How to Save a file in Microsoft Word

o save the workyou have just done, you'll need to use the menu bar that runs right across the top. This is the menu bar:

Locate your menu bar, and click with your left mouse button on the word "File". This menu will drop down:

Move your mouse pointer to Save As and then click once with the left mouse button. You'll get the Save as dialogue box popping up. The Save As dialogue box will look like this:

There are three main areas to the Save As dialogue box: Where do you want to save your document? What do you want to call it? What type of document do you want to save it as?

We'll take the three areas in turn, starting with "Where do you want to save your document?"

The "Where" is set with the "Save in" Box right at the top. This one

As you can see, the Save in box says My Documents. This is the folder called "My Documents" that is on your C drive. In other words, if you clicked the "Save" button now, you'll be saving your work in your "My Documents" folder.

But you can save your work to anywhere you like on your computer. To see a list of places where you can save your work, click the little black down-pointing arrow just to the right of where it says "My Documents". You should get this

You can select any of those items on the list (though you might not have an E and F on yours). If you clicked on C, a list of folders on your C drive would appear in the big box below. Remember: you are being asked "Which folder do you want to save your work in?"

Leave it on "My Documents".

We can create a new folder in which to save our letter. To create a new folder, click on the New Folder icon, as shown in the image below:

You will get yet another dialogue popping up. It will look something like this:

Just go ahead and type in a name for your folder, in our case type in "MY WP Projects". Then click OK. Your are taken inside of your new folder. Your new folder has been created inside the My Documents folder. The My Documents folder is itself inside another folder - the root folder on the C drive (see the The Hard Drive Explained section for an explanation of root folders).

Well we have created a folder called "MY WP Projects". We have created this folder inside the My Documents folder. But we still haven't saved our work. To do that we need to fill in the bottom two boxes of the Save As dialogue box. They look like this:

In the File Name box is what your document is called. If you clicked the Save button, your file will be called "Doc1". That's not a very descriptive name for a document, so we'll change it to something else. To give your document a different name, simply click inside the File Name text box. Delete everything in the text box. Type in a new name, something like Library Letter.

The final box is the "Save as type" box. If you click the little black arrow to the right of the box, you'll get a drop down list.

So that a file can be recognised on a PC, they are usually given a three letter extension, preceded by a full stop. So for our file called Library Letter, Word will automatically put a full stop after it, and then the three letters doc. All Microsoft Word documents end in the letters doc. No other file on your computer will end in these three letter. That means that any file that ends in doc must be a Microsoft Word file. The other items in that drop down list all have their own three letter extension. A web page will have the extension .htm. So if you clicked on this option, and then clicked the Save button, you would not be saving your work as a Word document but as a web page.

All that might sound a bit complicated, if you are beginner. So just leave the Save as Type box as Word Document (*.doc). Your Save As dialogue box should now look like the one below. When it does, click the Save button.

You have now saved your work to your hard drive. To prove that it has indeed been saved, click File > Save As again. When the Save As dialogue box appears, you should see the name of your file in the big white area. Click the Cancel button to get rid of the Save As dialogue box.

You can continue to work on a document that has been saved. But if you add more lines to your letter, or make any changes, you need to keep saving your changes on regular basis. You don't have to use Save As any more. You can just click the File menu, then click on Save. Or click on the circled icon in the image below. This will update your document.

Remember to save your work on a regular basis. It's not a pleasant experience to have worked on a document for some time only for your computer to break down. When you finally get your computer to work again, if you haven't saved regularly you'll find all that hard work lost forever, with no way to get it back!