DEMO: Editing

Delete, Backspace and Insert

Another thing that we can get really proficient in is editing. I'm in a Word document, and here's the difference between the delete key, the backspace key and the insert key.

I'm going to click somewhere in this sentence right here. Notice I'm between the T and the E right now. I'm going to start by using the backspace, because that's the most common, and we're just going to keep hitting it. Notice it's deleting whatever character is before it, so whatever is before the cursor will get deleted. The delete key is after the cursor: now everything after the cursor gets deleted.

So what's the insert key? I'm going to press the insert key a few times, and notice it's not doing anything. But I pressed it three times, so now the insert is on. Watch what I type now: it's typing over whatever is created there, and you can see that it's typing over the letters that are there.

It's very rare that I use the insert key, and the reason why I don't really use this feature all that much, but bring it up, is because sometimes that gets stuck on and people don't know how to fix it, they don't know how to correct it. All you need to do is really hit the insert key to remove it, and now it's going to type like normal. There is an option to turn that off, and I believe it's off by default at this point in time, which will save a lot of headaches in the future. But if that ever does occur, where somebody's typing over their characters, now you know what it is.

Formatting Shortcuts

One thing we can do is select something. Let's say we want to bold this sentence right here. I'm going to click the bold button, but a much easier way to do that is a control B to bold it, or control U to underline it, or control I to italicize it. This also works in a lot of other applications, like online applications and that type of stuff, so it's a shortcut to really help you do things a lot quicker.

Breaks

I also really like to hit that. For instance, right now if I hit enter it creates a new line, but I can hit shift enter and it'll create a break. I find this is more for if you're doing web programming, but sometimes it will be for a Word document. Notice that it's a little different than an enter. You can see my characters — I've got the special characters that are showing. This is a return, so it goes down to the next line. This is a break, so it's not creating a new number, it's like a continuation of the paragraph, versus this, which means it's a new paragraph.

I also have a control enter, that actually will bring us down to the next — it creates what's called a page break, and it brings us down to the next page.

Formatting Marks

That brings us to pointing out once again these little characters that are in here: spaces are dots, and paragraphs are the little paragraph symbol. I can turn those on and off, and this really helps me make sure that my formatting is correct on my document, that I'm not having a bunch of — I see people spacing things out with spaces rather than tabs, and so I can go in there and change some of that so it has better formatting to it. I like to always use that, when it's turned on, but some people don't like that. I just prefer it.

Undo and Redo

Of course, if we mess up, we always have the control Z to undo things, and control Y will redo things. We have these buttons up here to undo and redo. But one of the things that I really like is, if I want to go way back in my document, I have this down arrow and I can choose to go back as far as I want to go back. So now I go back to this clean document.

Finding a Shortcut

If I ever wanted to see what a shortcut was — for instance, I showed you the control B for bold — I could hover over the bold button and it would show me what shortcut this is: control B. So let's say there's something that I don't know. I can just hover above it and see if there's a quick shortcut for it. For instance, to center this I could do a control E to center this paragraph.

Navigating With the Alt Key

Another way that I can navigate through some of these menus is I can click on the alt button, and it shows me shortcuts for these different menus. For instance, if I want to do a search, I could do the Q — it's showing me Q for search. So I'll hit Q, and then I'll search for sentence, and then it will show me anything that's related to the sentence. That's a quick way to access different shortcuts and different menus on here.

I'll do one more alt, and then maybe I want to access the layout. So there's the layout, and then what do I want to access? Well, maybe it's the margins, so I hit margins and the margins come up. I can either scroll through with my arrow key, or maybe I want custom margins, so then I hit A and the custom margins box will come up. Once I'm in the custom margins box, I can hit the tab to scroll through the different items and use things like the arrow keys to select things, or I could hit the space bar, or type in — let's say I want 1.25, I just type that in. So there are different ways that I can scroll through this. Let's go back up: I'm going to do shift tab to go back up, and maybe I want landscape instead. Then I hit OK.