Stan: One of the advantages of a word processor is that you can easily make changes to your documents without retyping them. Now, we’ll make some changes to a business letter we’ve already created and saved on our disc. We’ll begin by opening the file.
Terry: But you could have changed this after the shoveling.
Stan: Good! And I see you’ve been working on the shed?
Terry: Well, I’ve been thinking about the shed.
Stan: Why am I not surprised?
Terry: You know there are lots of old stuff out there in that shed.
Stan: That’s why I asked you to clean it out.
Terry: I mean really old stuff.
Stan: That’s why I asked you to really clean it out. There are no antiques there anymore. The antique buyers have gone through it more than once.
Terry: I know. We don’t need antique buyers, we need archaeologists.
Stan: Archaeologists, for our shed?
Terry: Yeah, there could be artifacts out there, primitive implements, I don’t think we should touch anything until some trained archaeologist have a look at it. Can’t you just see it? I get this picture in my head of that team of archaeologist going through there finding you know like well ancient stuff, valuable ancient stuff. Maybe so valuable that you wouldn’t have to work so hard and you could just take it easy.
Stan: Yeah, you know for a long time I’ve thought maybe this was part of the Roman Empire once. There are lots of Italian Restaurants around here or maybe the ancient Egyptians were here. I bet that’s where all our sands came from. Now, wait I know before the island of Atlantis sink maybe the Atlantians stored some of their stuff in our shed.
Terry: I’m starting to think you don’t think much of my idea.
Stan: I wouldn’t go so far as to call it an idea.
Terry: But what about all of the primitive implements?
Stan: I’m getting a picture in my head of what I’d like to do with those primitive implements.
Terry: Okay. I’ll work on the shed.
Stan: Good idea.
Let’s see, what we’re we doing? We were going to use this not so primitive implement to open a letter file and make some changes to it. We’ll choose the open button on the toolbar. We click on the button and the open dialog box appears. It shows the bed and breakfast folder because that’s the last folder we used. The file list now shows the mailer file we created earlier. These other files are not part of your software. These are files we created.
If you want you can change the way files are displayed in this dialog box with these view buttons. Currently, the file list is displayed. When we click on the mailer file and then click on the details button. We can also see the list with details like file size and date. The properties button shows information like who created and modified the file. Clicking on the preview button displays a preview of the file wrapped to fit into the window. To switch back to the list view, we just click on that button.
Previewing documents can help us find the document we want before we open it. Now, we’ll open our letter file. The file we want is called sunset letter. To open the file, we’ll double click on its file name. When we do the file is opened. When a file opens the status bar briefly displays the file name and the number of characters in the file. To make changes to a file such as moving or replacing text, we need to select the text that we want to change.
One way is by dragging with the mouse. We point to the text, hold down the left moue button and move the mouse. The highlighting shows which characters are selected. When we select with the mouse entire words are automatically selected as we drag to the right. We can select by character if we drag back to the left. When we release the mouse button the pointer stops selecting. We can now choose commands to change the selected text. To deselect text without changing it we click anywhere in the document window. When we double click on a word the word is selected. To select a line we click in the left margin. To quickly select as paragraph we just double click in the left margin. We click to deselect it.
To select with the keyboard, we hold down the shift key and press the arrow keys. With the keyboard we can select a character at a time. When we release the shift key selecting stops and when we move the insertion point the text is deselected. You can practice with these and other selecting methods and short cuts until you find the ones you prefer.
Now, we’ll use our selecting skills to edit the document. We want to delete this sentence. To quickly select a sentence we hold the control key and click. To delete selected text, we just press the delete key. The sentence is deleted. We also have a new contact at this company, so we want to replace the name and address block. We drag the selected, to replace selected text we just type. Now we want to replace the name Dianne with Marylou throughout the document. Instead of finding and replacing the words ourselves we’ll let word do that work.
We open the edit menu and we’ll choose the replace command. When we do, a dialog box appears. We can use this dialog box to find, to find and replace or to go to a location in the document. We typed Dianne in the find field then press tab to move to the replace field. We type Marylou. To replace all occurrences of Dianne we choose the replace all button, word finds and replace this and tells us how many replacements we’re made. We’re done with the dialog box now, so we click on the close button. Marylou has replaced Dianne through the document.
With finding and replacing, you can make changes quickly and without missing what you’re looking for.
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