Document Processing Edit and Format Features

The five key feature groups are edit, format, cut and paste, printing, and file management.

Welcome to a new year in office automation "do it yourself" education. Don't hesitate to take on this topic, I will accompany you with expressions, common sense steps and tips, and descriptive examples. This is an ongoing series to help build confidence and ability in applied office automation software.

In our last article - episode, we reviewed the current state of office automation, and followed this up with detailed examples of edit commands and an exercise.

Let us enumerate the steps to highlight some text and edit and apply cut and paste commands.

Before preceding with a repeat exercise, here are some other ideas.
Why do I separate cut and paste from edit in my five feature explanation of word processing?
There are many different key configurations to navigate in application software and change, overwrite, and delete character text. Cut and Paste are the two commands in that feature group.
Since cut and paste represents scalable editing of data, we will discuss it with editing. One can copy, cut, or paste text within a document. Cut text is text which is highlighted, as if to copy, but that is instead erased. Delete also removes text. Cut text is saved in memory or MS Office clipboard. It can be pasted somewhere else, as long as a different text string is not cut or copied.

Here is our sample text from the previous article - episode.

By locating, understanding, and applying edit, format, print, cut and paste, and file management, anybody can have a successful approach to document processing.

I want any beginning reader to open a word processor, either MS Word or OpenOffice.Org Writer, or both.

If you have both, stop a moment and look at the edit pull down menu of each application. Notice the differences and similarities between the commands and between the short cut keys, those starting with CTRL and some letter key. Determine which application has more edit commands and which short cut keys are the same and which are different. Right now, cut and paste remain universally accepted in most word processing applications.
Cut, copy and paste also tend to have the same short cut keys, CTRL - X, CTRL - C and CTRL - V, respectively.

Here are the promised enumerated steps to copying our sample text sentence and pasting to an open word processing document.

1. Highlight the entire sentence from the first word "By" to the last word at the period, "processing." Include the period. One can highlight with the most efficiency by using the mouse.

1.a. Highlight by moving the mouse to the first desired characters, in this case the word "By."
Hold down the left mouse key while rolling the mouse pointer over as many characters as desired. This includes the whole sentence. Let go of the left mouse button, when highlighting is finished.

2. Do not press the left mouse button, before cutting or copying text. Otherwise, you will have to highlight the text again. Roll the mouse over the highlighted text, press the right mouse button, select the copy command from the context menu. A context menu,pulls together commands depending upon the context of what a user is working upon.

3. Now navigate to any open blank word processing new document. Apply a left click within the open document. This activates the document page. Next right click to obtain a relevant context menu. Notice that the context commands available within dedicated word processing software differs from context commands on a web page.
Select the Paste command.

It looks convoluted, but one can copy and paste or cut and re-paste in three steps.
1. Highlight the text. 2. Indicate to copy the text. 3. Navigate to different software or new location and paste the new text.

If you want to undo these steps for any reason, look up undo within the edit menu, or look for the undo icon in the toolbars. One can paste the last copied text string as many times as desired, until memory is replaced by copying a new text string, or by saving the current document.

Can you imagine a more powerful feature that magnifies and paste command? Suppose you have a document with the phrase "awkward features" placed throughout a competition. Here is how to replace that phrase with the sentence we just pasted in one spot.

Multiple - Paste replacement:

1. Have an open word processing document available, type: Word Processing is defined by awkward features.

2. Make sure you have highlighted and copied text or a phrase. In this case we will copy part of the same prior sentence. Start from the word "locating." Include all words through "management." Copy the selected text. Return to the open word processing with the new sentence in it.

3. Pull up the Find and Replace command pop-up from the edit menu. In the Find input box, type the phrase "awkward features" without the quotes. Now click in the Replace input box. Press the CTRL and the V keys together. Your copied phrase should appear as input for replacing prior text.

4. With the Find and Replace inputs filled, you can click on the Replace All button at will. If there were one or one hundred instances of the terms to be found or replaced, all instances of the phrase will be replaced.

This is just a taste of the new powers you will possess, if you are not already aware. By the way Find and Replace is the next chief improvement, besides File Management and digital cut and paste.

Next up - more software comparison. All software applications listed here are the trademarks of their respective publishers.