When you start Word, it gives you a blank document to let you start typing right away. Word makes some assumptions about how the document will look, so you don't need to worry about formatting at all unless you want to change the default settings. Here are the most important ones:
Later in this book, you learn how to change all of these formatting options. For now, you can just focus on typing. Typing Paragraphs and Creating Blank LinesThe key to having a happy typing experience is knowing when to press Enter. Follow these two rules for typing paragraphs of text:
Figure 2.1 illustrates these two rules. Figure 2.1. Do not press Enter within a paragraph. Do press Enter at the end of the paragraph.
When you press Enter, you actually insert a hidden character called a paragraph mark , which tells Word to end the paragraph. Word's definition of a paragraph may be a little broader than yours. It considers a paragraph to be any amount of text that ends with a paragraph mark. So as far as Word is concerned , blank lines and short lines of text ”such as headings or the lines in an address block ”are separate paragraphs. To create lines between your paragraphs, press Enter twice at the end of the paragraph: once to end the paragraph you just typed and once to create the blank line. If you need several blank lines, just continue pressing Enter. If you press Enter too many times and need to delete a blank line, press the Backspace key. You'll learn much more about deleting paragraph marks later in this hour. Figure 2.2 illustrates when to press Enter to create short lines of text and blank lines. Figure 2.2. Press Enter to end short lines of text and create blank lines.
As you type, you may see a variety of nonprinting underlines and buttons popping up automatically in your text. Here is a list of what they are and where you'll learn about them:
Inserting TabsWord gives you default tab stops every one-half inch across the horizontal ruler. (If you don't see your rulers, choose View, Ruler.) Each time you press the Tab key, the insertion point jumps out to the next tab stop. Any text to the right of the insertion point moves along with it. Figure 2.3 shows the beginning of a memo in which the Tab key was pressed after the labels To:, From:, Date:, and Re: to line up the text at the half-inch mark on the horizontal ruler. When you use tabs, you can align your text far more precisely than you can by pressing the Spacebar multiple times. Figure 2.3. Press the Tab key to push text out to the next tab stop.
You can also press the Tab key at the beginning of a paragraph to indent the first line by one-half inch. Figure 2.4 shows a document whose paragraphs are indented in this way. Figure 2.4. Press the Tab key at the beginning of each paragraph to indent the first line.
Viewing Paragraph, Tab, and Space MarksAs you're typing your document, you may occasionally want to check to see whether you accidentally pressed Enter at the end of a line within a paragraph, or pressed Enter too many times between paragraphs. Or, maybe you think you might have pressed the Tab key one time too many, or typed an extra space between two words. You can use Word's Show/Hide feature to solve these mysteries. To turn it on, click the Show/Hide button on the Formatting toolbar (or press Ctrl+Shift+*). This is a toggle button, meaning that you click it once to turn it on, and again when you want to turn it off (see Figure 2.5). Figure 2.5. The Show/Hide feature lets you see your paragraph, tab, and space marks.
The Show/Hide feature uses the paragraph mark symbol to indicate where you pressed Enter, a right arrow to show where you pressed the Tab key, and a dot to mark where you pressed the Spacebar. Figure 2.5 shows a document that has an errant paragraph, tab, and space mark. The user accidentally pressed the Tab key a second time on the From: line, typed an extra space between the words designating and Fridays , and pressed Enter at the end of a line within a paragraph. To delete any of these characters , click immediately to the left of the character and press the Delete key (or click immediately to the right of the character and press the Backspace key). Figure 2.6 shows the same document after these three problems were fixed. Figure 2.6. The extra paragraph, tab, and space marks have been deleted.
Typing onto the Next PageAs you're typing, Word calculates how many lines fit on a page. When the page you're on is full, Word automatically inserts a page break and starts another page. Figure 2.7 shows the break between two pages of text, as it appears in Print Layout view. (If your page breaks look different than what you see in Figure 2.7, choose View, Print Layout.) Figure 2.7. Word breaks pages for you.
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