Editing Text
Some of these features can be activated with the mouse or with touch, however unless you are editing text on a touch screen, you are much better off learning the shortcut keys for the commands in this tutorial at least, as they are much quicker and easier to use (given that while typing text you already have your hands on the keyboard) than grabbing the mouse and finding the right icon on the ribbon or toolbar.
Saving documents
One of the most important skills to get used to practicing, is saving your work regularly. Some apps, such as Microsoft Word, make regular backups as you work, however not every app does this, and it's good practice in any case to regularly save in case something goes wrong.
When you save documents, they are stored either on the hard drive (in your computer itself) or on OneDrive (in the cloud). This keeps them ready for you to come back to, even if you turn the computer off and unplug it.
While you are typing a document, apps like WordPad keep what you have written in memory while you are working on them, but this isn't saved to the hard drive (or OneDrive) until you specifically ask WordPad to save it. If the power fails, then you lose any changes you made to your document since you last saved it.
To save your work, you can either click or tap on the square purple and white icon which looks like an old fashioned floppy disk. The keyboard shortcut for this is CONTROL+S. Remember with modifier keys such as CONTROL, that you hold down the modifier key (in this case CONTROL), then press the other part of the keystroke (in this case, the letter "S"), then let them both go.
By default most programs, including WordPad, will look in your "Documents" folder to save or open files.
The "Save as" dialogue seems intimidating at first, as it has quite a number of options. The only two pieces of information it really needs though are "Where are you going to save your document" and "What are you going to call your document". We just mentioned using the "Documents" folder to save our document, so that cuts out needing to navigate most of the controls on this dialogue box, leaving "What are you going to call the document"? When the Save As dialogue box opens, the focus is on the "File name" edit field. When you save a document, it's a good idea to give it a meaningful name so that you can find the right one again later. "My story" might work well if you don't write very much, but if you write a short story for a local magazine each month, then you will soon lose track of which story is which.
When you bring up the Save As dialog box, the focus is on the File Name edit field, so all you need to do to save into your documents folder, is type a name and press ENTER.
By default, WordPad adds ".RTF" to the end of the file name you choose. This stands for "Rich Text Format" and is a common file format which most word processors can open. It distinguishes files which WordPad can open from say images or sound files.
Once you've done that, saving in future is even easier because the second time you save your document, WordPad already knows where to save it and what to call it so saves it automatically with no visual indication.
Entering Text
When you write in an edit field, there is a thin vertical line, called the "Text cursor". As you type, this moves to the right to stay just in front of the last letter. If you make a mistake, you can press the BACKSPACE key (two keys above ENTER) and it will remove the last letter.
Opening a Document
Opening a document is very similar to saving a document. To "S"ave a document is CONTROL+S so to "O"pen a document is CONTROL+O (not all keystrokes are quite as obvious but many of the very common ones are).
When you press CONTROL+O, (or open the "File" menu and choose "Open"), you are presented with a dialogue box which looks very similar to the one we saw when we saved our document. Just above the edit field for the file name (which again has focus), is a larger box with all the documents we have in the Documents folder. To open a document you can either click or tap on the one you want (note there is a scroll bar on the right if you need to go down further) or start typing the name and press DOWN ARROW to select - similar to how we found items by using the search feature in Windows.
Note: You can also navigate to the list of files by pressing SHIFT+TAB twice then using the DOWN ARROW.
Navigating text
There are a number of ways of navigating around text.
You can click or tap where you want to move the cursor to. You will notice that when the mouse pointer is over text, it changes from an arrow to an "I" beam - a vertical line to make it easier to place in between letters.
The keyboard can be a more precise way to accurately move through text. Pressing the LEFT and RIGHT ARROW keys move the cursor by one letter in that direction. Pressing the UP and DOWN arrow keys move one line UP or DOWN.
Holding down CONTROL while you press the LEFT and RIGHT ARROW KEYS moves the cursor by one word.
Press the HOME and END keys (remember they are above the ARROWS) moves the cursor to the beginning or the end of the current line.
When you type, text will be inserted wherever the text cursor is. Any text to the right of the cursor will be pushed along to make room for the new text.
Editing text
Pressing BACKSPACE to remove the last character works really well if you realize your error as soon as you press the wrong key, however it's not ideal for going back a long way to change things.
Being able to navigate through the text we have written makes editing much easier. If you want to change a word in the middle of a sentence, you don't need to backspace and then retype the whole sentence, you can use CONTROL+LEFT ARROW go back to the specific word and then LEFT ARROW to move to the character.
As we know, the LEFT and RIGHT ARROW KEYS move us by one letter at a time, and if we hold down CONTROL while we press them, we move by one word at a time. CONTROL works in conjunction with other navigation keys as well. We used HOME to go to the beginning of a line, and END to go to the end of the line. We can use CONTROL to boost the action of these two keys as well. Can you think what they might do?
Pressing CONTROL+HOME takes you to the beginning of the whole document and pressing CONTROL+END takes you to the end of the whole document.
One more key we'll cover for this section is DELETE. It's another of the keys in the section above the ARROWS. Where BACKSPACE removes the character to the left of the cursor and is great for removing the last character if you press the wrong key, DELETE removes the character to the right of the cursor and works well when you are navigating through text.
We can also use CONTROL with DELETE to remove the word to the right of the cursor or with BACKSPACE to remove the word to the left of the cursor.
Selecting Text
As well as being able to go back through what you have written and edit it, you can also select text to copy it from one place to another or change its formatting. Remember all the navigation keys we've looked at so far in this tutorial? If you hold down SHIFT while you use any of those keystrokes, as well as moving, the text will be selected. So if you press SHIFT+RIGHT ARROW, one letter will be selected. If you press SHIFT+END, the text to the end of the current line will be selected, if you press SHIFT+CONTROL+RIGHT ARROW the next word will be selected and if you press SHIFT+CONTROL+END the rest of the document from the current point will be selected.
You can select text to the left instead (LEFT ARROW, HOME, CONTROL+LEFT ARROW etc) - though if you go back over text you have already selected, it will unselect it (eg if you press SHIFT+RIGHT ARROW it will select the next character and if you then press SHIFT+LEFT ARROW it will deselect that character).
You can also select text with the mouse by left clicking where you want to start selecting but don't release the mouse button - hold it down and drag the mouse pointer to where you want to end the selection. Once you let go of the left mouse button the text will remain selected.
Undo
As you are editing text, it can be very easy to make mistakes, even if you have been using the computer for years. We've looked at using BACKSPACE and DELETE to remove text and using the navigation keys to move through the document to insert new text, but another very handy shortcut to know is called "Undo". This will undo whatever the last thing you did was. There is a quick access toolbar button for this in WordPad which looks like a blue arrow curving to the left. You can press this with the mouse or a tap, or you can use the keystroke CONTROL+Z.
This can be very helpful when working with text you have selected as if you accidentally type a letter while you have text selected, the selected text will be replaced with that letter. It does behave slightly differently in different apps - in some apps it undoes characters one at a time and in others it undoes the whole block of text you just wrote. It also undoes accidental formatting changes as well (for instance if you accidentally pressed CONTROL+B and turned on Bold text instead of pressing SHIFT+B for the start of a name).
Cut, Copy, Paste and Undo
Once you have selected text, you can do the following things:
Cut:
Press CONTROL+X to Cut the selected text. This removes it from where it currently is, and puts it on "the clipboard", a place in memory where it is ready to be placed (called "pasted") somewhere else.
Copy:
Press CONTROL+C to copy selected text. The text is still where it was, but a copy is made in on the clipboard, ready to be pasted elsewhere.
Paste:
Press CONTROL+V to paste text which has been cut or copied. The text will be pasted wherever the cursor currently is, moving any text after it along, just as happened when we typed into the middle of our document.
WordPad has buttons for these functions on the Home Ribbon. The "Paste" button is a large icon of a clipboard at the very left of the Home ribbon, "Cut" and "Copy" are smaller buttons just to the right of "Paste".
The icon for Cut is a pair of scissors so thinking of this can help in remembering the X in CONTROL+X for cut.
The icon for Copy is two sheets of paper, one in front of the other.
Advanced navigation
We've looked at a number of ways of navigating and selecting text, and there are a couple more keystrokes we haven't used yet.
We already know that pressing UP or DOWN ARROWS on their own moves by one line, but we haven't looked at what CONTROL does with these two keys. Pressing CONTROL+UP ARROW or CONTROL+DOWN ARROW moves the cursor to the start of the next or previous paragraph (in WordPad it also treats blank lines as paragraphs, but in many other apps it jumps straight to the next block of text).
PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN move the cursor by one screen worth of information so the amount of movement depends on the level of zoom and the font size of the current document.
In some apps, CONTROL+PAGE UP and CONTROL+PAGE DOWN move by one physical page (for example in Microsoft Word), and in other places, they move to the start or end of the text currently visible on screen.
INSERT turns on a special typing mode where if you type in the middle of a document, instead of pushing text to the right of the cursor to make room, new text overwrites the old text.
Finally, CONTROL+A is "Select all". This will select all the text in the document.