Wordperfect for Absolute Beginners 2 – Dear Reader, as a novice word processor, you may feel like a klutz now. In no time, you’ll be a WordPerfect nonklutz! This blog post continues discussion of the basics from Basics Of Wordperfect for Absolute Beginners. Besides helping you overcome your fear of remaining a word processing klutz forever, it presents some of the most typical word processing situations and how you can master them.
You’ll learn more useful patterns for entering text into an existing document and other standard WordPerfect commands and conveniences.
Contents
Retrieving a Document
It’s time to continue work on your latest writing project: the company newsletter that you started in the first part, First, retrieve, or open, the document by its file name and make a copy of it in the computer’s memory.
Cautions: If you’re finished working on one document and you want to work on another, always save the first document and clear the screen with the F7 Exit key before you retrieve another document. If you don’t, you’ll Join the two documents.
Dear Reader, if there is a “gotcha” in WordPerfect, it’s here, and it can be the bane of klutzes and nonklutzes alike. WordPerfect doesn’t distinguish between the act of retrieving a document to a blank screen and retrieving-and hence joining-a document into another document that may already be on the screen. In both operations you’re still retrieving the document and putting a copy of it into memory. If there’s a document already on the screen. WordPerfect inserts the second document at the current cursor location of the first.
In third part you’ll learn how to join documents. Right now and for the sake of your sanity, follow this simple rule of thumb to make sure that you aren’t joining documents. If the status line doesn’t say Pg 1 Ln 1′ before you retrieve a document, then you haven’t properly cleared the screen. Assuming then that you have cleared the screen, you’re ready to retrieve a document.
Press SHIFT-F10 Retrieve
wordperfect prompts:
Documents to be retrieved
Type news
Press Return
Theres your newsletter, wordperfect positions cursors at the beginning of documents after you retrieved it. If you want to work with a document on another drive or another directory, supply the drive name or directory path, as in this two examples below.
a:news News is on the A drive
\wp\vince\news News is in the VINCE subdirectory of the WP directory
Using Block to Make Major Deletions
One of the themes of this book is: Saving keystrokes means saving work.
WordPerfect offers you other ways to make wholesale deletions with only a few keystrokes. You block out the text and then delete it.
A block is any continuous section of text, whether a word, a phrase, a line, a sentence, a paragraph, an entire page, or even the whole document. Before you can use a block, WordPerfect has to know the limits of the block. To delimit or mark off a block, first position the cursor at the beginning character in the block and then extend the block to encompass the remaining text in the block.
Normally a block extends horizontally to include all characters on each line in the block.
That means that a soft or hard return at the end of a line is also part of the block. When you then move or copy a block, the block retains its shape, Sometimes, however, you might want to block out only a rectangular section of text. Because that’s an advanced technique, you won’t learn about it until later.
Although you’ll learn only how to delete blocks in this blogpost, there are many other things you can do with blocks. For all block operations you must first delimit the block as outlined here.
Suppose you want to delete the first paragraph. The cursor should be at the beginning of the line in front of the tab, which you want to include it in the paragraph. To turn block on:
Press
Word Perfect tells you:
Block on
and continues to flash this message until you finish working with the block.
That is, after you’ve extended the block to the last character in the block, you leave block mode on while you perform whatever operation you want.
Here, because you’re deleting a paragraph, you can quickly extend the block to include the entire paragraph:
Press RETURN
Because every paragraph ends with a hard return, WordPerfect looks for the next occurrence of a hard return and then highlights the entire block between the cursor location and the return. You also want to include the extra hard return that you added for spacing between paragraphs:
Press DOWN ARROW once
but notice that there’s no highlighting in the blank lines.
Press DEL or BACKSPACE
to delete the block.
Word Perfect asks you to confirm what you’re doing:
Delete Block? (Y/N) No
Type y
to complete the deletion.
The “Undelete” Feature
Oops! You didn’t want to delete that block! WordPerfect offers a feature you can use to “undelete” a previous deletion if you find that you really want to keep the deleted material. How does WordPerfect do it? It keeps deletions in a buffer, which is a holding zone.
Press F1 Cancel
Word Perfect brings the last deletion back and highlights it. It also presents the undelete menu:
Undelete 1 Restore; 2 Previous Deletion: 0
To accept the undelete:
Type 1 or r [Restore]
to bring back the paragraph.
Tip: WordPerfect can restore the previous three deletions only, so it’s always a good idea to undelete as soon as you can.
Here’s how WordPerfect keeps track of deletions. Every time you delete text or codes (explained later), that counts as one deletion.
Fortunately,WordPerfect is “smart” enough to bunch several deletions together as long as you issue the deletions consecutively.
For example, if you press BACKSPACE three times to delete the previous three characters, that counts as just one deletion. If you delete three words in a row without doing anything else, that’s another deletion. If, however, you press DEL once to delete a character, move the cursor, and continue typing, that’s one deletion, too. Whatever is the fourth deletion goes into the buffer and pushes the first one out.
You can look at the last three deletions with the 2 [Previous Deletion) choice. You can also press the UP ARROW or DOWN ARROW keys to circle through the previous three deletions, then type 1 or r [Restore] to recall the highlighted deletion. Type 0, press F1 Cancel a second time, or press RETURN to cancel the restore operation.
Another Block Example
After you turn the block on, you can use any cursor movement command or type any character to extend the block in a forward direction. The cursor should be at the left margin of the second paragraph. If it isn’t, move it there.
Then:
Press ALT-F4 Block or F12 Block
Туре .
(That’s a period.)
You’ve asked WordPerfect to find the first period character, which sets up the first sentence as the block. If you want to delete this sentence, you should also delete the two spaces after the sentence:
Type SPACEBAR twice
Because this was just practice:
Press F1 Cancel
to turn off the block.
Press the Fl Cancel key to stop a block operation. Note that this key works differently when the block is highlighted. Many WordPerfect commands have “dual personalities” depending on whether you use them alone or with a block. Here’s another block example.
Press ALT-F4 Block or F12 Block
Press SPACEBAR
This time, you’ve delimited the block as one word. Continue pressing the SPACEBAR to delimit a phrase of several words.
Press F1 Cancel
to turn off the block.
Press ALT-F4 Block or F12 Block
Туре т
Be sure the T is uppercase. The block extends to the next occurrence of T, which is in the word Toupee.
Press F1 Cancel
Press ALT-F4 Block or F12 Block
Press HOME,HOME, DOWN ARROW
Now you’ve delimited the block from the cursor position to the end of the document.
Press F1 Cancel
You can delimit a block from the cursor position backward, but you can only use a cursor movement command to highlight the block. when you type a character while block is on, WordPerfect look forward for that character. Experiment with delimiting blocks using the techniques the outlined earlier.
Clear the Screen and Start Over!
Because you may have made deletions to this document before you really wanted 10 keep, return to the previous version of the document before you continue That is, clear the document from the screen and retrieve it again:
Press F7 Exit
Type n twice
Press SHIFT-F10 Retrieve
Type news
Press RETURN
An Editing Session
Now you want to add more “copy” to the newsletter, so go to the end of the document quickly:
Press HOME,HOME,DOWN ARROW
There should be two blank lines between the last paragraph and the new one you’ll type now.
Type the following new paragraph but make sure it starts with a tab.
The picnic starts at 9 a.m. and continues until, as Joe Tetrazzini down in Tinting and Dyeing remarked,
“the suds are gone.” With any luck, that won’t be until much later. Founder’s Park is located on Route 22 at the Big Sneeze exit. Founder’s peeled for our signs. Keep your eyes peeled for or signs.
Press RETURN twice
to end the paragraph and add a blank line.
Type the next paragraph:
Caution! the construction at the Impromptu interchange. It’s a real mess right now! If you’re driving in from the south, try to avoid the construction of impromptu interchange. it’s a real mess right now!
Press RETURN twice
to end the paragraph and add a blank line.
Combining and Splitting Paragraphs
Taking a look at this wonderful prose on the screen, you decide to rearrange the contents of the last two paragraphs. You’ll combine them into one paragraph and then split the paragraph at another spot.
Press UP ARROW six times
to position the cursor on Ln 5° (the last line in the paragraph).
Press END
The cursor is at the end of the paragraph. It should be two spaces past the period. If it isn’t there, type the two spaces now. Then:
Press DEL three times
You’ve deleted the hard return at the end of the paragraph, the second RETURN, and the tab that began the paragraph. The text of the last paragraph is now joined to the previous paragraph. You can combine paragraphs by deleting whatever is between them.
Question: Is there another way to combine the two paragraphs?
Answer: Yes! Position the cursor on the first word of the second paragraph, then use the BACKSPACE key to delete the intervening tab and hard returns.
Press UP ARROW twice
Press CTRL-RIGHT ARROW enough times
to position the cursor under the F of Founder’s.
This is where you want to begin a new paragraph.
Press RETURN twice
You’ve split the paragraph at this spot. But is it correct yet? No! Look at the screen. You must insert another tab to indent the paragraph:
Press TAB
Press DOWN ARROW
Word Perfect has to have access to the second program disk. Insert this disk in the proper drive and press a key to continue. (I won’t mention this again.)
Overflow Files
As you work, WordPerfect maintains certain overflow files on the disk but deletes these overflow files when you save your work and properly exit the program. There are several overflow files, each beginning with (WP). What they contain is explained in the WordPerfect documentation.
If you turn off or reset your computer without properly exiting Word Perfect, or if the power fails and the computer goes “down,'” Word Perfect can’t delete the overflow files. When you load WordPerfect the next time, the program sees the previous overflow files and you’ll see this message:
Are other copies of WordPerfect currently running? (Y/N)
Because overflow files exist from the previous session, WordPerfect is a bit confused. It “assumes” that another copy of the program is working else-where. Normally this isn’t the case, so it’s safe to do this:
Type n
WordPerfect deletes the previous overflow files and opens new ones. If you type y, however, WordPerfect requests another directory name and supplies the current directory (for instance,C: \WP as here):
Directory is in use. New WP Directory:C: \WP\
You can’t run two copies of WordPerfect in the same directory, because there can be only one set of overflow files per directory. You must type a different directory name and press RETURN if you want to keep two sets of overflow files. This scenario doesn’t occur too often, thank goodness!
Tip: A better bet if you’re not sure is to press F1 Cancel to return to the DOS prompt. You could then rename the overflow files. Load WordPerfect again and retrieve the overflow files individually to see if you lost any work Thus, the overflow files can help you recover lost work. Accidental destruction of a file may never happen to you, but it’s comforting to know that there are ways to recover work when you’re in dire straits.
Dear Reader, there’s a lot to learn, and everyone makes mistakes! But I hope that the examples in these first two blog post showed you ways to redeem yourself and save a lot of frustration and work, too.