Word Processing

Prior to the invention of the personal computer, text had to be arranged in a number of different ways.

For personal use, you may have owned a typewriter; for large-scale publication, a typesetting machine or linotype.

"Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put

that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too."

-Brian Eno

The key benefit to modern word processing systems is the ability to edit, or simply put, change things after the fact.

On a typewriter or linotype, a writer was stuck with what they put down; they would have to start from scratch if they needed to fix a typographical error.

Microsoft Office

Some background: Office was first announced at the COMDEX conference in 1988 by Bill Gates; it consisted of only Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

Since then, it has grown to encompass additional applications such as Access and Outlook.

Microsoft Office is in fact so popular and widely used that Microsoft no longer

particularly cares about digital piracy of its Office tools for personal use, reasoning that even if an individual user pirates a copy of

Word for their own use, it simply means they will be most familiar with its interface and therefore incentivize major companies and corporations to purchase the Office suite.

Wizzywig?

Modern word processors now tend to use something known as a WYSIWYG editor, which stands for “What You See Is What You Get.”

A WYSIWYG editor allows a user to see the changes or edits they are making in real time, rather than at the time of publishing.

The Ribbon

Ribbon Interface Microsoft switched to the so-called

“ribbon interface” in its Office suite for the 2007 edition.

The ribbon is simply a series of tabs consisting of different toolsets, which run across the screen in an extensive menu bar.

You’ve already seen an example of a basic ribbon in MS Paint.