Welcome back to our course on Word 2013.
We’re now going to spend some time looking at basic entry and editing of text in Word.
So from now on we’re going to be making Word documents and putting all sorts of content
into them.
We will format the documents later in the course.
For the moment we’re primarily concerned with entering and editing the content and
to some extent moving the content around as well.
So let’s begin with a brand new document and we’ll put some text into it.
So there’s a really straightforward keyboard shortcut for creating a new document, that’s
Control and N. It gives us a new blank document and note that with a new blank document, the
cursor is flashing at the point where text will appear.
If I just start typing with my keyboard now, this is where the text will appear.
So if I start typing, that’s it.
Now for most of this section, I’m going to be just using a conventional keyboard on
a PC.
If you don’t have a conventional keyboard, if you’re using an on-screen keyboard, then
there are a couple of possibilities.
If you have Windows 8, then there will be a button on the taskbar where you can bring
up the on-screen keyboard.
So for instance if I click it here, the onscreen keyboard looks like that and I can, of course,
type conventionally on that on-screen keyboard.
Also within Windows 8, there is an available on-screen keyboard as well.
You can normally get to the option to switch that on using Windows plus U to go into the
Ease of Access settings.
So one way or another if you’re not using a physical keyboard, you’re obviously going
to need to enable your on-screen or virtual keyboard and as I discussed earlier on it
does a problem in terms of how much space you’ve got to type in, but you can, of course,
hide the Ribbon as we saw earlier on.
For the moment, I’m going to use a physical keyboard, so I’ll assume that if you need
to use an on-screen keyboard by now you know how to set it up.
Now wherever you are in terms of entering text in Word 2013, the text always appears
at the cursor.
So if I move the cursor, suppose I move the cursor before the word First, so I move it
to the left of the F in First and start typing, that is where the text appears.
If I reposition at the end, press the Space, carry on typing, again that’s where the
text appears.
If I make a typing error, click back to where the error is, correct it, and so on.
Now apart from moving the position of the cursor using the mouse and just clicking elsewhere,
I can use the arrows on the keyboard.
So the left arrow, if I press left arrow repeatedly, I move back through the text.
If I press right arrow repeatedly, again, I move forward through the text.
And don’t forget if you’re using touch, you can just touch somewhere within the text
and that will put the cursor into that position.
Now sometimes when I’m using touch, you’ll see the on-screen keyboard leap up at the
bottom there.
Just ignore that.
I’ll get rid of it each time.
Now the next thing I’d like to look at is what’s right down at the bottom of the screen
and that’s the status bar.
Now the status bar has two halves at the moment.
We can see a load of buttons and a slider on the right.
I’m going to look at those later on in the course.
I don’t want to worry about those at the moment.
I want to concentrate on what’s on the left.
What you see on your status bar may be different from what I see on mine.
What I can see on mine at the moment is an indicator to say that we’re currently on
Page 1 of 1.
So with this new document I’m still working on the first page.
It then says 12 words and in fact if you count the words there, there are indeed 12 of them.
Then there’s a little symbol, then it says English United Kingdom, then there’s another
little symbol.
What you see on your status bar, what you see on mine may be different, but we can reconcile
the differences by right clicking on the status bar and looking at what all of the options
for the status bar are.
Right click on the status bar and we have a long list of options.
Now with all of these, the value of whatever the option is, is shown in this long list.
It’s basically a sort of menu.
So for instance, the formatted page number is one, the section we’re in is one.
I’ll talk about sections later.
The page number is Page 1 of 1.
The vertical page position is one inch.
The line number is one, the column number is 23, word count 12 words; a whole load of
values.
But the only ones that are shown on the status bar are the ones that are ticked.
You can show as many of these as you can squeeze into the status bar.
So for instance, if I didn’t want to see the page number, if I uncheck that the first
entry on the status bar, Page 1 of 1 no longer shows.
But if I tick on section, then I see the section number appear instead.
I can, of course, have both ticked and then I’ll see both.
So that’s basically how we control what appears on the status bar.
But one of the particular entries I want to look at now is about three-quarters of the
way down the list and it’s called Overtype.
And we normally refer to it as the Overtype Mode and the Overtype Mode at the moment is
set to the value on the right which is Insert.
Now I’m going to show this on the status bar, so I’m going to tick that so that it’s
on the status bar.
Then I’ll click away to close the Customize Status Bar list and you now see the word Insert
down here on the status bar.
The cursor is currently to the left of the word Line in the sentence “This is my very
first line of text.”
And I’m going to type in the word Short followed by a space.
I want you to watch what happens to the word line as I do that.
You notice that as I type the word, Line moves to the right and that’s because the mode
I’m in, the overtype mode I’m in, is Insert, which means that as I type what I am typing
is inserted before the character to the right of the cursor.
Now if I click on Insert on the status bar, it toggles the setting from Insert to the
other available mode which is Overtype mode.
Now note the cursor is still to the left of the word Line and I’m going to type the
word Short with a space again, but I want you to watch what happens this time.
As I type now, what I am typing overtypes what is there already.
It basically obliterates whatever was there before.
And this is a very important fundamental thing when you’re using word even if you don’t
use Overtype Mode very often.
If you manage to get it into Overtype Mode, that will be happening and you’ll probably
wonder what the heck’s going on.
Why is what I’m typing deleting what was there before?
If you want to use both modes that’s fine; the most important thing is you need to know
which mode you’re in.
I will almost always on this course be in Insert Mode and I’m going to go back into
Insert Mode now.
So here’s a pretty good situation.
I’ve just obliterated some text that I didn’t mean to.
Well, that’s where Undo comes into it.
There is an Undo command.
The simplest way of accessing it usually is from the Quick Access Toolbar, so one of the
buttons up there.
Click on the button once, Undo typing, click once.
Now watch as I click that button time after time, one by one the last bits of typing I
did are undone and what was there before returns.
So Undo, Undo, Undo, Undo, Undo.
And I’m back to where I was before I started typing in Overtype Mode.
And of course, if I went a little bit too far I could go back and get rid of the Short
that I did before.
But, supposing I got back to that point and I though, Ah I’ve undone both of those Shorts.
I really still wanted the first one, then I can Redo the first one and the Undo has
got a button pointing to the left there.
The Redo over here has an arrow pointing to the right.
If I do Redo, I can put back the Short-space that was actually correct.
So that’s Undo and Redo.
Now I should point out that Undo and Redo are not restricted just to typing actions.
They can pretty much Undo or Redo any action that you take in Word 2013.
And in the case of Undo, if you look at the arrow there’s a drop down to the side of
it and the drop down lists the last so many actions, how many is one of the things that
you can set in Word Options.
And if you go back to some old action, say the one where I started to type First there,
if I click on the typing F in typing First, it will undo everything back to and including
that step.
So if I clicked there, I’d pretty much wipe out almost everything I’ve typed so far,
which I don’t aim to do at the moment, but you can undo back a long way like that.
Now let’s look at one or two other important aspects of entering and editing text.
At the moment, the cursor is to the left of the L in Line.
If I press the Delete key, the one that’s on the keyboard labeled either Delete or Del,
it deletes a single character to the right of the cursor.
So in this case, it will delete the L in Line.
If I press the Backspace key, Backspace or BS, it’ll be labeled, it deletes the character
to the left of the cursor.
So in this case, it would delete the space to the left of the I.
So they’re the two delete keys which do one character at a time.
Now as we’ll see in the next section, we can delete more than that at a time if we
want to.
But if you’re just deleting single characters, Delete deletes a character to the right of
the cursor and Backspace deletes a character to the left of a cursor.
So now let’s look at another important option when you’re entering text.
Depending on your keyboard, normally pressing the End key on the keyboard takes you to the
end of the current line.
And once you get to the end of the current line, if you press the Enter key, you start
a new paragraph.
So at this point that’s my second paragraph and I could go on to type a third paragraph,
which is what I’m going to do now, but watch carefully.
Now you may or may not see this, but I have made some deliberate spelling mistakes there
and those spelling mistakes have caused some underlining.
Now it’s possible that you won’t see that sort of underlining on your installation of
Word 2013 because it depends on a couple of Word Option settings and I want to look at
those now.
So let’s go back into Word Options, click on Proofing, and just over halfway down this
page, when correcting spelling and grammar in Word and there are two options there: Check
spelling as you type and mark grammar errors as you type.
Now the whole question of spelling checking and grammar checking, I’m going to go over
in detail in a later section.
The reason for mentioning this now is that particularly if you’re new to Word, seeing
all those underlinings may be a little bit baffling and they may be a bit annoying.
If you’ve used Word for a while, you’re probably used to it.
If you really don’t want Word to check things for you as you type, so you don’t want it
to tell you about spelling mistakes or suspected spelling mistakes and/or suspected grammar
mistakes, you can uncheck of both of these now and then that won’t happen.
I’m going to leave them set on at the moment partly because if I do type in any spelling
mistakes, I don’t want them to find their way into this course.
So it’ll help me to spot them and make sure that you don’t finish up the victims of
my spelling mistakes.
But if you want to switch that checking off, you can do.
I haven’t made any changes so I’ll Cancel.
Is if it switched off then when I’d made those mistakes nothing would have happened.
They wouldn’t have been underlined.
I just would have been able to make those mistakes.
So in this section we’ve covered the basics of entering text, a little bit about editing
text, and dealing with things like deleting text, the difference between insert and overtype
mode, and just making sure that you know how to switch on and off spelling and grammar,
what’s called Auto-Correction as well.
In the next section, we’re going to look not only at a few other aspects of entering
and editing text, but the all important question of how to select text.
So I’ll see you in
the next section.