Basic Word Processing

1. The mouse, the keyboard, and the screen: Notice that the tail of the mouse is up, that the leftmost mouse button is for everyday use, and that different things happen when you click, doubleclick, and drag. Find the cursor-movement keys on the keyboard, and see that the cursor moves around the screen. Notice that the mouse controls the mouse pointer, and the keyboard controls the text cursor.
2. Typing in and editing text: Try out the letters, numbers, and punctuation marks on the keyboard. Find the backspace key and use it to correct errors. Also find the shift keys.
3. Commands: menus, toolbars, and key shortcuts: Find the bar of pull-down menus near the top of the screen. Learn to pull them down and look at the commands they offer. Learn to see the keyboard shortcuts and use them for commands you need frequently. Learn to find commands you use less frequently on the menu. Learn that the buttons on the toolbar duplicate some of these same commands. While we're on the subject of commands, find the undo command, and learn to open an existing document or create a new one.
4. Save early and save often: Save the document to the disk in case anything happens to the copy on the screen. Learn to do this freqently. It will save you heartache later when something goes wrong, because you can open the last-saved version of your document.
5. Word wrap and paragraphs: Notice that the word processor automatically keeps your text wrapped into a paragraph. Notice that if you edit text on an earlier line, the wrapping automatically adjusts properly. Hitting returnstarts a new paragraph, which wraps separately from the previous one. (Therefore, hitting return twice is not a good way to doublespace a document. We will cover proper doublespacing later. Learn to remove unwanted paragraph breaks with backspace.
6. Cursors, positioning, and insertion: Notice that text you type is inserted at the position of the text cursor. Find the insert key and notice the difference between insert mode and overwrite mode. Notice that moving the mouse controls a pointer (different from the text cursor), and learn to use this mouse pointer to position the text cursor by clicking. Also learn to use the mouse pointer for the menus and for selecting text (see the next point).
7. Selecting and deleting text: Try dragging with the mouse, and notice that text is selected. Learn to drag from the beginning to the end of a selection. You can also use the shift key with the cursor-movement keys to do the same thing. Learn to use backspace to erase unwanted selected text. You can also use cut to remove unwanted selected text, but this places it on the clipboard.
8. Cut, Copy, and Paste: Learn that the clipboard can store exactly one thing at a time, but that size does not matter. Learn to cut things from the document to the clipboard and paste them back in a different location. Learn to copy stuff and paste it back multiple times. (The clipboard is most useful for word processing, but you can also use it in other applications, or to copy things from one application to another.)
9. Formatting text: Learn to toggle bold, italic, and underline. Learn how to select a different font face or size.
10. Formatting paragraphs: Learn to find the paragraph-formatting commands in the menus. Learn to apply doublespacing. Notice that new formatting applies only to the current paragraph or to new paragraphs created from the current paragraph. Learn to adjust the margins and indents for a paragraph, using the ruler bar. Learn about tabs. Learn to set and use tab stops.
11. Reformatting: select and alter: Learn to select text and paragraphs and change their formatting. Learn to select the entire document and change everything at once.
12. Printing: Learn to use print preview and page setup to get the document looking just the way you want before printing a hard copy. Learn to print a hard copy of the document. If it doesn't work at first, don't keep hitting print, because you'll end up with multiple copies once you do find and solve the problem.
13. Help: Learn to use the help feature to find out about things you don't know or don't understand. Also remember that the librarians are here to help you any time you have trouble in the library. (Some librarians know more about word processing than others, of course.) If you need help at home, we may have (or be able to get on loan from another library) books about the word processing program you use at home. If you aren't sure what word processing program you use, consult the about entry on the help menu.