Special Edition Using Microsoft Windows XP Professional (3rd Edition)

For more capable word processing than Notepad can accomplish, you can use WordPad. Though it's not Word or WordPerfect, it works fine for most everyday writing chores. It includes most of the formatting tools people need for typical writing projects, and the price is right. You can edit documents of virtually any length, it supports drag-and-drop editing, and it can accept graphics pasted to it from the Windows Clipboard. WordPad supports the following:

• Standard character formatting with font, style, and size

• Standard paragraph formatting with changing line spacing, indents and margins, bullets, justification, and right and left alignment

• Adjustable tab stops

• Search and replace

• Headers and footers

• Pagination control

• Insert and edit graphics

• Undo

• Print preview

It doesn't do tables, columns, indexes, master documents, outline view, legal line numbering, or anything really groovy, though. Go get Word or WordPerfect if you have that level of needs.

Save and Open Options

WordPad can save and open files in several formats:

• Rich Text Format This choice is the default. The Rich Text Format is used more and more as a common format for exchanging documents between word processors, though few, if any, use it as their primary format (it's sort of like an Esperanto for word processors). The Rich Text Format preserves the appearance as well as the content of your document. Graphics and other objects can be saved in the file along with the text but might be lost when you open the file with another application. To learn more about how to insert graphics into a WordPad document so that the graphic will be stored in the document, see "Adding Graphics to a WordPad Document" later in this chapter.

• Text Files See the discussion of text files earlier in the chapter in the section covering Notepad.

• Unicode See the discussion of Unicode earlier in the chapter in the section covering Notepad.

WordPad also can open the following document types (although it must save changes to these files as .RTF, Text, or Unicode documents):

• Word for Windows This choice opens documents stored in the format used by Microsoft Word for Windows version 6.0, and Microsoft Word 95 (.DOC). If you have any version of Microsoft Word installed, incidentally, double-clicking a .DOC file opens it in Word, not WordPad.

• Windows Write This choice opens documents stored in the .WRI format used by Windows Write, the simple word processor supplied with Windows 3.x. This feature enables you to read README.WRI files supplied with some older Windows applications.

• Text DocumentsMS-DOS Format This choice opens text documents stored with the MS-DOS version of the ASCII character set.

WordPad correctly opens even incorrectly named (wrong extension) RTF and Word 6 files if you select the All Documents option in the Files of Type area in the Open dialog box or type the document's full name. If WordPad doesn't detect a file's format, it opens it as a text-only file. Note that if a document contains formatting information created by another application it will likely appear as garbage characters mixed with the document's normal text.

Running WordPad and Editing with WordPad

To run WordPad, choose Start, All Programs, Accessories, WordPad. The WordPad window then comes up. Figure 5.3 shows an example of a Notepad file which has been edited with WordPad.

As with most Windows programs these days, you don't have to memorize what each button on the toolbar does. Just position the mouse pointer over the button and a pop-up screen tip will appear on the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

When you're doing lots of editing and formatting in WordPad, check the View menu. You can turn on as many of the toolbars as you need to quickly change formatting, tab locations, and so on. A check mark next to a bar's name means it's on. They are toggle settings.

You can drag and drop or "tear off" the various toolbars. Just position the mouse pointer over the far left edge of any bar (don't click a button); then drag the bar where you want it.

Editing is simple in this program and complies with Windows standards and then adds a few rules of its own. I'll outline them very quickly. Just enter your text as usual. Lines of text occur automatically and are readjusted if you resize the window, change the margins, or change the font size. You can move the cursor around with a click of the mouse or by using the control codes listed for Notepad in Table 5.1.

You can double-click a word to select the whole word. To select the entire document quickly (select all), move the cursor to the left edge of the document until the arrow changes direction, and then Ctrl+click. To select an arbitrary area, click and drag the pointer over the text. Release when the text is highlighted. You can also select areas of text by pressing Shift and using the arrow keys. The spot where you first click (beginning of the selection) is called the anchor point. You can triple-click to select a paragraph. After text is selected, you can format it with the toolbars and format menu commands.

To move blocks of text, either select the text and use Cut, Copy, and Paste from the Edit menu, or drag it with the mouse to the new location and drop it.

TIP

To insert characters that aren't available on your keyboard, such as ™, ®, or ©, use the Character Map accessory, covered later in this chapter in the section "Character Map."

WordPad handles each paragraph as a separate entity, each with its own formatting information, such as tab stops. To apply changes to multiple paragraphs, select them first.

To undo the last command, choose Edit, Undo; click the Undo button (the curving arrow) on the toolbar; or press Ctrl+Z.

Undo can undo the following errors: block deletions, anything removed by pressing Del or Backspace (as a unit), blocks replaced by typing, new text typed (back to the last time you issued a command), and character and paragraph formatting changes (if you select the Undo command immediately after making the change).

Adding Graphics to a WordPad Document

You can insert a graphicand other OLE objectsinto a WordPad document in one of three ways: by pasting the graphic from the clipboard, by creating the object from scratch as you insert it, or by inserting an existing object stored in a disk file. The basic steps required are similar for either method, but they vary slightly in detail.

• Select Edit, Paste to insert a graphic you've put on the system Clipboard.

• Select Insert, New Object to create a new graphic using another program or an existing file. In the Insert Object dialog box, choose the type of graphic object you want from the list, and click OK. At the insertion point, an area opens for the graphic. You create the graphic in the second program and then exit the graphics program using the appropriate command (typically Exit and Return) and return to WordPad.

• Click the graphic, and then drag the picture's handles (the small black squares along the edges) to resize the image.

After you've pasted the graphic, you have only crude control over positioning it where you want it in the document. You can't move a graphic around with the mouse, and no menu command is available for this purpose. Instead, you must push the picture around in your document with ordinary typing, the Backspace key, or the Tab key, or you can cut and paste it into a new location.

TIP

When you insert an existing object from a file, the Insert Object dialog box offers a Link check box. If you check this box, any changes to the source file are reflected in the WordPad file. This is called Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), and is different than the usual Cut, Copy, and Paste commands. It's not used very often, so it's not covered in this book. For more information about OLE, check the Windows Help system, and search for linking and embedding.

If you want to retrieve the document with graphics intact on another computer, I recommend using the Edit, Paste method if you can do so. Documents created with the Insert, New Object method that used an existing graphic didn't store the object inside the document file, but used a pointer to it. When the document was retrieved from another system, it would have a framing box instead of the actual graphic.

Display Options

A few WordPad preferences affect viewing of files. You can check the View, Options dialog box to see them. All the tab pages except General Options in the Options dialog box pertain to the various types of documents that WordPad can open: Text Only, Rich Text Format, Word for Windows, Windows Write, and Embedded. Each of these pages offers identical choices. These settings affect display only; none of these choices affect the way your document prints.