COM 140 (2025): Microsoft Word

You might wonder why you still need to understand the power and functionality of Word, when AI is becoming more powerful and capable? Microsoft Word is the most common software used by corporations, and it continues to modernize features and functionality, with Co-Pilot. It is still  the global standard for communication, organization, and productivity. Adding Copilot to Word helps you to write, edit, and understand other people's documents.  

Some Features and Benefits:

• Fine-tune your academic and creative work beyond spell check. Using AI with writing software tools such as Word can help improve the quality of the work. For example, you can prompt the AI to add a transitional sentence, or simplify a concept.
• Save time on rewrites, and potentially avoid writers block. Focus on thinking critically about what you want to write, and using the AI to refine the content. Copilot in Word can come up with different ways to structure or phrase a section. Ask Copilot to change spacing, margins, and page orientation, add or remove bullet points, and more.
• Change from Word to PDF; add special features, such as Word Art, shapes, and text boxes all with a few prompts.  
• Increase you own creativity. Jump-start your creativity by brainstorming with the AI, bouncing ideas off the software and thinking critically about the responses, which can then lead to more refined ideas.  
• Support groups projects. Working on a document with several authors can be frustrating, especially if everyone's writing style varies a lot.To fix this work with the group to determine what the tone and style the group wants, then, ask AI Word to maintain that tone and writing style across the document. 
• Get help understanding complex articles and documents. Business reports, technical documents, and other resources can be loaded with jargon and hard to understand. When you need to read something that’s "dense" you can prompt the AI to summarize the docusment or explain a paragraph in simpler terms.  “Summarize this for me in simpler language.” 
• Keep documents consistent. Maintaining consistency and formatting aligned in group projects and larger documents can be made easier. Just prompt the AI Copilot in Word to follow certain styles, such as centering all headings, and bolding them..

Be ready and able to demonstrate working with tables, table data, parts of a table, sorting data, formatting 
tables with styles, and creating footnotes & endnotes in a Word document, and also show you know how to add SmartArt, headers, footers, and a cover page, as well as insert symbols, special characters, objects, text boxes, and WordArt.Work with SmartArt, headers, footers, and a cover page. Insert symbols, special characters, objects, text boxes, and WordArt.

Draft Coach is an Add-in to ONLINE Microsoft Word. It checks for plagiarism, and compares your work to other work in TurnItIn. YOu can see the similarity score and plagiarism report prior to submitting it for grading. It ONLY works with Office 365 ONLINE Word. 

When adding the Turnitin Draft Coach add-in for the first time:

1. Create a blank document, or open an online Microsoft Word assignment.

2. Select Insert and then Add-ins.

3. From the Office Add-insl, select Admin Managed and then Turnitin Draft Coach.

   If the add-in does not appear, you may need to refresh your page and try again. If it does not appear after refreshing the page, it may not be set up for your institution. Contact your instructor and they can advise you.

4. The Turnitin Draft Coach panel will appear on the right-hand side of your document.

   If the panel fails to appear and an error message appears instead, ensure pop-ups are enabled in your browsers settings and try again.

5. Turnitin Draft Coach is ready to help! Select Get Feedback Now to get started.