Word Processor’s Tricks – The cursor should be directly after the period at the end of the last sentence of the paragraph. If it isn’t, use the BACKSPACE key to move the cursor back. Now for your first trick.
Experienced word processors know that they often have to add more text to the ends of paragraphs when they edit a document. If they include the required two spaces after the last sentence in the paragraph, they can quickly move the cursor to the end of the line, past the two spaces, and start typing new text later. I call this the end of paragraph trick. If you wish, press the SPACEBAR twice now and add extra two spaces to the end of each paragraph. Its up to you.
Contents
Finishing the Paragraph
WordPerfect would wrap the lines continuously if you didn’t tell it where to stop. Because you want to end the paragraph now, do this:
Press RETURN twice
Use the RETURN key when you want to create a short line, such as at the end of a paragraph, that is, when you don’t want WordPerfect to wrap the line. When you press RETURN you move down to the next line and position the cursor at the left margin. You’ve added one blank line between paragraphs by pressing RETURN twice, once to end the paragraph and once for spacing. The cursor should now be at the left margin.
An Important Note About Tabs
On some screens the tab stop may be farther to the right. Because WordPerfect now measures the line in inches, it shows the tab stop farther over. What’s more, the appearance of tab stops may differ depending on the printer you’re using. The document will still print correctly.
It’s important that you understand what a tab really means to WordPerfect and your printer. A tab is an exact measurement that moves the print head a certain distance to the right. If you use spaces instead of tabs, the paragraphs won’t align correctly because a space is an inexact measurement.
That is, the width of a space can change from printer to printer and from line to line, depending on the other characters in the line. The width of the tab doesn’t change unless or until you set other tab stops.
Two Types of Carriage Returns
WordPerfect distinguishes between the carriage returns that it places at the ends of lines during wordwrap and the ones that you put in to end paragraphs or blank lines. The former are called soft returns and the latter, hard returns. Hard returns remain in a document unless you delete them, while WordPerfect adjusts the soft returns when you edit the wrapped lines. You’ll see this happen shortly.
When they begin using a word processing program, many former typists make the mistake of pressing the RETURN key to move down the page, when all they really wanted to do was to move the cursor. Whenever you press RETURN, you insert a hard return in the document. If you use the RETURN key indiscriminately, you will have some very “spaced-out” documents. You must delete superfluous hard returns yourself, either as you type or later (see Deleting Hard Returns).
More Work
Type the second paragraph. Remember to press TAB once to begin the paragraph:
“As a special feature, President Glatzkopf will be there to present the annual Employee of the Year award. As you probably know, this handsome gift will go to the Consolidated Toupee employee who best typifies the CT spirit : Consolidated Toupee is tops!”
When you reach the end of the paragraph:
Press RETURN twice
Time to do the third paragraph:
The “Permanent wave” staff will also present its annual awards, which will include the “Best Dressed Woman and Man,” *The Person most Likely to Succeed,’ and, well, we’ll keep you quessing about the others. Come and find out!
Press RETURN twice
to position the cursor at the left margin of line 18.
Save Your Work!
Remember that you haven’t yet saved this new document to a file on the disk. For the sake of getting used to an important new pattern, even though you’ve typed oaly three paragraphs, save your work now and continue. Floppy disk users: Make sure there’s a disk in the B drive and that the drive door is closed.
Press F10 Save
On the status line, WordPerfect prompts:
Document to be saved:
Type news
for the file name.
Press RETURN
Now that you’ve given the new document a file name, NEWS WordPerfect displays the file name at the left corner of the status line. The file name reminds you that this is the newsletter that you’re working on.
The F10 Save key saves the document as the file NEWS on the current drive and, if you have a hard disk, in the current subdirectory. If you wast to save the document to a different drive or subdirectory, append the drive or subdirectory name to the file name, for instance, a:news or \wp\articles/news. WordPerfect then returns you to where you left off in the document.
A Note on Your Printer
Word Perfect formats a document according to the printer you’re using, it also saves the name of the printer with the document in a special document header that you don’t see. Later, when you retrieve the document, Word Perfect checks the document header and selects the printer that’s attached to the document.
Suppose you work with more than one printer and you’ve selected another printer in the interim. When you retrieve a document that you originally created or edited with a different printer, WordPerfect automatically selects that printer.
Moving the Cursor
Pretend that you have done a lot more typing than just three paragraphs and that now you want to make some editing changes to this document. The cursor always shows you your current position in the document. If that’s not where you want to be, you must move the cursor to where you want to make additions or changes.
Caution: Never use the RETURN key to move the cursor unless you do indeed want to insert blank lines in the document. This is a major trap into which many typists have fallen when they first work with a word processing program like WordPerfect.
You already know that the four ARROW keys on the numeric keypad move the cursor one character at a time in their respective directions: up. down, left, and right. Although these keys repeat if you hold them down, sometimes you’ll want to make more wholesale moves to save time and keystroking. In general, you use the CTRL or HOME key together with an ARROW key to jump around in a document. Two of the most frequently used jumps are to the beginning and the end of the document.
In addition, the HOME key is an extender. That is, it extends the direction of the ARROW key. So, LEFT ARROW moves the cursor one character to the left, while HOME,LEFT ARROW moves the cursor to the left side of the screen, and HOME, HOME,LEFT ARROW moves the cursor to the left side of the entire line. There’s even a HOME,HOME,HOME, LEFT ARROW command, but I don’t want to get too carried away yet!
Before you issue the next command, I’d like to remind you how to press the keys. Whenever you see the HOME key and other keys together, press and release HOME the stated number of times, then press the other key.
Notice in the instruction that commas separate the HOME key from the other Key(s). So:
Press
HOME.HOME, UP ARROW
(IF you see numbers on the screen, you’ve accidentally pressed the NUM LOCK key, which changes the cursor keypad to an accounting keypad. Press NUM LOCK once to get back to cursor mode, then use the BACKSPACE key to delete the numbers from the screen.)
WordPerfect displays this briefly:
Repositioning
and the cursor jumps to the beginning of the document.
Press HOME.HOME,DOWN ARROW
Now the cursor is at the end of the document, which should be two lines below the last paragraph. So, the pattern is to press the HOME key twice, followed by the UP ARROW or DOWN ARROW key, to go to the beginning or end of the document, respectively.
Press HOME.UP ARROW
This command moves the cursor to the top of the screen. When it’s at the top of the screen and you press the command again, WordPerfect moves up by screenful (24 lines). However, WordPerfect can’t move the cursor past the beginning of the document.
The key combination HOME,DOWN ARROW moves the cursor to the bottom of the screen. Again, if the cursor is already at the bottom, the cursor moves down by screenful (24 lines). There are even shortcuts for these two commands: Try pressing the GRAY – key and the GRAY + key on the far night side of the keyboard. Why press two keys when you need press only one? WordPerfect calls the GRAY – and GRAY + keys the screen up and screen down keys.
When you’re comfortable with the screen keys, use the ARROW keys to position the cursor in the middle of any typed line in any paragraph. Then:
Press CTRL-LEFT ARROW
A reminder about this type of command: Whenever you see two keys connected by a hyphen, hold down the first key as you press the second. Then release both keys. The cursor jumps to the beginning of the previous word.
Press CTRL-RIGHT ARROW
The cursor jumps to the beginning of the next word. Repeat the commands to become comfortable with them. Often, you’ll want to move either to the beginning of the line or the end of the line. With the cursor positioned in the middle of any line of text:
Press HOME,LEFT ARROW
The cursor moves to the beginning text of the line. (Later, you’ll see that codes sometimes appear at the beginning of the line, so WordPerfect includes a way to move the cursor in front of these codes.) Actually, this command moves the cursor to the left side of the line on the current screen. Most of the time that will be the left margin, but there are ways to move the cursor when you’re working with long lines that don’t fit entirely on one screen.
Press HOME,RIGHT ARROW
The cursor moves to the end of the line. There’s a nifty shortcut for this command: Just press the END key once. Actually, HOME,RIGHT ARROW moves the cursor only to the right side of the currently visible line, while END always moves the cursor to the actual end of the line.
Tip: These two commands are useful because they can help you correct typing mistakes at the other side of the line. Just move back to the mistake with HOME,LEFT ARROW, use the RIGHT ARROW to move the cursor to the mistake, and correct it. Then press END to return to where you left off. The END key always takes you to the last entered character on the line. Those are the basic cursor movement commands in WordPerfect. Figure
1-2 below illustrates these keys on your computer’s numeric keypad.
Inserting and Deleting Text
Because WordPerfect is normally in insert mode, all you have to do is position the cursor exactly where you want to insert any word or words. Then type the insertion. Do this:
Press HOME,HOME, UP ARROW
to position the cursor at the beginning of the document.
Press DOWN ARROW seven times
to position the cursor at the beginning of the second line of the second paragraph.
Press CTRL-RIGHT ARROW
to position the cursor under the t of the word the.
Note: Always make sure the cursor is under the correct word before you continue the example.
Type to some lucky person
Remember to type the space after the word person so that it is separated from the. When you edit text, always make sure you type the correct spaces between words. If your text looks wrong on the screen, it will print wrong You have inserted words and pushed the rest of the line to the right. As soon as you move the cursor up or down a line, WordPerfect automatically adjusts the lines.
Press DOWN ARROW
The lines are brought correctly back into the margins. Position the cursor under the letter h of handsome on the line. Now you decide that you don’t like this word, so delete it.
Press DEL eight times
You’ve deleted the entire word handsome by deleting each individual character; the rest of the line moves back to fill in the space. You did not delete the space after handsome because now you’ll type in another word. Without moving the cursor:
Type beautiful
How does the line look? Is there one space between each word? There are two ways to delete individual characters: either by rubbing out the previous character with the BACKSPACE key or by deleting the character when the cursor is directly under it with the DEL key. When you use the BACKSPACE key, you don’t delete the character at the cursor location. You merely bring this character back with the cursor as you delete the previous character.
Tip: You’ll use the BACKSPACE key most often when you’re typing new text and wish to correct your mistakes as you go, and you’ll use the DEL key when you make corrections or changes later. Either key does the same thing. but in a slightly different fashion.
Deleting Hard Returns
Just read this section; don’t do any steps. You can delete a hard carriage return with the cursor directly on the return by pressing the DEL key. How do you get to the return? With the cursor anywhere on the line that ends in the hard return, press END to go to the end of the line. If you mistakenly press the RETURN key when you’re adding text, remember to press BACKSPACE to delete the hard return.
Tip: As a way of reminding you where hard returns appear in a docu-ment, you can set up WordPerfect to display a hard return as a visible character on the screen (Appendix A). For instance, you might want hard returns to appear as ‹ or ›.
Deleting a Word
To learn how to delete a word, position the cursor under the space between the words beautiful and gift. It should be there now.
Press CTRL-BACKSPACE
Instead of pressing the BACKSPACE key nine Word Delevaste of key. strokin=you deleted the entire word quickly with the Weta Den te command, CTRL-BACKSPACE. You also rubbed out the space between beautiful and gift.
Type fabulous
Make sure there’s a space after fabulous.
Press HOME,HOME, UP ARROW
to position the cursor at the beginning of the document.
Press CTRL-RIGHT ARROW twice
to position the cursor under the b of biggest.
You want to delete the words biggest news for this:
Press CTRL-BACKSPACE four times
WordPerfect deletes the four words. CTRL-BACKSPACE deletes an entire word up to, but not including, the previous space. The cursor can be anywhere under the word.
Two other commands-HOME,BACKSPACE and HOME,DEL-let you delete parts of a word. HOME,BACKSPACE deletes from the cursor left to the previous space character, which WordPerfect calls the word boundary.
This command doesn’t delete the space if the cursor is not on the first letter of the word. HOME,DEL deletes from the cursor right to the next space character (again, a word boundary), but it does delete the space.
Regrettably, computers are not magical devices that can understand what you type. The first sentence of the paragraph now doesn’t make grammatical
text: sense. The computer will not catch this mistake. Insert the following new
Type most important news of the
Clearing the Screen or Exiting WordPerfect
If you’re finished working with a document and you want to work on tes save the document and clear the screen with the F7 Exit key.
Press F7 Exit
Finished?
Remember to save an edited document to a file before you tum eif your computer. A good pantom to follow is always to exit Wordperfect (press FT Exit), because WordPerfect then reminds you to save your work. As discussed earlier, if you tum off your computer without property exiting word-Perfect, you’ll see a strange message the next time you load the program. If you are finished for the day, you can remove the diskettes and turn the machine off, or you can use your computer with another program.
A full 90% of all word processing comprises the activities covered in this blogpost. entering text, moving the cursor, making additions and corrections by inserting and deleting text, and saving your work, In the next blog post, you’ll learn about the other basic word processing tasks, such as retrieving files and how to use other useful WordPerfect commands.
If you’d like more practice with the commands and operations covered in this post, by all means do some word processing on your own. Start a new document, enter text, move the cursor, insert and delete text, and use the F3 Help key. Or repeat the steps in this post but supply a different file name when you save the document. The sooner you learn the basic patterns, the quicker you’ll become an experienced Word Perfect user.