Hello again and welcome back to our course on Word 2013.
In this section, we’re going to look some more at entering and editing text.
In the preceding section, we looked at some of the basics.
This time we’re going to look at dealing with a little bit more text and some of the
things that arise.
Now in order to make things a little bit more straightforward for me and hopefully for you
as well, I’m going to show you a little trick about how to get plenty of text to work
on in Word 2013.
If you type in a new empty document or in fact in any document this character sequence:
the equal sign, then R-A-N-D, and then a pair of round brackets, and press the Enter key.
What Word 2013 will do is to enter some random text into the document for you.
So I’m going to press Enter now.
Now I’m going to do that again.
Now I’m going to do that once more and then that will be enough text for me to demonstrate
what I want to demonstrate.
So first of all, we’ve now got more than one page and you cannot see all of the text
at once.
If you’re using a mouse and keyboard, you can scroll through the available text using
the scroll bar on the right, grab the bar with the mouse, and pull it up and down like
that to find your way through the document.
And of course, it works exactly the same as a standard Windows scroll bar.
If you’re using a touch device, of course, all you need to do to scroll your way through
the document is to just swipe in the normal way up and down with your finger to move through
the document.
Of course, you can also use the scroll bar as well if you want to.
Now if you’re at one end of the document, let’s suppose I’ve got the cursor at the
very end of the document, the bottom of the document.
To get to the beginning, it’s basically Control and Home.
Now keyboards do vary so it’s impossible to say exactly where the Home key is on your
keyboard.
But Control-Home will take you right to the very beginning of the document, that is it
will put the cursor at the beginning of the document and Control-End will put the cursor
right at the very end of the document, ready to type some more text.
As I mentioned earlier, if you’ve got the cursor within a line, let’s say I put the
cursor in the middle of that line, just pressing Home takes the cursor back to the start of
the line and pressing End takes it to the end of the line.
Now this is particularly for anybody following this course who’s not used to using a word
processor at all.
One of the conventional issues when you’re typing a lot of text is what happens when
you’re typing and you get to the end of a line.
Well in the case of Word 2013, Word automatically handles that for you by what’s called wrapping
the text.
When it can’t fit the word you’re typing in at the end of the line it starts a new
line for you.
It’s very important that you don’t watch what’s happening, get to the end of the
line and then press an Enter key to start a new line yourself.
You only need to press an Enter key to start a new paragraph, in which case you get the
equivalent of a gap like this one where you’ve gone from one paragraph to the next.
So the wrapping of text is automatic.
I’ll demonstrate that now just by typing a sentence.
I’ve got the cursor positioned here to the right of the word Device with a full stop
at the end of that paragraph and I’m just going to type a sentence to demonstrate the
wrapping of text when it gets to the right hand of a line here.
Now it’s time to look at one of the most important actions that you can take when you’re
using Word and that is selecting of text.
In fact, you can select more than just text in word, but let’s just think about selecting
text for the moment.
Let’s suppose that I wanted to take one of these paragraphs and move it within the
document.
Let’s say this one here that says, Reading is easier to, where I’ve added the extra
sentence at the end.
To select something in Word with a mouse it’s pretty straightforward really.
In principle, let’s say I wanted to select the whole of this paragraph.
One very simple way of doing it, although it might take you a little bit of practice
if you’re not quite used to it, is to click with the mouse at the beginning of the paragraph,
so put the cursor at the beginning.
Now click there and drag the cursor to the very end of the paragraph.
And when everything is selected, release the mouse button, that’s the left mouse button,
and that is now selected.
Now making a selection in Word 2013 is a very important action because various things can
follow on from making a selection.
One thing that might follow on from making a selection is that you might delete that
selection of text.
So for instance, having selected that text if I just press the Delete key watch what
happens.
That text is now deleted.
I’ll do an Undo, the text is back again.
You may also have noticed when I made that selection, let me just make the selection
again, but after I’ve made it, mini toolbar appears.
And I can use the commands on the mini toolbar to format the text, but we’re going to come
back to that later on in the course.
One very significant thing that I can do with it, which is relevant to what we’re doing
now which is entering and editing text, is that I could move that text somewhere else
in the document.
But I’ll come back to that a little while later as well.
What I’d really like to look at now is some of the other options for selection.
Now there are many options for selecting text in Word 2013.
We’ve already seen how to use the mouse to drag over a selection, but let’s look
at some of the others.
If you wanted to select one word, let’s suppose you wanted to select the word Demonstrates
here, you could, of course, just drag the mouse over the letters and select that way,
but also a double click within the word selects just that single word.
Now having made that selection, I can deselect by clicking anywhere else.
Now do a triple click.
That selects the whole paragraph.
Deselect again, click somewhere else within the same paragraph, hold the Control key down
and click, and that selects a single sentence.
Now as I said, there are many of these.
For instance, still looking at the same paragraph if you move the cursor towards the left, you
see the normal cursor changes into a right pointing arrow.
If you click, you will select the line of text, not the sentence, not the paragraph,
but the line of text that’s in line with the tip of the arrow.
If you double click, you select the whole paragraph.
There are many more of these, but let’s just look at a couple of really important
ones.
Let’s suppose you want to select a long sequence of text, say three paragraphs from
there to the end of that one.
All you need to do is to click at the beginning of the passage, hold down the Shift key, click
at the end, and you get the whole passage.
And your selection does not have to be contiguous.
So let’s suppose I want to select say two paragraphs with something between them that
is not selected.
Let’s say I select that first paragraph, hold down the Control key and select another
paragraph, and I’ve got two noncontiguous paragraphs selected.
And, of course, I can increase that to three or more and I don’t have to use whole paragraphs.
That could be single words, sentences, lines, any combination of those things that I want.
So just one more very important option and that is that the keyboard sequence Control-A
selects all of the contents of a document in Word 2013.
Now to find out even more about selections and you’ll realize pretty soon how important
being able to make selections is, then I refer you to the online Help and it’s pretty comprehensive
in terms of these and other ways of making selections within Word.
So let’s now have a look at some of the selection methods when using touch.
Let’s suppose that I’m looking at that same paragraph where I added the sentence
at the end, if I’m using touch, if I just touch within that paragraph, then the cursor
is placed.
I can see the cursor flashing there and the little circle is a little handle that I can
use in order to extend a selection.
So if I touch within the circle and pull off to the left, I extend the selection to the
left.
I’ve now got two circles.
I’ve got one near the beginning of the selection and one near the end.
And I can use the lower or right hand one, the one near the end now, to make a complete
selection within the paragraph.
Now using those little selection handles on a touch device, I can make fairly sophisticated
selections.
One of the issues with this, of course, as it always is with touch, is how big your fingers
are, what the resolution of your screen is, how small or large the text is, and so on.
So there’s always a big amount of experimentation with this.
But if you do have trouble, don’t forget the option you have of using larger text but
also as you’ll see later on in this course, you can actually zoom into what you’re doing.
You can make everything a little bit bigger and a little bit easier to work with, with
some of the methods that we’re going to look at later in the course.
But that’s the basic way of making a selection using touch.
So that is enough on selection for now.
In the next section on entering and editing text, we’re going to look at a couple of
special cases of entering content into a Word document.
So please join me for that.