Opening, Saving, and Closing Documents

Most Windows applications use a common method for opening, saving, and closing documents. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all start a new document by default when you start the program. They, along with Access, also display the task pane (refer to Figure 2.3), which you can use to open a document. You can select a recently used document from the task pane or click More or one of the other links to open a document that is not listed.

To open a file without using the task pane, you can choose File, Open to display the standard Office Open file dialog box (see Figure 2.6).