Taking a Break: Save As, Closing, and Exiting

We've made an excellent start. Now it's time to take a break, and we'll come back to review our document later. Meanwhile, what should we do with it?

Since this was a brand new document when we started, we need to give it a name. Our word processing software has assigned it a default name, but we'll probably want to give it a name that will help us remember what it is. Some systems will let us use as long a file name as we want, but many systems limit the name to eight characters, made up of letters and numbers.

Let's call our document "Practice". To save the document, we go to the "File" pull down menu and click on "Save As." A box will come up where we can enter which disk drive and which folder we want our document kept in, and the name of the document. We want our document kept in the folder called "My Documents" on the C: drive. If that folder is not the one showing, we can click on the "Up" arrow until we get all the way back to the C: drive. Then, we can look at the list of folders on the C: drive and click on the "My Documents" folder. Then we type in "Practice". Notice that for "Save As Type" we have "Word Document". Click on "Save."

Now here's something to think about. Your word processing software will save your document as a type of file that it recognizes, but other software packages may not be able to read that file type. Say you want to give a copy of your document to a friend who doesn't have the same word processing software you do. It would be nice for that friend to be able to use the file anyway. There is a way to do this.

What we do is have our word processing software convert the document to a format that can be read by other word processing software. The most universal format is Text format.

Let's save our file in Text format too. We'll use the "Save As" command in the file menu as we did before. Only this time we'll specify that the file type should be "Text Only." We will receive a warning that some of the formatting features will be lost. We are aware of that, so we will click on "Yes."

Now we have two documents saved. The first one is saved as a Word type file. The second one is saved as a Text file. There are two more things to do before we take our break. We need to close our document and close our word processing software.

We go to the "File" menu and click on "Close." If we have made changes to the document since we last saved it, the computer asks us if we want to save changes before we close the document. If we say "Yes," any changes we have made will be saved and the file will be closed. If we say "No" any changes we have made since we last saved the document will be lost when the document is closed. Finally, we go to the "File" menu and click on "Exit." This closes our word processing software.