Word Processing Basics—EAS205

Word Processing Basics—EAJ205
This handout will not teach you everything there is to know about word processing in Japanese, but it will teach
you what you need in order to finish the homework assignments.
Many of the aspects of a manuscript can be put in either while you are typing or after the fact. These
instructions will tell you how to do this after the fact not because this is inherently better but rather because it’s
easier for the purposes of making this handout. Feel free to choose either method when you’re writing your
own paper.
When you open Microsoft Word 2007, you will see a screen that looks like this:
This is the “Home” ribbon. There are
also “Insert,” “Page Layout,” etc. ribbons
This screen is significantly different from the Windows 2003 screen. All the same functions are here, but not
necessarily where you’d expect them to be. First we’ll focus on file management, then move on to text
management.
The menu bar at the top is called a “ribbon” (what was wrong with “bar”? I don’t know, but if you want to use
the Help function, knowing the new terminology is helpful). Each “ribbon” covers a range of functions that are
represented by relatively intuitive icons. When you open a new file you will automatically begin with the
“Home” ribbon.
1

One of the most un-intuitive things about Word 2007 is where “Open” “Close” “Save” and other such basic
commands are located. Apparently someone at Microsoft decided that the old pull-down menu of “File” was
passé. Why not replace it with a non-descript icon? Hey, now that’s a great idea! (not). But that’s what they did.
In order to find all the basic file-management menu options, you need to click on the multi-colored icon on the
far left.
When you do this, you’ll get a pop-up menu that looks like this:
This should look familiar—at least, the choices should look familiar even if the layout
doesn’t. For the purposes of our class you will only need New, Open, Save, Save As, Print,
and Close.
Now, before we get into the actual text formatting, let me make one more observation: in
older Microsoft products the “Help” menu was always the furthest thing to the right,
regardless of which software you were using. In this version of Word it is still up to the right,
but not in the family of “ribbons,” where you’d expect it to be. Indeed, it is ALL the way to
the right, represented by an icon that looks like this:
O.K., let’s get started!
2

Everyone has his or her favorite screen layout. I’ll let you customize yours, but I have one piece of advice: life
will be much easier for you if you set your Word to show you the “ruler.” Here’s how you do that:
In the document, choose the “View” Ribbon:
One of your choices here is “Ruler” – check the box and you should see the “ruler” at the top of your page. This
will show you where your margins are set, and you can also use the little triangle icons to drag the margins to
your needs.
Centering and Enlarging Text
Once you have opened a new file, you can begin typing. Most machines are set up so that “Times New Roman”
is the default font and 12 pt. is the default font size. Note that both of these will be indicated on the “Home”
ribbon at the top of the screen. (If you need to change the font, click on the arrow to the right of the font box to
see your choices.) You can also expand the Font box by clicking on the lower right hand arrow
Begin by typing your title:
Now you need to do two things:
1) Center the text
2) Make the font bigger
To do both, first highlight all of the text (this is most easily done using the mouse).
Once you have done this, click on the “center text” icon on the “Paragraph” box and the text should move to a
center position (see diagram on next page).
3

Center Text Icon
Once you’ve done this, the title should still be highlighted. Now click on the font size box and choose a bigger
font—16 or 18 are usually best for a title. Put your name on the title page, too, and any other identifying
information you think necessary.
Now that you’ve done all this, you’ll have to “undo” it for the body of your paper. Hit return a couple times.
Your cursor will still be in the middle of the screen. Now, go back to the Paragraph box and click on the left
alignment button (to the left of the center alignment button you just clicked to center the text). Likewise,
change the font size to 12 pt. now your screen should look like this:
4

Inserting a Page Break
At this point you could hit “Enter” many time in order to get to a second page. But, if you change any
formatting or text later on, it could screw up your nice title page. The way around that is to “insert a page break”
after the last word on your title page (whatever that may be).
It’s pretty simple, really. On the “Insert” ribbon just click on “Page Break” and you’re done.
Adding Page Numbers
You can add page numbers to your text automatically—they will move if necessary without you having to pay
attention to them. You can choose their position (top, bottom, right, left) you can choose their style (Arabic or
Roman numerals, upper case or lower case, etc.), you can choose their font…the choices are wide and varied.
Once your papers get big and complicated (i.e., they have prefaces and introductions and they are hundreds of
pages long) there are some other formatting concerns to pay attention to. But right now, all you need to do is
learn the basics.
For your homework assignment, and, frankly, for most of the papers you’ll have to write as a college student,
you’ll want a title page. I can’t tell you how many students send me their papers as two files—one is the title
page and the other is the paper itself—because they can’t figure out how to make a title page. It is sloppy and
silly and a pain in the neck to keep the files straight on my end. The good news: this isn’t rocket science, so pay
attention and you’ll impress your professors:
Put your cursor at the beginning of your document, then choose the “Insert” ribbon:
Click on “Page Number” and you’ll get a new menu that looks like this:
5

I’ve chosen “Bottom of Page” here, but you could make a different choice depending on what you’re doing.
Once you click on your choice you’ll end up with a screen that looks like the screen shot on the next page.
6

There are a couple important things to note at his point. First, you are now in the “Header & Footer Tools” subribbon
of the “Design” ribbon.
If you want to change something about your page numbers, this is where you want to be. But, when you’re done
with formatting your page numbers you’ll need to click on the “Close Header and Footer” icon to escape.
Now, what you want to do to create a title page is 1) Remove the page number from your first page and 2) start
numbering from your 2 nd page. Not too hard, really.
Microsoft actually explains this adequately in their Help section, so I’ll give you their version:
7

Remove the page number from the first page
1. Click anywhere in the document.
2. On the Page Layout tab, click the Page Setup Dialog Box Launcher, and then click the Layout tab.
3. Under Headers and footers, select the Different first page check box, and then click OK.
Start numbering on the second page with 1
1. Follow the steps for removing the page number from the first page.
2. On the Insert tab, in the Headers & Footers group, click Page Number, and then click Format Page Numbers.
3. In the Start at box, type 0.
8

Double Spacing
Congratulations! Now you’re ready to type the body of your paper. You’ll need to double space the body. The
command to change spacing is also in the Paragraph box of the “Home” ribbon.
This icon is self-explanatory when you click on it, so let’s move on to a cautionary word: although it might
seem easier to hit the “Enter” key twice at the end of every line instead of using the Word functions, it will be a
headache in the end. If you edit or change things later the formatting will be all wrong. So, take a little extra
time at the start to set things up correctly and you’ll be happier in the end.
Also, when you indent your paragraph, use the “Tab” key, don’t type a bunch of spaces. Word then recognizes
what you’re doing is a paragraph, and when you get into fancier formatting this is really important. Also, most
fonts are not fixed width, so typing spaces does not guarantee the proper alignment.
OK, type two pages of text, being sure that it has the characteristics you’ll need for this assignment. Once
you’ve done that, return to this point.
Adjusting the spacing for indented quotations
When you have a very long quotation—more than a sentence—you should set it apart from the rest of your text
by single-spacing it, and adjusting the margins on both sides about 1/2 inch. This is easy to do: simply highlight
the text of the quotation with your mouse, then use the change spacing (see above). To move the margins, keep
the text highlighted and drag the ruler marker at the top of the page over to the desired location.
Footnotes
Word will automatically create nicely formatted footnotes (or endnotes) for you. This DOES NOT mean that it
magically inserts all the necessary information, but rather that it places the note in an appropriate place on the
page, and moves the note if the reference in the main text moves.
I know, you’re thinking that this is no big deal. But it is! Before such software was created, footnotes would be
inserted at the bottom of the page (using a typewriter—remember what those are?) and an author would have to
know exactly how long his/her footnote would be before beginning to type it, so as to leave enough room for
the whole thing while preserving the margins. A ruler next to your typewriter was a must. But I digress…
Put your cursor where you want the note to be and then click on the “References” ribbon and choose “Insert
Footnote”
9

The software will number it automatically and put it at the bottom of your page. You can add, delete, expand,
etc. as much as you like and the software will adjust. Nifty!
Italicizing
Most footnotes are references to your source. In this case, you’ll want to italicize the title of the work to which
you refer. You could underline it instead, but italicizing looks nicer (underlining was common when we used
typewriters, and there was no way to change font).
It’s easy to italicize—simply highlight what you want to change (using the mouse is easiest here) and then go to
the “Home” ribbon and click on the italic capital “I,” located between the bold “B” and the underlined “U.”
Voila, you have italicized. And, now you know how to make something bold type or underlined, too.
Running Spell Check
You’ve finished your paper and you’re happy. But it’s three in the morning and you’ve never been the most
accurate typist in the world. Trust me, this will not matter to your instructor: he or she will find it irritating to
receive a paper if you haven’t bothered to check the spelling. Word will automatically check your spelling for
you, underlining everything that’s wrong with a red, squiggly line. A green squiggly line means that the
grammar may be questionable. (These squiggly lines will not show up when you print the document.)
Word will also often fix problems for you as you type, which is handy. However, to be safe, it is best to double
check. Once you have finished typing, either go through and make sure EVERY red squiggly line is fixed OR
you can check using one of the Word tools.
Click on “Spelling & Grammar” on the “Review” ribbon.
Word will let you add vocabulary to your database, which is handy when the name of some Japanese, Chinese,
or Korean person is initially marked as misspelled (because Word doesn’t recognize it). Follow the Spell-check
window instructions—they are self-explanatory.
OK, now you’ve been working on your assignment for a goodly amount of time. Time to save! Just about
everyone has a battle story about losing tons of data because they didn’t save early and often. Protect your work!
Save!
Be sure to name your file something clear, and choose the directory where you will save it.
10

SPECIAL WORDPROCESSING ISSUES FOR STUDENTS OF JAPANESE
The electronic world is a wonderful place. We can input Japanese characters with very little effort, mix them up
with Roman Letters, insert glossing (furigana)…it is fantastic, really. The technology, software, and
standardization involved here did not really become cemented until about the year 2000 or 2001. Prior to that
there were all sorts of clunky methods, and prior to that (we’re talking mid-1990’s) there was essentially
nothing if you were working in an English language environment. Let’s just refer to them as the “bad old days.”
Inputting “symbols”
Japanese uses diacritical marks when it is Romanized. These marks are all available in Microsoft Word.
Inputting is not difficult, and one can even re-program one’s keyboard for shortcuts (however, if you do not
have your own computer and are relegated to using the computing center, you will not have permission to do
this). These instructions will only show you how to input the diacritical marks—reprogramming your keyboard
is relatively self-explanatory and up to you, should you wish to do so.
In your document, click on the “Insert” ribbon and the “Symbol” box:
When you do this, you’ll get an abbreviated menu of commonly used symbols. The ones you want may be there,
but most likely will not be there, (it depends who used what most recently on the computer) so you can then
click on “More Symbols” for a full menu that will look something like this:
12

Scrolling up and down the menu will give you a large number of choices. Clicking on your choice and then on
“Insert” will insert the symbol into your document.
If you want to re-program your keyboard, click on the button that says “shortcut key” –again, the process is
relatively intuitive.
Inputting Japanese Characters
Now for the fun part: typing in Japanese. You could, if you were feeling perverse, reprogram your keyboard so
that each key represented a kana, but I’ve never met a student who wants to do that so these instructions will be
for typing in Romanization only.
On your main screen, you should see a small blue box with “EN” on it. The location of this box could be
anywhere—like many menu bars, the user can move it at will. In the screen shot below, I’ve put it on the top
right-hand side:
This is the language bar. You can type in many different languages in Microsoft Word, but most versions don’t
automatically install it for you. The process is actually done at the level of Windows, not Word. And, it might
require that you install a Language Pack. Because there are so many variables, we don’t have time to work
through it in class, but I would recommend using the Word Help feature on your own machine. The first article
you want to read is “Step-by-step: Preparing your computer to type and edit text in another language.”
Now, I’ll assume that you’ve set up your computer to work with Japanese. Let’s get started!
Open a document and then click on the Language Bar. You’ll get choices of different languages (whatever you
have on your machine). Choose “Japanese” and your language bar will change appearance. It should look like
this:
The first thing you should do is change the Input Mode. Click on it and you’ll get a sub menu that looks like
this:
You want “Hiragana.” Now, when you type on your keyboard using Romanization, you should see Japanese.
13

When you enter Japanese it will first appear in hiragana, and will have a dotted line below it. If you hit the
Enter button the dotted line will disappear and the hiragana is “entered” into your document.
Entering kanji requires an additional step. First, type the word you want in hiragana. Next, hit the space bar.
You will get a “first choice” selection of kanji for the word. If you hit Enter, it will be entered into the document.
But maybe that’s not the kanji you want. To see more, hit the space bar again and you’ll get a menu of all the
kanji that might fit the phonetic selection you’ve typed. For example, if you type きこう and then hit the space
bar twice, this is what you should see:
Here, 紀行 was my first choice, but I didn’t want it. The next choice is 機構 and so
on. By using either the space bar or the arrows keys you can scroll through the menu
to find which set of kanji you want. Notice that the screen only shows ten at a time,
but that there are plenty more beyond that. Depending on how common the phonetic
combination you’ve entered is, this list can grow really long.
If you move your mouse over the little yellow call-out icons, you’ll get definitions
(albeit in Japanese) of each word. Not all words get an icon, though—only the ones
that some editor saw fit to annotate.
There are a few tricks you’ll need to get used to:
1. To enter ん you need to type nn (or, if the ん is in a word but not at the end, such as in ぶんぽう you
can type a single n and the software will figure it out)
2. To enter a small っ simply enter a double consonant. For example, typing katte will result in かって
3. To enter the particle を you need to type “wo” not “o”. There’s actually a phonetic reason for this, but
we won’t get to it for a few more units.
4. The software works with a number of Romanization systems simultaneously (this is not true for word
processing in Chinese, by the way). For example, in order to get ち, you can type either “chi” or “ti” (the
“ti” is from a Romanization system you’re probably not familiar with, but again, we’ll get there in a few
more units).
5. In order to get づ and ぢ you must type “du” and “di” respectively. Typing “zu” and “ji” will only result
in ず and じ.
6. To enter Japanese-style quotation marks use the bracket keys [ and ] to get「 and 」
7. The forward slash / key will give you this character in Japanese mode: ・ This is used to separate words,
such as your first and last name when written in katakana
8. The backward slash \ key will give you the yen symbol ¥
9. To write katakana, first type what you want in hiragana, then hit F7.
10. Periods and commas are the same keys as they are in English
14

11. Some characters, like 々 can be entered by writing a nickname for them. For example, I entered 々 by
typing “onaji” and then selecting it from a menu of characters that represent repetition:
The software remembers the last word you chose, so it will change the menus as you type. This is convenient if
you are using the same machine all the time, but less so if you’re using a public computer.
Now, one of the biggest drawbacks to the software is that it often does not dredge up the character you want,
even if you’ve correctly entered the reading of the character. But do not despair—there is a way to get what you
need. It is the IME pad, which you’ll find on the language toolbar:
Click on this and you’ll get a menu that looks like this:
Click on “Hand Writing” and you’ll get the following pop-up window:
15

Along the line in Word history, someone decided that this window should always open with the roof radical
represented. Don’t ask me why. It just happens. If you click on “Clear” you can clear the handwriting pad. Now
you can use your mouse to draw the character you want. As you do so, choices will appear in the middle box.
As soon as you see what you want, you can double click on it to enter it into the document.
Although you might think it some perverted conspiracy against Japanese language students, I have to tell you
that the software REALLY prefers that you write the character using the correct stroke order. If you don’t you
may end up wasting a lot of time looking for what you want.
16

The IME pad has other input methods, as indicated on the left-hand side:
If you click on these icons you’ll get other input methods. The one that I use the most often is the organization
by radical, but you might also use the total stroke order option. Let’s take a quick look at how the organization
by radical is done:
Within the strokenumber
category,
there are different
radicals. The one
chosen here is the
horse radical.
To get here in the
first place I clicked
on this icon 部,
which stands for
“radical”
Pull-down menu for finding radicals with
a certain number of brushstrokes
17

By the way, you can change the appearance of your Japanese the same way you can change the appearance of
English text (bold, italics, etc.) using the same tools as described above.
Vertical Text
So far we’ve only been looking at horizontal text. But as often as not, Japanese is written vertically. Word will
let you do that, too. You can compose horizontally then convert the text to vertical, or you can compose
vertically. Either way it is fairly easy. On the “Page Layout”
ribbon choose “Text Direction”
The choices you’ll get are as follows:
Entering a Japanese gloss (furigana)
By the way, if you click on “Text Direction Options” you’ll get essentially the same
choices, but in a little bit easier-to-decipher format.
There may be times when you want to gloss your kanji with hiragana to indicate the reading. This kind of gloss
is called furigana (振り仮名) Word makes this easy. First, enter the kanji in your document. Then, highlight it.
Next, in the “Home” ribbon, choose the ABC icon. When you do this, you’ll see that it is called “phonetic guide”
in Word parlance:
18

At this point you’ll get a new pop-up menu. The example below shows what happens when I enter the kanji for
“gakkō” 学校, highlight it, and then click on the ABC icon:
The software chooses what it anticipates the reading would be, and generally speaking, is right about 90% of
the time. But, if it isn’t, you can change it in this dialog box. You might also want to “offset” the text one point
or two, to keep it from being squished. The other settings you should probably not need to change. Once
everything looks good to you, click on OK and you should end up with glossed text.
You can gloss in either horizontal or vertical text. One thing to keep in mind is that if you later change the size
of the font in your main document, the glossing will not automatically change in proportion. So, make sure
you’ve got the font size where you want it before you add furigana.
Japanese Greetings
Word has a fun function that comes in handy when writing letters. It is the “Japanese Greetings” function, found
on the “Insert” ribbon:
When you click on “Japanese Greetings” you’ll get a small pull-down menu
that gives you three choices: “Greeting” “Opening” and “Closing”
Clicking on each choice will bring up different windows.
19

“Greeting” looks like this:
Be careful about which Greeting, Salutation and Statement of appreciation you choose. The Greeting isn’t too
hard to screw up (it always has to do with the weather) but the Salutation and the Statement of appreciation
differs depending on who you are writing to (a person, a company or office, etc.) Likewise, the Statement of
appreciation will differ depending on your relationship with the letter recipient.
The “Opening” choice brings up this window:
This is not terribly difficult, but notice that some of the openings are specific, like the 5 th one which indicates
that you’re asking a favor. Choose appropriately.
The “Closing” choice brings up this window:
20

Again, choose appropriately. Do not use the one I’ve highlighted here (“Please convey my kindest regards to
your wife”), for example, if you’re writing to a female colleague.
21