Creating Documents in Word

Welcome to Microsoft Word: The Healthcare Professional's Writing Tool

Microsoft Word is the most widely used word processing application in the world, and it is an essential tool for healthcare professionals. Whether you are drafting a patient referral letter, composing a memo about new office procedures, creating a report for your supervisor, or preparing educational materials for patients, Word provides the features and flexibility you need to produce clear, professional documents.

In healthcare settings, accurate and well-organized documentation is not just a professional courtesy — it is a critical component of patient care and regulatory compliance. Medical offices, clinics, hospitals, and health systems rely on standardized documents for everything from internal communication to patient-facing materials. Learning to create these documents efficiently and correctly is one of the most practical skills you will gain in this course.

The Word Interface

When you first open Microsoft Word, you are greeted by the Start screen, which displays recent documents and template options. Once you open or create a document, you will see the main Word workspace, which includes several key components:

Take a moment to familiarize yourself with these components. In a busy medical office, knowing exactly where to find the tool you need saves valuable time — especially when a provider is waiting for a document to be completed.

Creating a New Document: Blank Documents and Templates

Every document in Word starts with one decision: Do you begin from a blank page or use a template? Both approaches are valuable, and healthcare professionals use each regularly depending on the situation.

Starting with a Blank Document

To create a blank document, open Word and select Blank document on the Start screen, or press Ctrl+N at any time while Word is open. This gives you a clean, empty page with default formatting (typically Calibri 11pt font, single spacing, and 1-inch margins). A blank document is ideal when you need full control over the content and layout — for example, when composing a one-time memo to clinic staff about updated scheduling procedures.

Using Templates

Templates are pre-designed document layouts that include formatting, placeholder text, and sometimes graphics. Word offers hundreds of built-in templates, and thousands more are available online through the template gallery. To access templates, select File > New and browse or search the available options.

In healthcare settings, templates are especially valuable because they help ensure consistency and compliance. Common healthcare templates include:

• Professional letters — For referral letters, appointment confirmations, and insurance correspondence
• Memos — For internal office communications about policy changes, meeting agendas, or safety announcements
• Fax cover sheets — Still used in many medical offices for transmitting patient records between facilities
• Flyers and brochures — For patient education, health awareness campaigns, and community outreach events
• Reports — For clinical summaries, quality improvement reports, and administrative reviews

When you select a template, Word creates a new document based on that template — the original template file remains unchanged, so you can use it again and again. This is particularly important in healthcare offices where the same form or letter format is used repeatedly with different patient or employee information.

Entering, Selecting, and Navigating Text

Once you have a document open, you are ready to begin entering and working with text. The blinking vertical line in the document area is your insertion point (also called the cursor). When you type, characters appear at the insertion point and it moves to the right. Pressing Enter starts a new paragraph, and pressing Tab inserts a tab character for indentation.

Essential Keyboard Shortcuts for Microsoft Word

Basic Editing: Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, and Redo

Editing is where you refine your document — moving text from one place to another, correcting mistakes, and rearranging content for clarity. Word provides a robust set of editing tools that every healthcare professional should master.

The Clipboard: Cut, Copy, and Paste

The clipboard is a temporary storage area that holds text or other content you have cut or copied. The three core clipboard operations are:

• Copy (Ctrl+C) — Duplicates the selected text and places it on the clipboard. The original text remains in place. Use this when you need the same information in multiple locations — for instance, copying a patient's full name and date of birth into several different forms.
• Cut (Ctrl+X) — Removes the selected text from the document and places it on the clipboard. Use this when you want to move text from one location to another — for example, relocating a section of instructions from the middle to the beginning of a patient handout.
• Paste (Ctrl+V) — Inserts the clipboard contents at the current insertion point. You can paste the same content multiple times without re-copying it.

Word also offers Paste Special options when you select the small arrow below the Paste button on the Home tab. These options let you choose how pasted content is formatted — keeping the source formatting, merging with the destination formatting, or pasting as plain text. In healthcare documentation, Paste as Plain Text is often useful when copying information from a website or electronic health record (EHR) system, because it strips out unwanted formatting.

Undo and Redo

Everyone makes mistakes — and in a fast-paced medical office, accidental edits happen frequently. Word's Undo and Redo functions are your safety net:

• Undo (Ctrl+Z) — Reverses your most recent action. You can press Ctrl+Z multiple times to undo several actions in sequence. You can also select the dropdown arrow next to the Undo button on the Quick Access Toolbar to see a list of recent actions and undo multiple steps at once.
• Redo (Ctrl+Y) — Reapplies an action you just undid. If you undo too many steps, Redo brings them back one at a time.

Think of Undo as your "safety net" when working on important healthcare documents. If you accidentally delete a paragraph from a policy document or paste the wrong text into a referral letter, a quick Ctrl+Z instantly restores your work. Developing the habit of using Undo regularly will save you time and reduce stress in your daily workflow.

Saving Your Work: Save, Save As, and File Formats

Saving your work is one of the most important habits you will develop as a computer user. In a healthcare environment, losing an unsaved document can mean repeating hours of work — or worse, losing critical information that affects patient care or compliance. Word offers two primary save commands, each serving a different purpose.

Save vs. Save As

Save (Ctrl+S) updates the current file with your latest changes. If the file has already been saved once, pressing Ctrl+S simply overwrites the previous version. If the document has never been saved (it is a new, untitled document), Word will prompt you to choose a file name and location — essentially performing a Save As automatically.

Save As (F12 or File > Save As) allows you to save the document with a new name, in a new location, or in a different file format. Save As creates a copy of the document, leaving the original unchanged. This is essential in healthcare settings when you need to create variations of the same document — for example, saving a generic patient instruction sheet with a specific patient's name, or creating a PDF version of a Word document for emailing to a patient.

Understanding File Formats

Word can save documents in multiple formats, and choosing the right format matters — especially in healthcare where documents are shared between different offices, systems, and platforms. Understanding when to use each format is a key professional skill.

Printing, Print Preview, and File Management

Even in an increasingly digital healthcare environment, printing remains a daily necessity. Patient consent forms, prescription labels, referral letters, chart notes, and office signage all require printed output. Word provides robust print tools to help you produce exactly what you need.

Print Preview

Before sending a document to the printer, always review it in Print Preview. Access Print Preview by pressing Ctrl+P or selecting File > Print. The preview pane on the right shows exactly how the document will appear on paper, including margins, headers, footers, page breaks, and graphics. Review your document carefully for:

• Correct margins and page orientation (portrait vs. landscape)
• Proper page breaks — text should not be cut off awkwardly between pages
• Headers and footers displaying correctly
• Images positioned where you expect them
• The correct number of pages

Print Settings

The Print screen also gives you control over important settings:

• Printer selection — Choose which printer to use (important in offices with multiple printers for different purposes, such as a color printer for patient handouts and a black-and-white printer for internal documents)
• Page range — Print all pages, a specific range (e.g., pages 2–4), or just the current page
• Number of copies — Specify how many copies to print
• Collation — When printing multiple copies of multi-page documents, collation keeps the pages in order
• Duplex printing — Print on both sides of the paper to save resources

File Management for Word Documents

Good file management is essential when you create many documents over time. Healthcare offices generate a high volume of documents, and being able to find what you need quickly is a professional necessity. Apply these file management practices to your Word documents:

• Use descriptive file names — Include the document type, topic, and date. For example: Memo_StaffTraining_2026-02-15.docx or PatientHandout_DiabetesManagement_v2.docx
• Organize files in folders — Create a logical folder structure such as Documents > Memos > 2026 or Patient Materials > Handouts
• Use version naming — When revising documents, save new versions with version numbers (v1, v2, v3) or dates rather than overwriting the original
• Back up important files — Save copies to OneDrive, a USB drive, or your organization's network drive

Putting It All Together

In this lesson, you have learned the essential skills for creating documents in Microsoft Word — from navigating the interface and creating new documents, through entering and selecting text, editing with clipboard operations, and saving in the right format. These foundational skills are the building blocks for everything you will do in Word throughout the rest of this course and in your healthcare career. In the next lesson, you will build on this foundation by learning to format your documents with professional fonts, colors, spacing, tables, and graphics to create documents that are not only accurate, but visually polished and easy to read.