Word Processing
Word Processing
This domain tests document creation, editing and professional formatting. Questions can cover character and paragraph formatting, tables, styles, headers and footers, find and replace, page setup, printing, and mail merge.
Core rules
- Character formatting changes fonts, size, bold, italic, underline and colour. Paragraph formatting changes alignment, indents, spacing and bullets.
- Margins are page-level space; indents are paragraph-level space. Line spacing controls distance between lines within a paragraph.
- A header or footer repeats text at the top or bottom of pages. A page break forces a new page; a section break allows different formatting.
- Mail merge combines a main document with a data source. The main document holds fixed text and merge fields; the data source holds records.
- Always preview the merged output before printing or saving.
Worked example
A school wants 40 result letters. The main document contains fixed text plus merge fields for Name and Roll Number. The data source is a table with one row per student and columns Name and Roll Number. Merging creates one letter per record, so 40 records produce 40 letters. If a filter is applied to include only students with Marks at least 60, only matching records are merged. The reasoning is that the main document supplies the layout and the data source supplies variable values.
Traps
Do not confuse a page break with a section break. Do not edit the data source after merging and expect old output to update automatically. Changing a file extension does not make it a different document format. Check field names for spelling, because a misspelt merge field produces an error or blank. Do not rely on spell check to catch wrong-word errors.