Absolute Beginners Guide to Computer Basics (2nd Edition)

Now that you know how to create and save Word documents, let's examine how you put specific words on paperor, rather, onscreen.

Entering Text

You enter text in a Word document at the insertion point, which appears onscreen as a blinking cursor. When you start typing on your keyboard, the new text is added at the insertion point.

You move the insertion point with your mouse by clicking on a new position in your text. You move the insertion point with your keyboard by using your keyboard's arrow keys.

Editing Text

After you've entered your text, it's time to edit. With Word you can delete, cut, copy, and paste textor graphicsto and from anywhere in your document, or between documents.

Before you can edit text, though, you have to select the text to edit. The easiest way to select text is with your mouse; just hold down your mouse button and drag the cursor over the text you want to select. You also can select text using your keyboard; use the Shift keyin combination with other keysto highlight blocks of text. For example, Shift+Left Arrow selects one character to the left; Shift+End selects all text to the end of the current line.

Any text you select appears as white text against a black highlight. After you've selected a block of text, you can then edit it in a number of ways, as detailed in Table 13.1.

Formatting Text

After your text is entered and edited, you can use Word's numerous formatting options to add some pizzazz to your document. It's easiest to edit text when you're working in Print Layout view because this displays your document as it will look when printed. To switch to this view, pull down the View menu and select Print Layout.

Formatting text is easyand most achievable from Word's Formatting toolbar. This toolbar, located at the top of the screen, includes buttons for bold, italic, and underline, as well as font, font size, and font color. To format a block of text, highlight the text and then click the desired format button.

More text formatting options are available in the Font dialog box. To display this dialog box, pull down the Format menu and select Font. From here, you can perform both basic formatting (font, font style, font color, and so on) and advanced formatting (strikethrough, superscript, subscript, shadow, outline, emboss, engrave, character spacing, and text animation). Just select the formatting you want and click OK.

Checking Spelling and Grammar

If you're not a great speller, you'll appreciate Word's automatic spell checking. You can see it right onscreen; just deliberately misspell a word, and you'll see a squiggly red line under the misspelling. That's Word telling you you've made a spelling error.

When you see that squiggly red line, position your cursor on top of the misspelled word, then right-click your mouse. Word now displays a pop-up menu with its suggestions for spelling corrections. You can choose a replacement word from the list, or return to your document and manually change the misspelling.

note

Sometimes Word meets a word it doesn't recognize, even though the word is spelled correctly. In these instances, you can add the new word to Word's spelling dictionary by right-clicking the word and selecting Add from the pop-up menu.

Word also includes a built-in grammar checker. When Word identifies bad grammar in your document, it underlines the offending passage with a green squiggly line. Right-click anywhere in the passage to view Word's grammatical suggestions.