Despite all the whiz-bang, 21st-century innovations in Word 2008, some things haven’t changed, including…well, typing and clicking. The basics of adding, deleting, and moving text around work essentially the same way as they did in Word 1.0, which fit on a single floppy disk and had to be started up with a hand crank.

Most of the editing and formatting techniques in Word and the other Office programs require a two-step procedure: select, then do. That is, first select the thing (character, word, paragraph, sentence) that you intend to act upon, then use keystrokes or menu commands to tell the Mac what to do to it.