Description
A well laid out resume can mean the difference between getting the interview or getting passed by. Whether you're gainfully employed or looking for a job, it's always a good idea to keep your resume up to date. In this three-part series, Helen Bradley runs us through the finer points of creating a professional resume that's sure to help in the job hunt.
Transcript
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley and in today’s Butterscotch tutorial we’re going to see how to make a resume in Microsoft Word. We’ll start by clicking the office button and click new. From the templates list down the left of the screen, we’re going to select resume and CV’s. Then in the middle of the screen we’ll select basic resumes. The resume that I’ve chosen to use because it works very well in Microsoft Word 2007 is this resume modern two. Click it to select it and click download. If you’re prompted into the license information, you’ll need to complete that before you can download. The resume template has been designed inside a table that’s why you’re seeing dashed grid lines around the screen. Don’t worry about this because they won’t print later on. Take a little time to familiarize yourself with the lot of the template. Also, have a look at the kind of information that you’re going to need to insert to complete it. You’ll need to gather update informations so that you’re ready to type it. For now we’re going to type two things into this resume. We’re going to click and type our name and we’re going to type a street address at the top of the screen here. To do that, you’ll click and drag overall information in the top row of the table, press the delete button that deletes the information and now you can type your own details in its place. You will need to type the street address, your phone number and your email address. Before we go ahead and add some more details to the resume, let’s have a look at the theme that’s applied to it. Click the page layout tab and here are the themes that can be applied to this document. Click button, these themes can be seen if you hold your mouse button over anyone of the themes. When you do so, you’ll see that the colors change as to the fonts. It’s a little hard to see them here but you should get graceful ideas to one which may suit your needs. When you find it, click it. If it’s still not the one that you want, go back and select themes again and try a different one. If the text and things looks fine but you prefer different colors, then select the different color scheme from the theme colors list. Again when you hold your mouse over any of these themes the document underneath changes so that you can preview that theme colors, when you find what you like click on it. You can also change the fonts. Click the theme font dropdown list and preview the fonts that can be applied to your document. When you find a font combination you like, click it to select it. So far we’ve downloaded a template from the internet. We’ve type a few details into it and we’ve changed the theme, the theme colors and the fonts used in the document. Now it’s time to go ahead and to enter all the data into our resume. We’re ready to enter some data into our resume. We’re going to start with the objective. These elements that are in brackets here have been set up as what they called click and type blocks. All you have to do is click on them and you’ll see a blue bar behind them. That means that the whole area is now selected, so you can just start typing the text that’s highlighted in blue. It’s going to disappear and your text is going over the top. Now that we’ve created our objective, we’re ready to go forward to professional highlights. If you don’t want to use the word professional highlight you can just select the words and type over the top. And now we need to enter our first field or area of achievement. Now we’re ready to add our first job responsibility or achievement that is of note. We’ll just click on each of this in turn and add some content. Now I’ve got two more fields or areas of achievement to go but I don’t need the third one. If there’s an element that you don’t need, just click and drag over the top of it to select it. When I press the delete key it will be removed. You can see that I’ve got an extra bullet point here. All I need to do is to press the backspace key to get rid of it. Let’s continue on with skills for now. You might notice here that this type of cell is divided in two. We’ve got five items on the left and five on the right. I have eight items in total so I’ve decided that I don’t need the bottom item in either of these table cells. So I’m going to click and drag to select the item I don’t want and press the delete key. Again I’ve got an extra bullet point here so I’ll press the backspace key. Again, I don’t want this last one here, drag over to select it, press the delete key to remove it and press backspace to move back and remove that bullet point. When I hold my mouse pointer over that dashed line that divides the two cells, my mouse point to change in shape I’ll just click and drag to the right. We’re ready now to add employment history. I’ll click on the job title to select it and then I’m just going to type over the top. Now I need to add the company names, city and state and now the dates of employment and then the next job title. We have more lines for the job details that we need. I’m going to drag over the cells to select them up here on the tool bar you’ll see I have table tool selected and I need the layout tab and now what I need is this delete button here. I want to delete this row so I’m going to select delete rows and the row has now been removed. I’ll go ahead now and finish entering just this a little bit of data into the resume. In the next video, we look at finishing off our resume. Now that we’ve created our resume and entered all our data into it, it’s time to save the file. Click the office button and click save. I’m going to type the name for my resume and unless it will show that the people that you are sending your resume too can read Word 2007 files. You’re well advice from the save as type list to choose Word 97-2003 document. This is a more universally acceptable format. Click save. To spell the document click the review tab and then click spelling and grammar. Whenever it would encounter a misspelled word, it’s going to flag it for you. It’s going to suggest alternative spellings. This is the correct spelling, so I’m going to click change. This is the correct spelling for this particular error. This word is correctly spelled so I’m just going to select ignore once, and now I’m done. After having spelled check the document I will save it again file save. It’s important to perforate your document very carefully. You can perforate it by reading it on the screen. Some people like to read this out loud because that’s such a way of tracking mistakes. It’s certainly good idea to print a copy and read that yourself and perhaps have somebody else to check it for you. When you’re ready to print the document do a print preview first. Click the office button, select print and then select the print preview. You can click with this zoom tool to see that document up close. This allows you to check it carefully. You can see that the lines that were on the screen no longer existed because we’re in print preview mode and the table lines aren’t going to print. When you’re ready to print, you can click the print button. It’s a good idea to print a draft copy on an inexpensive sheet of paper first so that you can perforate it carefully and then print your final copy. To get out of the print preview, click close print preview. Some online sites and potential employers may require you to provide your resume in PDF format. Microsoft word has a PDF save utility available for it but you’ll need to download it and install it. It’s available from the web at this website. It’s a Microsoft 2007 add-in that adds the ability to save the PDF files to Microsoft Word, Excel and other applications in the suite. Once you’ve downloaded it and installed the add-in, you can save a file to a PDF file by clicking the office button. Click save as and choose Adobe PDF. Thank you for joining us for this video series making your resume in Microsoft Word.
