Word Processing and Documentation
What the exam tests
This domain covers document creation and formatting, styles, page layout, tables, mail merge, reviewing tools, and printing or exporting. Practical items usually ask for the effect of a formatting choice or the correct menu route.
Core concepts
- Character formatting changes selected text (font, size, bold, colour); paragraph formatting changes the whole paragraph (alignment, line spacing, indent, space before and after).
- Styles bundle formatting under a name. Heading 1, Heading 2 and so on feed the automatic Table of Contents and the Navigation pane; directly bolded text does not.
- Page setup controls margins, orientation (portrait or landscape), paper size and columns. A page break starts a new page within the same section; a section break allows different headers, margins or orientation.
- Headers and footers repeat on every page; fields such as page number, date and file name update automatically.
- Track Changes records insertions and deletions for review; comments do not alter the text.
Worked example
A mail merge for 60 parents' letters. The main document holds the fixed text plus merge fields such as Name and Marks. The data source is a table or spreadsheet with one record per parent and a header row. Merging produces one letter per record; adding a filter such as Marks < 40 produces only those letters. The main document keeps the field codes, not the values, so editing the data source and re-merging is what changes the output.
Traps
- Pressing Enter repeatedly to push text down instead of setting paragraph spacing; the layout collapses the moment text is edited.
- Expecting a hand-typed contents list to update; only heading styles generate a live TOC.
- Saving as .docx when a fixed-layout, non-editable file is required - export to PDF instead.
- Treating spell check as grammar check: it flags neither wrong-word errors nor missing punctuation.