embracing modernization and innovation is a recurring theme.
Social Progress & Empowerment: Articles showcase advancements in women’s empowerment and the growing importance of the youth demographic.
Detailed Analysis:
1. National Identity and Patriotism:
Founding Day Celebrations: The articles emphasize the importance of Founding Day as a symbol of national pride and a connection to the Kingdom’s rich history. The celebration is portrayed as a widespread, popular event with participation from various sectors of society. (The least that can be said about the joy of citizens on Founding Day is that it was characterized by comprehensiveness, pride, and boasting of the history of this nation).
Historical Significance: The articles highlight the three centuries of history behind the modern Kingdom, tracing its roots back to the founding of the first Saudi state.(That the history of this country is approaching the completion of three centuries, which reflects the historical and cultural depth of the march of this country, and the important events it witnessed, which reshaped the history of the Arabian Peninsula.)
Royal Endorsement: King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are prominently featured in connection with Founding Day, reinforcing the leadership’s commitment to national heritage and future aspirations. (The words of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz – may God protect him – came on this occasion, summarizing the most prominent achievements of the country during its march, when he said – may God protect him -: »We are proud of the anniversary of the establishment of our blessed state three centuries ago on security, justice and pure faith«)
Celebrating with Traditional Attire: Citizens expressing joy by wearing traditional clothing.(The people of the Qassim region expressed their joy in various age groups on the occasion of Founding Day, which falls on February 22 of each year, by wearing popular heritage costumes, in the activities organized by many governmental agencies).
2. Vision 2030 & Economic Development:
Progress and Achievement: The articles highlight the tangible progress being made towards Vision 2030’s goals across various sectors.“ (The march of the blessed Kingdom moves forward with pride and steadfastness, knocking on the doors of a promising and bright future, which was established for a country that is progressing under the umbrella of Vision 2030. We are confidently reaping the fruits of that vision in every field, with clear development that the world is witnessing, which sees that the Kingdom has achieved everything it dreams of, and seeks it at a rapid pace, and confident steps.)
NEOM & Renewable Energy: The NEOM project and its focus on green hydrogen are showcased as a key example of the Kingdom’s commitment to sustainable energy and innovation. (Al-Ghamdi: On Saudi Founding Day, we celebrate the completion of 60% of our projects and the operation by the end of 2026 “NEOM for Green Hydrogen” builds a sustainable legacy by exploiting the Kingdom’s inexhaustible resources)
Investment & Diversification: Articles discuss efforts to attract foreign investment and diversify the Saudi economy beyond oil, including initiatives like the Future Investment Initiative (FII). “” (“Priority Summit” affirms the importance of shaping the future of global investment and economic resilience)
3. Regional Leadership & Diplomacy:
Diplomatic Engagement: The sources highlight Saudi Arabia’s role as a mediator and facilitator of dialogue in the region. The meeting in Riyadh with leaders from Jordan, Qatar, Egypt, UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain is an example of this..” (By gracious invitation from His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, a fraternal consultative meeting was held in the city of Riyadh on 22 Sha’ban 1446 AH, corresponding to February 21, 2025 AD, with the participation of His Majesty King Abdullah II Ibn Al Hussein, King of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and His Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Emir of the State of Qatar, and His Excellency President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, President of the Arab Republic of Egypt, and His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates, and His Highness Sheikh Mishaal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, Emir of the State of Kuwait, and His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince and Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Bahrain.)
Commitment to Peace & Security: Crown Prince’s emphasis on dialogue to resolve international crises and the Kingdom’s commitment to global security.“ (For his part, His Highness the Crown Prince affirmed the Kingdom’s commitment – may God protect him – to making every possible effort to enhance security and peace in the world, believing that dialogue is the only way to resolve all international crises.)
4. Cultural Preservation & Modernization:
Ministry of Culture Initiatives: The Ministry of Culture is actively promoting Saudi heritage through festivals, exhibitions, and support for traditional crafts.“ (The Ministry of Culture organizes a group of cultural and historical events during the period from 20 to 23 of this February, in celebration of Founding Day, which falls on the twenty-second of the month of February every year. These events are hosted by the cities of Riyadh and AlUla, in addition to other events that are held in five Saudi cities, through which it recalls the great story of a nation that was founded three centuries ago.)
Balancing Tradition with Modernity: Articles showcase how Saudi Arabia is blending its rich cultural past with modern artistic expression and technological advancements.“ (Founding Day activities include offering on the wedding, programmed “drone” a wedding on the foundation presents an eye-catching, human show of technology and art, designs for drone shows combine shapes, lights, and mobile dimensions.)
5. Social Progress & Empowerment:
Women’s Empowerment: The articles reference efforts to empower women and increase their participation in various sectors of society. (Dr. Amal Al-Habdan spoke about the achievements of women, stressing that the Kingdom’s vision has a major role in empowering women and the developments in making women an essential element in the Kingdom and the future. She noted the efforts made by the government that contribute to enabling women to be able to participate in building the country.)
Youth Engagement: The article “Founding Day.. Inspiration for Future Engineers” highlights the role of youth in the Kingdom’s future development.“(Saudi Foundation Day is a date in the history of the Kingdom, as it embodies pride, appreciation, and authenticity, and the brilliant past to the future. It is a day that inspires ambitious engineers and engineers.)
Focus on healthcare initiatives: Many articles focus on healthcare initiatives.“(The ingenuity of our leaders lies in sending a medical team of 61 doctors and specialists, within a convoy sent by the King Salman Center for Relief and Humanitarian Operations to support the health sector in Syria, with 3 humanitarian campaigns with precise targeting in a number of specialties. The medical missions were within 104 campaigns and general, medical specialties in the voluntary Saudi “Hope” program).
Conclusion:
The news articles paint a picture of a nation deeply connected to its history while simultaneously striving for ambitious goals in modernization and regional leadership. The emphasis on Vision 2030, cultural preservation, and social progress suggests a concerted effort to build a strong, diversified, and globally engaged Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia Founding Day: History, Celebrations, and Vision 2030
FAQ on Saudi Arabia’s Founding Day and Related Events
1. What is Saudi Arabia’s Founding Day, and what does it commemorate?
Founding Day, celebrated annually on February 22nd, commemorates the establishment of the first Saudi state in 1727 by Imam Muhammad bin Saud in Diriyah. It is a celebration of national pride, cultural heritage, and the deep-rooted history of the Saudi nation. It serves to highlight the historical, cultural, and societal depth of the Kingdom.
2. What are some of the key themes and values associated with Founding Day?
The key themes include national pride, unity, security, justice, and a commitment to Islamic principles. The celebrations reflect the resilience, stability, and progress achieved over three centuries and the enduring legacy of Saudi leadership. It also emphasizes the importance of preserving the Saudi identity, culture and heritage.
3. How is Saudi Arabia celebrating Founding Day in recent years?
The Kingdom celebrates with widespread popular festivities, including various media participation, governmental and private sector involvement, and people donning traditional attire. There are also cultural festivals, historical exhibitions, air shows with drones, musical performances, and artistic displays. These events take place across numerous cities, highlighting Saudi Arabia’s history and traditions.
4. What is Vision 2030, and how does Founding Day relate to it?
Vision 2030 is a comprehensive plan to diversify the Saudi economy, develop public service sectors, and improve quality of life. Founding Day underscores the historical foundation upon which Vision 2030 is built, emphasizing the commitment to progress, innovation, and sustainable development while honoring the nation’s past.
5. What is the significance of Imam Muhammad bin Saud in Saudi history?
Imam Muhammad bin Saud is revered as the founder of the first Saudi state in 1727. He established Diriyah as its capital, laying the groundwork for political unity, security, and the spread of Islamic teachings in the region. His leadership is considered the cornerstone of the Saudi dynasty.
6. How does Saudi Arabia balance preserving its cultural heritage with modern development?
Saudi Arabia actively promotes cultural heritage through initiatives like restoring historical sites, celebrating traditions, and supporting local craftsmanship. Simultaneously, it embraces modern development through Vision 2030 by investing in technology, infrastructure, and innovation, ensuring the preservation of its legacy.
7. What are the implications of Saudi Arabia’s growing regional and international role?
Saudi Arabia’s growing role as a regional and international leader is reflected in its efforts to promote peace, stability, and economic cooperation. Its diplomatic engagements, investments in humanitarian aid, and commitment to resolving global issues demonstrate its influence and importance in shaping a more stable and prosperous future.
8. What role does the Al-Saud dynasty play in shaping Saudi Arabia’s identity and future?
The Al-Saud dynasty plays a central role in shaping Saudi Arabia’s identity and future by upholding the nation’s values, promoting unity, and driving economic and social progress. Their leadership is characterized by a commitment to Islamic principles, sustainable development, and international cooperation, guiding the Kingdom toward continued success and prosperity.
Saudi Arabia: Culture, Development, and Modernization
Saudi Arabia is a country with a rich history and culture that is currently undergoing rapid development and modernization.
Key aspects of Saudi Arabia according to the sources:
National Day (Tassis Day): Celebrated on February 22nd, it commemorates the founding of the Saudi state. It’s a time for Saudis to celebrate their traditions and cultural heritage with activities and events that showcase national identity. This day serves as an opportunity to reflect on past achievements and look forward to a bright future, reinforcing the values of unity and social cohesion.
Historical Significance: The first Saudi state was established in 1727 when Imam Muhammad bin Saud laid the foundation for the state based on Islamic principles. The Saudi state’s establishment was not just a passing event but a fundamental transformation that established a system of governance based on justice, unity, and stability.
Leadership & Development: Under the leadership of King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia is moving steadily towards achieving sustainable development and strengthening its position as an economic and cultural power. The Kingdom is drawing inspiration from its rich heritage to build a bright future for generations to come.
Modernization & Vision: Saudi Arabia is undergoing a new era of modernization and renaissance under the leadership of King Salman bin Abdulaziz.
Cultural Heritage: The Kingdom’s architecture is linked to Saudi identity, extending to interior design that reflects cultural and heritage values. Traditional motifs are being integrated into modern spaces with smart technologies.
Economic Diversification:
NEOM Project: Aims to build a legacy of innovation and sustainability, harnessing the Kingdom’s resources.
Clean Energy: The Kingdom has a strategic focus on clean energy and is committed to reducing carbon emissions.
Regional & International Role:
Promoting Peace: Saudi Arabia plays an important role in promoting peace and stability in the region and the world.
Humanitarian Aid: The Kingdom extends its support to countries in need, providing humanitarian aid and funding development projects.
** الثقافة و الأدب** The Arabic poetry is a living historical document, and Al-Yamama represents one of the prominent milestones in the memory of Arab literature.
Saudi Arabia Royal Celebrations: Traditions, Unity, and Heritage
Royal celebrations in Saudi Arabia highlight the country’s history, culture, and unity. These occasions often involve the King and Crown Prince, along with other members of the royal family, and are marked by various traditions and festivities.
Key aspects of royal celebrations in Saudi Arabia, based on the sources:
Day of Tassis Celebrations:
Commemoration: Tassis Day, celebrated on February 22nd, is a major event that commemorates the founding of the Saudi state.
Traditions and cultural heritage: It is a time for Saudis to celebrate their traditions and cultural heritage with activities and events that showcase national identity. These events include traditional dances, festivals, and cultural seminars, all contributing to a sense of belonging and pride in the nation.
National Identity and Pride: The celebrations reinforce the values of unity and social cohesion.
Royal involvement:
Congratulatory messages: Kings and leaders from other countries, such as Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Palestine, and Morocco, send congratulatory messages to the King and Crown Prince on the anniversary of the Founding Day.
Guidance and leadership: The celebrations emphasize the King and Crown Prince’s leadership in achieving sustainable development and strengthening Saudi Arabia’s position.
Celebrations and their significance:
Cultural activities: These celebrations often include wearing traditional costumes and enjoying traditional cuisine, reflecting the country’s heritage.
Focus on unity and progress: Celebrations also highlight the unity of the community and its role in supporting continued development and prosperity.
In summary, royal celebrations in Saudi Arabia, particularly the Founding Day, are significant events that showcase national pride, cultural heritage, and the strong leadership of the royal family. These celebrations serve to unite the Saudi people, honor their history, and look forward to a prosperous future.
Saudi Arabia: Economic Growth and Diversification
Economic growth in Saudi Arabia is a multifaceted topic, with both internal and external factors driving its trajectory. The sources provide insights into various aspects of this growth, including diversification efforts, technological advancements, and global influences.
Key points concerning Saudi Arabia’s economic growth:
Diversification Beyond Oil: Saudi Arabia is actively working to diversify its economy away from its traditional reliance on oil revenues.
NEOM Project: This project exemplifies the commitment to building a sustainable future by utilizing the Kingdom’s resources in innovative ways. It aims to establish a legacy of creativity, sustainability, and collaboration.
Clean Energy Initiatives: A key strategy involves prioritizing clean energy and reducing carbon emissions, indicating a move towards a more sustainable economic model.
Technological Advancement and Digital Transformation: The Kingdom has made significant strides in adopting modern technologies across various sectors.
E-commerce: The e-commerce sector’s growth, especially in areas like children’s products, is playing a crucial role in driving the industry forward.
Digital Infrastructure: Systems such as the “Absher” electronic system, “Sehhaty” (health) system, “Najiz” system, and others have been implemented, showcasing the country’s rapid advancement in digital transactions.
Vision 2030: This is a transformative plan for the kingdom. Projects aligned with Vision 2030 reflect ambition in achieving a sustainable civilizational renaissance.
Role of Key Sectors:
Children’s Products: The market for children’s products, including luxury items and skincare, is experiencing substantial growth, driven by increased parental awareness and spending.
Construction: There has been significant progress in construction and development activities, indicating strong economic momentum.
Global Economic Factors:
Oil Market Influences: Fluctuations in global oil prices continue to have an impact on Saudi Arabia’s economy.
International Relations: Saudi Arabia’s relationships with other countries and its role in international collaborations also influence its economic growth and stability.
Empowering Entrepreneurship: The government supports entrepreneurs and the private sector, strengthening its position among the world’s largest economies.
Focus on Sustainable Development: Saudi Arabia emphasizes sustainable development, aiming to balance economic progress with environmental responsibility and social well-being.
Saudi Arabia: Cultural Events and National Identity
Cultural events in Saudi Arabia play a vital role in celebrating the nation’s heritage, promoting unity, and showcasing its rich traditions. These events range from national day celebrations to local festivals, all contributing to a vibrant cultural landscape.
Key aspects of cultural events in Saudi Arabia, according to the sources:
Celebration of National Identity:
Founding Day (Tassis Day): This is a major celebration that commemorates the establishment of the Saudi state and is marked by various activities that highlight national identity.
Expression of Pride: National days provide an opportunity to express pride and belonging to the nation.
Traditions and Heritage: Saudis celebrate their heritage through traditional attire, cuisine, and various cultural displays.
Variety of Cultural Activities:
Traditional Arts and Crafts: Events often include displays of traditional crafts, such as weaving, pottery, and other artistic expressions that reflect the skills and creativity of Saudi artisans.
The “Na Al-Wali” is an artistic work documenting the history of the Kingdom.
“A’ashi Street” is an upcoming series set in the 1970s and 1980s, supported by the Saudi Film Authority to promote Saudi film production.
Cultural Evenings: Literary evenings that highlight the history of regions through Arabic poetry contribute to the appreciation of Arab culture.
“Earth Memory” Events: These events include explorations of historical eras, displays of traditional folk costumes, and interactive experiences.
Promotion of Unity and Social Cohesion:
Reinforcing Values: Cultural events reinforce the values of unity and social cohesion among members of society.
Community Engagement: Activities encourage community participation and strengthen bonds between individuals.
The Role of Institutions:
Government Support: The Ministry of Culture and other organizations play a key role in organizing and promoting cultural events.
Public Libraries: The establishment of public libraries signifies a commitment to spreading culture and knowledge.
Preservation of Heritage:
Awareness: Events aim to raise awareness about the Kingdom’s history, traditions, and key figures.
Connecting Generations: These events provide a rich experience that connects visitors to the roots of Saudi history and its rich heritage, ensuring that the younger generation understands and appreciates their cultural background.
Specific events:
Camel Riding: Some events offer the experience of camel riding, simulating desert caravans.
Henna and Kohl: Traditional practices such as applying kohl and decorating hands with henna are showcased.
In summary, cultural events in Saudi Arabia serve as vibrant platforms for celebrating national identity, preserving heritage, and promoting unity, contributing to a rich and dynamic cultural environment. These events not only entertain but also educate and connect people with their history and traditions.
Saudi Arabia: A Nation United Through Sports Competitions
Sports competitions in Saudi Arabia are gaining prominence, reflecting the nation’s growing interest and investment in sports and fitness. These competitions span various fields and contribute to both national pride and international recognition.
Key aspects of sports competitions in Saudi Arabia based on the sources:
Football (Soccer):Saudi League: The Saudi League is gaining attention, although some controversies and incidents, such as player ejections and criticisms of player behavior, have been noted.
National Team Success: The Saudi national football team’s success is attributed to dedicated work and support, with victories celebrated as a source of national pride.
Asian Cup: The Saudi team’s qualification for the Asian Cup is highlighted as a result of strong support and efforts.
Equestrian Events (Fruosiya):Promotion of Heritage: Equestrian events are significant, with high-ranking officials and royals participating in and supporting these competitions.
Club Competitions: Clubs like Al-Washm play an active role in equestrian activities, with efforts to encourage and support players.
General Sports Development:Emphasis on Achievement: There’s a clear emphasis on achieving high standards in sports, with recognition given to athletes and teams for their accomplishments.
Investment in Sports: Saudi Arabia is investing in sports and fitness, leading to increased participation and success in various competitions.
Role of Sports Institutions:
Club Management: Effective club management plays a crucial role in motivating players and raising morale.
Parental Support: Parents contribute significantly by supporting their children’s participation in sports, underscoring the importance of family involvement.
Specific Examples:
Qadisiya Club: Qadisiya club’s success in achieving third place in competitions is noted.
Al-Ahli Club: Al-Ahli club is mentioned for securing important points in a match, showcasing their competitive performance.
In summary, sports competitions in Saudi Arabia are supported by national pride, investment, and effective management, contributing to the country’s growing presence and success in regional and international sports. These events are integral to promoting national unity, celebrating achievements, and fostering a culture of sportsmanship and excellence.
Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques directs naming a number of Riyadh squares after imams and kings
In commemoration of the imams and kings of the Saudi state, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – may God support him – has directed, based on what was submitted by His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister – may God protect him – to name 15 squares in the city of Riyadh after the imams and kings of the state, coinciding with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s celebration of Founding Day, which falls on February 22 of each year. This generous directive comes as an embodiment of the care and attention of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and His Highness the Crown Prince – may God protect them – to consolidate the great legacy of the Imams and Kings of the State who had the merit – after God – in establishing and unifying this lofty entity, developing and flourishing it, enhancing its gains, preserving its capabilities, protecting its land, maintaining its security and raising its people for more than 300 years until the present day. The 15 squares are distinguished by their locations that come on the main roads of the capital, Riyadh.
King: The state’s approach is firmly rooted in security, justice and pure faith
The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – may God protect him – affirmed his pride in the anniversary of the founding of the state three centuries ago. He said, may God protect him, via the “X” platform: “We are proud of the anniversary of the founding of our blessed state three centuries ago on security, justice and pure faith, and its approach has remained firmly rooted since then, in a nation advancing towards leadership in various fields.
Putin thanks Crown Prince for hosting talks with America
His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, received a phone call the day before yesterday from His Excellency President Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation. At the beginning of the call, the Russian President expressed his thanks and appreciation to the Kingdom and His Royal Highness the Crown Prince for the Kingdom’s hosting of the fruitful talks between Russia and the United States of America. During the call, the two leaders also praised the depth of relations between the two countries and the keenness to develop them in various fields. For his part, His Royal Highness the Crown Prince – may God protect him – stressed the Kingdom’s commitment to making all possible efforts to enhance security and peace in the world, believing that dialogue is the only way to resolve all international crises.
Under the patronage of the King.. The Crown Prince supervises the Saudi Cup race ceremony
Under the patronage of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – may God protect him – His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, yesterday evening, Saturday, the Saudi Cup race ceremony in its sixth edition, which is the most expensive in the world with financial prizes amounting to 38.1 million dollars, including 20 million dollars for the main race whip, at the King Abdulaziz Equestrian Field in Riyadh. Upon his arrival, His Royal Highness the Crown Prince was received by His Royal Highness Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Abdulaziz, Governor of Riyadh Region, Prince Bandar bin Khalid bin Faisal bin Abdulaziz, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Equestrian Authority and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Horse Racing Club, Prince Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Abdulaziz, Deputy Governor of Riyadh Region, and Prince Abdullah bin Khalid bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, Member of the Board of Directors of the Horse Racing Club and Chairman of the Technical Committees. His Royal Highness the Crown Prince was accompanied by Prince Salman bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, Governor of Madinah Region, Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki bin Faisal bin Abdulaziz, Minister of Sports, Prince Abdulaziz bin Saud bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz, Minister of Interior, and Prince Abdullah bin Bandar bin Abdulaziz, Minister of the National Guard. The Royal Anthem was played before the start of the race. After the end of the last round of the ceremony for the Saudi Cup, which is 1800 meters long, His Highness the Crown Prince crowned the Japanese owner, Sesuma Fujita, with the cup after his horse (Forever Young) won first place. His Highness also presented a cup to the trainer, Yahagi, and another to the jockey, Sakai.
Founding Day.. A renewed vision towards a promising future A solid approach
Khaled Al-Rubaish
The Saudi citizen continues to live in a state of happiness on the founding day of the Kingdom, amidst exceptional celebratory manifestations, in which all age groups participate, rejoicing in the country’s progress, and the achievements and transformations it has achieved, which have reshaped Saudi history, and documented in its white pages, offensive stations, which confirm that this country has inspiring leaders, armed with determination, perseverance and faith in God, in order to establish a country based on sound principles and solid foundations, which are respected and appreciated. The words of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz – may God protect him – on this occasion, were a summary of the country’s most prominent achievements during its development journey, when he said – may God protect him: “We are proud of the memory of the founding of our blessed state three centuries ago on security, justice and pure faith,” and his words – may God support him – carried a message pointing to the future of this country, which is full of hope, saying: “Its approach has remained steadfast since then, in a country that is advancing towards leadership in various fields.” The anniversary of the founding day this year recalls events that are 298 years old, according to what the historian Dr. Rashid Muhammad Asaker indicated in a comment on his personal account on the “Ex” platform, indicating that the history of this country is approaching the completion of three centuries, which reflects the historical and cultural depth of the journey of this country, and the important events it witnessed, which reshaped the history of the Arabian Peninsula. The least description of the citizens’ joy on the Founding Day is that it was characterized by universality, pride and boasting about the history of this country. This is embodied in the manifestations of popular celebration, in which various media outlets participated, which continue to sing about the love of the country. The manifestations of celebration spread themselves on the streets and squares, and reached homes, governmental and civil institutions, and shopping malls, in addition to everyone wearing green national slogans, exchanging congratulations, and their smiling eyes sending messages of love for the country. The blessed Kingdom is proudly and steadily moving forward, knocking on the doors of a promising and bright future, under the umbrella of Vision 2030, which established a nation advancing with confident steps in all fields. Here we are reaping the fruits of that vision, with clear development witnessed by the world, which sees that the Kingdom has achieved everything it dreams of, and is striving for at a rapid pace and confident steps. The Founding Day will remain an important national occasion, indicating the determination of the leaders of this country and their insistence on establishing a Muslim state that adheres to the Book of God and the Sunnah of His Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, raising the slogan of justice, unity and security, which are Saudi constants that will remain, God willing, until God inherits the earth and those on it.
At the kind invitation of the Crown Prince.. A brotherly consultative meeting in Riyadh
At the kind invitation of His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, a brotherly consultative meeting was held in the city of Riyadh on 22 Shaaban 1446 AH, corresponding to February 21, 2025 AD, with the participation of His Majesty King Abdullah II bin Al Hussein, King of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, His Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Emir of the State of Qatar, His Excellency President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, President of the Arab Republic of Egypt, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates, and His Highness Sheikh Meshal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, Emir of the State of Kuwait. His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince and Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Bahrain. During the meeting, consultations and exchange of views on various regional and international issues took place, especially the joint efforts in support of the Palestinian cause, and developments in the Gaza Strip. In this context, the leaders welcomed the holding of the emergency Arab summit scheduled to be held in Cairo on March 4, 2025.
The “Priority Summit” emphasizes the importance of shaping the future of global investment and economic resilience.
The work of the “Priority Summit” presented by the Future Investment Initiative Foundation, which was held during February 19-21, concluded in Miami. Richard Attias, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Future Investment Initiative Foundation, opened the second day of the Priority Summit in Miami, addressing the interconnected challenges facing the world in economic growth, resilience, climate change, emerging technologies, and geopolitical transformations, and addressing how to direct capital to be a force for good. For her part, Her Royal Highness Princess Reema bint Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, Ambassador of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques to the United States of America, stressed the importance of investment and financial growth, touching on the importance of investments directed towards achieving the goal of building a more equitable, resilient and sustainable world. The Priority Summit in Miami brought together senior leaders, investors and policymakers in the world to address the urgent challenges and opportunities shaping the global economy, stressing the urgent need for flexible and purposeful investment strategies.
Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques directs naming 15 squares in Riyadh after Imams and Kings of the State
Based on what was submitted by His Royal Highness the Crown Prince and coinciding with the Kingdom’s celebration of Founding Day In commemoration of the Imams and Kings of the Saudi State; Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – may God support him – based on what was submitted by His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister – may God protect him – to name 15 squares in Riyadh after Imams and Kings of the State, coinciding with the Kingdom’s celebration of Founding Day, which falls on February 22 of each year. This generous directive comes as an embodiment of the care and attention of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and His Highness the Crown Prince – may God protect them – to preserve the great legacy of the Imams and Kings of the world, who are the ones who have the failure – after God – in establishing and unifying this lofty entity, developing and perfecting it, strengthening its capabilities, preserving its land, and maintaining its security and the advancement of its people for more than 300 years until the present day.
It is distinguished by its locations that come on the main roads of the Iraqi capital; The generous directive included the following: (Imam Muhammad bin Saud Square, Imam Abdulaziz bin Muhammad Square, Imam Saud bin Abdulaziz Square, Imam Abdullah bin Saud Square, Imam Turki bin Abdullah Square, Imam Faisal bin Turki Square, Imam Abdullah bin Faisal Square, Imam Abdulrahman bin Faisal Square, King Abdulaziz Square, King Shiekh Square, King Faisal Square, King Khalid Square, King Fahd Square, King Abdullah Square, King Salman Square.
The King and the Crown Prince receive congratulations on the anniversary of the Founding Day
The two leaders of the Royal Family, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – may God protect him – receive the congratulations of His Majesty King Abdullah II bin Al-Hassan
King of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day.
In a cable sent to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, His Majesty expressed, on his behalf and on behalf of the people and government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, his best wishes and brotherly feelings on this occasion, asking God Almighty to return it to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques while he enjoys abundant health and well-being, and to the people of the Kingdom to achieve further progress and prosperity under his wise leadership. His Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Emir of Qatar, congratulated his brother, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – may God protect him – on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day. His Excellency Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani, Deputy Emir of Qatar, and His Excellency Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State of Qatar, in two cables, congratulated the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day of the Kingdom. His Excellency President Dr. Rashid Mohammed Al-Alimi, Chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council of the Republic of Yemen, in a cable, congratulated his brother, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – may God protect him – on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day. His Excellency also congratulated, in a cable, His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, on the occasion of the founding anniversary. His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, King of the Kingdom of Bahrain, offered his congratulations to his brother, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, on the occasion of the anniversary of the founding day. In a telegram sent to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, His Majesty wished them good health, happiness and a long life, and for the people of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia further progress, prosperity and advancement under their wise leadership. On this occasion, His Majesty praised the comprehensive civilizational and developmental achievements made by the Kingdom in various fields and sectors, which have strengthened the Kingdom’s position at the regional and international levels. His Majesty expressed his deep appreciation for the strong fraternal relations that unite the two countries and brotherly peoples, and the continuous development and growth witnessed by them at all levels, stressing his constant aspiration to continue and develop these historical relations between the two countries, and to advance them in various aspects of joint work and coordination, in a way that meets and achieves the ambitions and aspirations of the two brotherly peoples. His Majesty the King of the Kingdom of Bahrain also sent a cable of congratulations to His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, in which he expressed his sincere congratulations and wishes for His Highness good health and happiness on this national occasion.
From my side, I congratulate His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince and Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Bahrain, in a cable, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – may God protect him – on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day.
His Royal Highness the Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Bahrain also congratulated, in a cable, his brother His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day. His Royal Highness Sultan Haitham bin Tayyar, Sultan of Oman, also congratulated, in a cable, his brother, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – may God protect him – on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day. I extend my sincere congratulations to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, and my sincere wishes to him – may God protect him – for good health, happiness and a long life, coupled with a prayer to God Almighty to bring back this occasion and others like it, and to achieve more of what the people of the Kingdom aspire to in terms of progress, development and prosperity. His Excellency President Mahmoud Abbas, President of the State of Palestine, congratulated the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – may God protect him – on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day. In a telegram sent to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, His Highness the Amir said: “The Founding Day affirms the historical, cultural and civilizational depth of the Kingdom, and the goals it entails that enhance its deep roots, the strength of the relationship between the people and their leadership, the unity, stability and security of the Jewish state, the Jewish state’s support for the Yemeni people, and the great success in achieving further development and prosperity, within the framework of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030, and the Kingdom’s high status regionally and internationally.”
His Excellency called on God Almighty to grant the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques success in achieving what the Kingdom and its people aspire to,
renewing great pride in the historical and solid relations between the two countries and brotherly peoples, appreciating the Kingdom’s permanent and continuous support for the Palestinian people in building their independent state with sovereignty and geographical integration, and the distinguished efforts to achieve the recognition of the State of Palestine. His Excellency President Abbas asked God Almighty to grant the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques health and happiness, and the Kingdom, its government and its people continued progress and prosperity. His Excellency the President of the State of Palestine also congratulated His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day. In a cable sent to His Highness the Crown Prince, he renewed his pride in the historical bilateral relations with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and his keenness to strengthen them for the good of the two brotherly countries and peoples. His Highness Sheikh Mishaal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, Emir of Kuwait, congratulated his brother, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – may God protect him – on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day. In a telegram sent to the two Holy Mosques, His Highness the Amir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah praised the remarkable civilizational and developmental achievements made by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in various fields and regions, which have enhanced its prestigious position in the international community. His Highness the Amir of the State of Kuwait expressed his deep pride in the solid fraternal relations that unite the two noble families, which were embodied in the shared historical positions between them, and his praise for the close ties that unite the two countries, asking God Almighty to grant his brother, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, good health and complete wellness to continue leading the Kingdom’s progress and development, and to achieve for it and its noble people further progress and prosperity under the wise leadership. His Highness Sheikh Mishaal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, Emir of the State of Kuwait, also congratulated His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, on the occasion of the Founding Day. In a cable sent to His Highness the Crown Prince, His Highness praised the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s outstanding political and developmental achievements in various fields. I would like to express my deep appreciation for the strong historical and fraternal relations that unite the two brotherly countries and peoples, stressing the keenness and constant aspiration to strengthen them and advance the horizon of cooperation between them at all levels, asking God Almighty to grant His Highness the Crown Prince good health and well-being, and for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its noble people further progress and prosperity under the wise leadership. His Highness Sheikh Sabah Khaled Al-Hamad Al-Sabah, Crown Prince of the State of Kuwait, also congratulated the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – may God protect him – on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day. In a cable sent to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, His Highness the Crown Prince congratulated the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques on the great achievements and accomplishments made by the Kingdom, praying to God Almighty to grant His Highness the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques good health and wellness, and to achieve for the Kingdom all progress and prosperity under his wise leadership. In a similar cable, the Crown Prince of Kuwait congratulated His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day. His Highness the Crown Prince congratulated the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and His Highness the Crown Prince on the occasion of the Founding Day. His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, and His Highness Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Presidential Court, also congratulated the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – may God protect him – on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day. His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and His Highness Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan also congratulated, in telegrams, His Highness the Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day.
His Majesty King Mohammed VI, King of the Kingdom of Morocco, congratulated his brother, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud
may God support him – on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day. In a cable sent to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, His Majesty expressed his congratulations on this happy national occasion, asking God Almighty to bestow further progress and prosperity on the Kingdom, under the wise leadership. The King of Morocco praised the strong fraternal relations between the two countries, stressing keenness to continue working to develop bilateral relations and consolidate them in various areas of constructive cooperation, asking God Almighty to grant the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques good health, wellness and a long life. His Majesty King Mohammed VI also sent a similar congratulatory cable to His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Chairman of the Council of Ministers – may God protect him – in which he expressed his warmest congratulations and best wishes for progress and prosperity, praying to God Almighty to grant His Highness continued health and happiness, and to grant him success in his lofty duties. In a cable sent to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, His Excellency said: “The Founding Day confirms the deep roots of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the legacy of its ancient people,” expressing his wishes for the Kingdom’s continued progress on the paths of prosperity, development and peace. He also affirmed his determination to continue developing relations between the two countries in various fields and strengthening ties between the two peoples, who are bound by ties of mutual love and appreciation. President Ayoub prayed to Allah the Almighty to grant success to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and grant him continued health, and to protect the Kingdom and bestow upon it all good. His Excellency the Lebanese President also congratulated His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister – may God protect him – on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day. In a telegram sent to His Highness the Crown Prince, he said: “The Founding Day bears witness to the progress of the Kingdom of Jordan in the unity and solidarity of the two nations and the leadership of the sons of one land,” affirming his pride in the ties that unite the two peoples, and the historical relations between the two countries, which were reflected by the Kingdom’s standing by Lebanon in various circumstances and stages, and its support in facing challenges.
His Excellency prayed to God Almighty to preserve the Kingdom with His care, bestow His blessings upon it, and to grant His Highness the Crown Prince continued health and success.
For his part, His Excellency the President of the Arab League, Mohammed bin Ahmed Al-Yamahi, extended his highest congratulations and best wishes to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, and to His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister – may God protect them – on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day. Al-Yamahi said: The Founding Day is a day of loyalty and allegiance to the founding leaders of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a symbol of national unity and belonging, and a national and Arab occasion during which we remember the blessed path upon which the Kingdom was founded, and which the loyal sons of the nation followed with steady steps that made the Kingdom a pioneering model to be emulated in all fields, in addition to its solid Arab, regional and international position, thanks to the wise and prudent leadership of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and his Crown Prince – may God protect and preserve them. His Excellency the President of the Arab League stressed that the “Foundation of the Saudi State” Day represents a precious memory in the hearts of all Arabs and Muslims, calling on God Almighty to preserve the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, its wise leadership and its dear people, and to keep its flag flying high, and its legacy of humanitarian giving extending throughout history. His Excellency the Secretary-General of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Mr. Jassim Mohammed Al-Yabidiwi, congratulated the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, and His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister – may God protect them – on the occasion of the anniversary of the Founding Day. His Excellency stressed that this occasion holds a special and precious place for the sons of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and is a testimony to the great legacy and remarkable achievements that have embraced the sky of ambition under the wise leadership that has set its sights on development and prosperity for its people, thereby signaling progress and advancement for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and reflecting the glory and pride that the Kingdom has reached and the regional and international status that the Kingdom enjoys, including the important and pivotal role that the Kingdom plays in the Gulf Cooperation Council. His Excellency called on God Almighty to preserve the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, its King, government and people, and to perpetuate the blessings of security, safety and prosperity on the GCC countries and their peoples, under the leadership of Their Majesties and Highnesses, the leaders of the GCC countries – may God protect and preserve them.
The leadership congratulates the Governor-General of Saint Lucia
The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, sent a cable of congratulations to His Excellency Mr. Cyril Errol Melchides Charles, Governor-General of Saint Lucia, on the occasion of his country’s Independence Day. The King expressed his sincere congratulations and best wishes for His Excellency’s health and happiness, and for the government and people of Saint Lucia to continue progress and prosperity. For his part, His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, sent a cable of congratulations to His Excellency Mr. Cyril Errol Melchior Charles, Governor-General of St. Lucia, on the occasion of his country’s Independence Day. His Highness the Crown Prince expressed his best congratulations and sincere wishes for good health and happiness to His Excellency, and for the government and people of St. Lucia further progress and prosperity.
Foundation Day.. A renewed vision towards a promising future Dr. Muhammad Ayman Sousan
Foundation Day is considered a defining event not only in Saudi history but also in the history of the region and the world, due to the power and depth that distinguishes the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its impact on all regional and international developments. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia represents a spiritual reference for more than a billion Muslims who are in dire need of this reference to uphold the true religion and confront the campaigns of distortion and misinformation to which it is exposed as a result of the practitioners of extremist takfiri ideas and trends that have harmed the image of Islam, which is primarily characterized by the belief in tolerance, moderation and balance. It is far from extremism, fanaticism and excommunication of others. It is a religion that says, “If you were rude and hard-hearted, you would have disgraced those around you.” It is also a belief that says, “You do not guide whom you love, but Allah guides whom He wills.” It is a thought that says, “When did you enslave people while their mothers bore them?” These values of the true Islamic religion belie those Takfiris who attempt to appoint themselves as guardians of the true Islam and distribute the keys to Heaven and Hell according to their vision that belies the principles and values of tolerant Islam. They exploit religion only to achieve interests and goals that are far removed from religion, and more than that, they harm it and have made the leaders of these extremist movements the greatest threat to Islam and its moral and human values. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with its Arab affiliation, embodies an Arab project whose importance and vitality we can sense through the reality experienced by most Arab countries, which were torn apart by the nationalist drive that planted the seeds of discord and concerns among members of the Arab family, and led to a state of division and weakness in the Arab ranks, and flabbiness and misery in many Arab countries and a loss of hope for the future for millions of Arabs, which made everyone interfere in the affairs of Arab countries to serve their goals and agendas, whether from the countries of the region or from outside it, and we have recently witnessed Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, and the internal wars that are tearing apart other Arab countries are evidence of the complete suffering that some Arab countries are suffering from, and most of these countries are a result of the doctrines that have controlled these countries for decades after colonialism, which has made many of their peoples feel a sense of nostalgia for the days of the colonizers and the path that their countries have taken as a result of the false doctrines that ruled those countries. In the face of this tragic reality, it is not strange that the Arab people in various countries look to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the developmental renaissance it is witnessing in various fields, making it a beacon and a model to be emulated in wise governance that works tirelessly to secure a promising future for the Saudi cause, which is steadfastly marching behind its wise leadership to build a homeland that all people aspire to and that Lebanon is moving towards. The leadership of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, and the sound vision of His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, have proven that the establishment is a renewed vision based on a rich legacy that reflects reality and whose eyes look to the future, making the Kingdom a permanent workshop for development, growth and progress, and providing it with a distinguished position on the regional and international scene. The Kingdom’s development vision is not limited to its borders, but extends to the entire Arab region, out of Arab belonging and a sense of responsibility towards the sons of the Arab family. Let us remember what His Highness the Crown Prince said: “I believe that the new Europe is the Middle East. This is the war of the Saudis and this is my personal war. I do not want to leave life without seeing the Middle East at the forefront of the world’s ranks, and I believe that this goal will be achieved 100%.” Likewise, Prince Mohammed bin Salman said: “We assure the entire world that the Arabs will be ahead of progress and renaissance once again.” Others, and we will prove that every day. All of this makes this vision a review of the political thought that ruled the Arab world for decades, dragged states into it, and killed hope in the souls of the Arab cause. The glorious founding day and the sound vision of the Kingdom’s leadership today establish an exclusive Arab development project that restores prestige to our nation, tells the story of the glorious Messiah with the spirit of authenticity and modernity, achieves stability, restores the nation’s interests, and creates new hope for the Arab cause, far from hollow sentiments, false speeches, and empty bravado. Today, we are in greater need of such thinking and such a vision, which makes the founding day not just a memory, but a reality that we live every day, and a necessity for a better tomorrow.
Prince of Qassim reviews the new identity of road security
His Royal Highness Prince Dr. Faisal bin Mas`al, Prince of Qassim Region, reviewed the new identity of road security patrols, and the latest security technologies and equipment used to enhance security and safety on the roads. His Highness listened to a presentation from the Director of Qassim Region Police, Major General Ali Al-Qahtani, about the new developments in the road security system. His Highness the Emir of Al-Qassim Region praised the efforts made to develop security equipment and rely on the latest technologies in monitoring roads and facilitating traffic, stressing that these steps come within the framework of ensuring the enhancement of security and safety for citizens and residents, and supporting security efforts aimed at achieving the highest standards of protection on the roads. His Highness noted the vital role played by the Special Forces for Road Security in the region, stressing the importance of continuing to work to enhance traffic security and provide the best services to travelers and transit passengers. The meeting was attended by the Director of Road Security in the Qassim region, Colonel Youssef Al-Sabnet. On the other hand, His Highness received in his office in the Emirate of Buraidah the Executive Director General for Regional Development at the Ministry of Economy and Planning, Talal Al-Sahli, who presented to His Highness a report on the comparative advantage of the Al-Qassim region for the year 2025 AD. His Highness praised the efforts of the Ministry of Economy and Planning in preparing this report, which highlights the economic and developmental components that distinguish the region, and enhances the optimal opportunities for investment and how to benefit from the available resources to achieve sustainable development, noting the region’s competitive advantages in the agricultural, industrial and logistical sectors, which enhance its role in supporting the targeted Vision 2030 On the other hand, His Highness sponsored the launch of the Cooperative Sectors Forum organized by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development, with the participation of a number of officials and leaders of the region, along with experts and specialists in the cooperative sector, at the Community Development Center in Buraidah. After sponsoring the forum, the Emir of Al-Qassim Region stressed its importance and the workshops it includes that aim to support and strengthen the cooperative sector. His Highness also touched on the prominent role of cooperative societies in the region, especially in the agricultural and development fields, praising their success in strengthening cooperative work. His Highness stressed that cooperative societies represent a fundamental pillar in strengthening collective work and achieving sustainable development in the Al-Qassim region and the Kingdom in general. His Highness regretted that the cooperative societies in Al-Qassim have demonstrated a distinguished presence in various fields, especially in the agricultural sector, as these societies contribute to raising the efficiency of agricultural production and enhancing food security for citizens, which positively reflects on the local economy and families. His Highness noted that the cooperative societies contribute to achieving economic and social development by providing job opportunities for the young and old, while enhancing cooperation among members of society. His Highness noted that the wise leadership, may God protect him, pays great attention to supporting the cooperative societies and developing their capabilities in a way that achieves the sustainability of the sectors.
His Highness the Emir of Al-Qassim Region sponsored the sixth annual forum for female leaders,
which was held at the Emirate headquarters in Buraidah, as part of His Highness’s initiatives to support and empower women in the region, and enhance their participation in various fields. In his speech on this occasion, the Emir of Al-Qassim Region expressed his happiness in participating in the annual event that embodies the vision of the wise leadership in empowering Saudi women and enhancing their role in the national development process, noting the role of leadership and its interest in empowering women, which enabled him to The opportunity to assume leadership positions in various government and private sectors. He said: “Hassan in the Al Qassim region has been keen to empower women by assuming leadership positions and effectively involving them in decision-making, which reflects the great confidence in their abilities and capabilities. We are always proud of the distinguished steps taken to empower women and enhance their participation in development and families. An Assistant Undersecretary for Development Affairs has been appointed in the Emirate, the Women’s Development Committee has been established, and a periodic meeting has been established that includes more than 200 leadership members for the Empowerment Forum. Women and developing its initiatives, and establishing the “Kunooz” Association to support productive families, and establishing 14 volunteer teams led by an elite group of young men from the region to enhance social and volunteer work, leading to women heading eight civil associations, demonstrating the importance of providing appropriate job opportunities for women, and the division achieved first place among the Kingdom’s regions in localizing telecommunications and information technology sectors in line with its qualifications and ambitions, and contributing to achieving sustainable development and economic prosperity for the region. The ceremony included a speech by the Assistant Undersecretary for Development Affairs at the Emirate of Al-Qassim Dr. Fatima Al-Furaihi, in which she explained the noticeable transformations in supporting and empowering women in the region, and the emirate’s efforts to enhance their participation in local and regional work, drawing attention to the fact that the annual forum for female leaders is one of the initiatives of His Highness the Emir of the region, which aims to provide the necessary support to women, highlight the importance of empowering them in leadership positions, exchange experiences and knowledge, and build professional partnerships for promising female leaders. For her part, Dr. Amal Al-Habdan, a member of the Human Rights Commission Council, spoke about the achievements and qualitative developments in the field of women’s empowerment, indicating that the Kingdom has made women a fundamental element in the present and future, and has a major role in the Kingdom’s Vision 2030. She noted the efforts made by the wise government that contribute to empowering women to be able to participate in building the nation, indicating that the percentage of women’s participation in the region has reached 35.4%, thus exceeding the target.
The Governor of Diriyah visits the “Place of History” initiative and learns about the security legacy.
His Highness Prince Fahd bin Saad bin Abdullah bin Turki, Governor of Diriyah, visited the Ministry of Interior’s “Place of History” initiative at the historic Jubail Police Center, which is the first police center in the central region and embodies a prominent landmark that tells the story of security, stability and development in the Kingdom. During the visit, His Highness viewed rare archaeological artifacts that were displayed for the first time, including historical swords, daggers, and weapons that were used at that time, as well as some traditional crafts in the historic Al Jubailah market, and the mud houses surrounding the center. He also watched camel and horse shows from the Ministry of Interior, accompanied by various musical performances. The initiative to rehabilitate the historical Jubail Police Center comes within the framework of the Ministry of Interior’s keenness to preserve the historical security legacy, which embodies the security journey in the Kingdom since its establishment more than 300 years ago, through the restoration and rehabilitation of historical sites associated with its mission, emphasizing its pivotal role in maintaining security and strengthening national identity.
125 contestants compete for the King Salman Award for Memorizing the Qur’an… tomorrow
The Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Call and Guidance has completed the final preparations and arrangements for the local competition for the King Salman bin Abdulaziz Award for the Servants of the Two Holy Mosques for Memorizing, Reciting and Interpreting the Qur’an for boys and girls in its twenty-sixth session for the year 1445 AH, whose final selection will be held tomorrow in the city of Al-Rays. The Minister of Islamic Affairs, Call and Guidance, Sheikh Dr. Abdullatif bin Abdulaziz Al Sheikh,
Thanks and appreciation to the servants of the Two Holy Mosques and His Highness the Crown Prince – may God protect them – for their care and sponsorship of every work that serves the Holy Book of God and instills its values in the souls of the sons and daughters of the nation, indicating that holding this competition annually at the expense of the servants of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz – may God support him – translates his great care to support this Quranic forum, which has become a prominent landmark for the honorable breathing of the sons and daughters of the nation in the greatest outlet for memorizing the Holy Book of God, the first source of Islamic guidance and the wellspring of guidance. For all of humanity. Minister Al-Sheikh confirmed that the Ministry has completed all its preparations to receive the participants in this competition and provide them with all the necessary facilities in preparation for their reception and their relaxation in the final selection of the competition. It has harnessed all human and technical capabilities to distinguish the outcomes of this competition in line with its name, in the name of the servant of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz – may God support him – May God reward the servants of the Two Holy Mosques and His Highness the Crown Prince with all the best for their care and concern for what serves The books of God and His guardians who are the people of God and His treasure. The final selection will be held during the period from 25 Sa’ban 1446 AH to 29 Sa’ban 1446 AH, while the final ceremony for the boys will be held on Sunday 2 Ramadan 1446 AH, and the ceremony for the girls will be held under the auspices of the wife of the servants of the Two Holy Mosques, Her Highness Princess Fahda bint Fahd Al Hathleen on Monday 3 Ramadan 1446 AH. The competition includes six branches: The first: Memorizing the Holy Quran in full with good performance and intonation with the seven consecutive readings from the two methods of Al-Sutbiyya and Al-Taysir, narration and knowledge. The second branch: Memorizing the Holy Quran in full with good performance and intonation and interpreting the vocabulary of the Holy Quran. The third branch: Memorizing the Holy Quran in full with good performance and intonation. The fourth branch: Memorizing twenty consecutive parts with good performance and intonation. The fifth branch: Memorizing ten consecutive parts with good performance and intonation. The sixth branch: Memorizing five consecutive parts with good performance and intonation. The final selection will include 125 male and female competitors who qualified from the previous stages. The winners will be honored and presented with prizes worth seven million riyals during the closing ceremony.
EU Ambassador to Saudi Arabia celebrates Founding Day
Christophe Fernand, EU Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, celebrated the anniversary of the founding of the Kingdom, in a special event in Diriyah, highlighting the long-standing close relationship between the EU and the Kingdom. He said: We celebrate the vision, strength and resilience of the Kingdom, which has transformed it into the prosperous and influential nation it is today. The EU is proud to host this important national occasion in the Kingdom, which reminds us all of the long-standing friendship between the two peoples. The relationship between the European Union and the Kingdom is based on shared values, commitment to peace, stability and mutual respect, especially in the fields of culture, commerce, technology and environmental sustainability. Through cooperation on regional and international issues, the two sides enjoy a close relationship that continues to grow and develop. He stressed the importance of continuing this warm cooperative spirit, especially in the face of international challenges, adding: “At a time when we face an increasingly complex world, it is more important than ever to celebrate and enhance this partnership and strengthen our common synchronization towards progress, security and prosperity. Our friendship and shared vision form a solid foundation for facing these challenges and seizing opportunities for the future.” The Ambassador event was held within the “Saudi Bonjour” initiative in the Diriyah area, where the guests enjoyed traditional food and workshops that showcased the best of Saudi cultural heritage.
Dr. Sulaiman Al Habib Specialist Hospital successfully implants the latest AVEIR™ wireless pacemaker for an “octogenarian”
Dr. Sulaiman Al Habib Specialist Hospital has successfully performed a unique operation in which the latest AVEIR™ VR LEADLESS ABBOTT PACEMAKER wireless pacemaker was implanted for an “octogenarian” patient suffering from severe slowing of the heartbeat, which resulted in severe symptoms, according to Dr. Faisal Al Samidi, Consultant Cardiologist and Coronary Angiography, Head of the Medical Team. Dr. Al-Sumaidi: The patient was rushed to Dr. Sulaiman Al-Habib Specialist Hospital, suffering from severe symptoms, most notably dizziness, frequent loss of consciousness, vertigo, memory problems, and a rapid feeling of fatigue when engaging in any physical activity. He was immediately subjected to several medical tests, an electrocardiogram, blood tests, a thyroid hormone test, blood salts, and potassium. The results showed a severe slowing of the heart rate, and he was subjected to The medical team studied the case and concluded that there was a need for urgent medical intervention to stop the consequences of the heart failure and eliminate the acute symptoms. A treatment plan was developed, according to which the intervention was carried out via cardiac catheterization and the implantation of an advanced wireless pacemaker known as the AVEIR™ VR LEADLESS ABBOTT PACEMAKER. The operation took “20” minutes and was performed under local anesthesia. The patient was then transferred in a stable condition to the cardiac intensive care unit, where he remained for about “24” hours. Intensive medical care, before he left the hospital in good health and on his feet. Dr. Al-Sumaidi added that the AVEIR pacemaker is one of the latest and most advanced devices in the Kingdom, and is distinguished from other pacemakers by the absence of wires, as it is implanted directly in the heart and its complications are significantly less than pacemakers that are implanted in the upper chest. It is also characterized by a long battery life, as it continues to work for 10 to 12 years. It is worth noting that the hospital’s Interventional Cardiac Catheterization Unit has great capabilities, as it includes a qualified medical staff with high certificates. In a qualitative leap in the services of this unit, the hospital has installed the first and most modern cardiac catheterization device in the Middle East and North Africa, GE HEALTHCARE ALLIA, which is characterized by the IGS 730 PULSE, which enhances the accuracy of diagnosis and treatment, implantation of stents and valves, facilitates catheterization procedures, supports three-dimensional imaging, and reduces From the exposure of the reviewers to radiation, as well as Osama Al-Marsa
The Ministry of Interior launches the “Place of History” initiative.
In conjunction with the celebration of the Founding Day, the Ministry of Interior launched the “Place of History” initiative at the historic Jubailah Police Station, which is the first police station in the central region, and a landmark that tells the glories of security, safety, and development.
The “Place of History” initiative activity includes a program
and various segments that start from the square surrounding the Jubailah Police Station overlooking Wadi Hanifa and overlooking the “Sabaa Al-Maf” road, the gateway to Najd and Makkah Al-Mukarramah, which is a witness to the security of trade caravans, Hajj and Umrah pilgrims, and visitors to the Two Holy Mosques since the beginning of the establishment. The event includes displaying archaeological materials that are being displayed for the first time, such as historical swords, daggers and weapons used at that time, passing by some of the ancient crafts in the historic Jubail market, the clay houses surrounding the center and all the way to the “Police Hill.” It includes performances in the squares surrounding the center and some sites in Wadi Hanifa, historical carriages from various eras, traditional military costumes, and traditional clothing from all regions of the Kingdom. The surrounding streets will witness various performances by the Ministry of Interior’s camel and cavalry, accompanied by various musical performances. The initiative to rehabilitate the historic Jubail Police Center comes within the Ministry’s keenness and commitment to preserving the historical security legacy that embodies the story of security in the Kingdom since its first establishment 300 years ago, through initiatives to restore and rehabilitate historical sites linked to the Ministry’s tasks that represent an important legacy in the process of building the nation.
The Memory of the Earth is an epic historical experience that revives the glories of the founding journey.
The Ministry of Culture organized the “Memory of the Earth” event on the occasion of Founding Day at the Lisson Valley Complex in Riyadh. It is a historical experience with successive timelines, reviving the glories of the founding journey, starting with the first Saudi state and ending with the future of the nation. The “Memory of the Earth” event tells the story of a journey that visitors live through time, starting from the establishment of the first Saudi state by Imam Muhammad bin Saud in 1139 AH / 1727 AD, and continuing to the establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by its unifier, King Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al Saud, and his sons, the kings after him – may God have mercy on them – until the prosperous era of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and His Crown Prince – may God protect them – through an interactive tour through different time periods, witnessing the most important historical events, prominent figures, fashions, and cultural and heritage elements that It distinguished each stage in the Kingdom’s ancient history, in addition to the various artistic performances on the Folk Arts Theater, which showcases a variety of folk arts and performances that reflect the Kingdom’s rich cultural heritage. The event also transports visitors to a lively and exciting experience, as they move between time periods in a unique way inspired by the nature and culture of the Kingdom, through the “Memory of the Earth” path, which includes (Fajr Diriyah, Shield of Riyadh, Evening of Al-Jazirah, and Samad Tuwaiq), where they live a unique journey through successive time stations, taking them back to the glories of the founding journey. The “Memory of the Earth” event receives visitors from 5 pm to 11 pm, over the course of three days.
Pillars tell the glories of the nation at King Saud University
The Acting President of King Saud University, Dr. Abdullah bin Salman Al-Salman, sponsored the university’s celebration of Founding Day, on the main stage of the university city for female students, in the presence of the university’s vice-presidents, deans of colleges, supporting deanships, and a number of university employees and students. A poem entitled “The Founder Came” was recited, telling the story of the generations’ pride in this country whose history spans three centuries, its events standing as a witness to the historical and cultural depth of the Saudi state. A national operetta entitled “The Family of Glory” was presented, telling the story of the nation’s glories, performed by a number of talented university students. During the ceremony, it was announced that the university president had approved the establishment of three student clubs that support the artistic talents of male and female students at the university. These clubs are the Music Club, the Design and Fashion Club, and the Cinema Club, in order to support the artistic talents and creativity of university students. The celebration witnessed the honoring of the university president for the winners of the best distinguished artistic works in the drawing competition for this occasion, with the participation of a number of creative and talented students and employees of the university, and partners of success from external parties who contributed to participating in the university’s celebration of this precious national occasion, and the manifestations of the celebration were completed by performing the Saudi wedding. The ceremony was accompanied by an exhibition that included corners that tell the essential and historical meanings related to the glories, heroism and antiquity of the lofty Saudi state, including the flag corner that reviewed the history of the national flag since the founding of the Kingdom. Talented university students also participated in the art corner, which included a number of paintings and photography, and a special corner for historical national melodies, in addition to the popular tent that reflects the authentic heritage with the participation of a number of university students, both male and female, in order to revive the heritage and take pride in history. The ceremony was held under the supervision and organization of the Deanship of Student Affairs to embody the cultural heritage, consolidate pride in the national identity, enhance awareness of the country’s history, and reflect the progress and development that the Kingdom has achieved over the years since its establishment. It also highlighted the university’s interest and support in celebrating national occasions to enhance the culture of historical heritage among university students and staff.
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