Find out how to delete characters, lines, sentences, paragraphs, and pages. You'll also be introduced to the lifesaving Undo command.
✔ Learn how to find and replace text in your documents.
✔ Work with blocks of text and see how you can mark, select, copy, move, and paste blocks.
✔ Customize the spell checker and AutoCorrect settings.
✔ Get familiar with how to preview and print your documents, both on paper and electronically.
Chapter 3
To and Fro in a Document
In This Chapter
▶ Using the scroll bars
▶ Moving the insertion pointer
▶ Getting around with keyboard shortcuts
▶ Getting lost and getting back
▶ Using the Go To command
A computer screen is only so big. Your Word document can be much larger, perhaps requiring several monitors all stacked atop each other so that you could view it all at once. That somehow seems impractical. Therefore, Word offers techniques to let you hop, skip, and jump around your document, hither, thither, and yon.
Document Scrolling
It’s ironic that the word scroll is used when referring to an electronic document. The scroll was the first form of portable recorded text, existing long before bound books. On a computer, scrolling is the process by which you view a little bit of a big document in a tiny window.
The document portion of the Word program window features a vertical scroll bar, illustrated in Figure 3-1. The scroll bar’s operation is similar to the scroll bar in any Windows program. As a review, the figure illustrates the mouse’s effect on parts of the scroll bar.
Figure 3-1: The vertical scroll bar.
A key feature in the scroll bar is the elevator button (refer to Figure 3-1). Use the mouse to drag this button up or down to scroll the document. Its position in the scroll bar reflects the location of the text you see. For example, when the elevator button is at the top of the scroll bar, the window shows text at the start of the document.
✔ As you drag the elevator button up or down, you see a page number displayed, as shown in Figure 3-1. When a document is formatted with heading styles, you also see the heading title below the page number, as shown in the figure.
✔ The vertical scroll bar may disappear at times; move the mouse pointer over your text, and it shows up again.
✔ When the elevator button doesn't show up, or is dimmed, the whole document appears in the window. That means there’s nothing to scroll.
✔ Because the elevator button’s size reflects how much of the document appears in the window, the button grows smaller as your document grows longer.
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When your document is wider than can be displayed in the window, a horizontal scroll bar appears. It shows up at the bottom of the document part of the window, just above the status bar. Use the horizontal scroll bar to shift the page back and forth, left and right.
✔ Word automatically slides the document left and right as you type, but that action can be jarring. Instead, try to adjust the horizontal scroll bar to display as much of the text as possible. Or, if you can, make the document window wider.
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If your computer mouse sports a wheel button, you can use that button to scroll through your document. Roll the wheel to scroll up or down; the direction is set in Windows, so I can’t for certain tell you whether rolling the wheel up scrolls your document up or down. Just try it to see how it works.
Some mice let you press the wheel button or tilt it from side to side. If so, press and hold down the wheel button and drag the mouse forward or back to slowly pan your document up or down. Tilt the wheel button from side to side to pan the document left and right.
Move the Insertion Pointer
The beauty of a word processor is that you can edit any part of your document; you don't always have to work at "the end." The key to pulling off this trick is to know how to move the insertion pointer to the exact spot you want.
✔ Moving the insertion pointer is important! Scientific studies have shown that merely looking at the computer screen does no good.
✔ New text appears only at the insertion pointer. Text is deleted at the insertion pointer’s location. Text is pasted at the insertion pointer. Formatting commands affect text where the insertion pointer lies blinking.
The easiest way to put the insertion pointer exactly where you want it is to click the mouse at that spot in your text. Point. Click. The insertion pointer moves.
For short hops, nothing beats using the keyboard’s cursor keys to quickly move the insertion pointer around a document. The four arrow keys move the insertion pointer up, down, right, and left:
If you press and hold down the Ctrl (Control) key and then press an arrow key, the insertion pointer moves in larger increments. The invigorated insertion pointer leaps desperately in all four directions:
