Editing text in a document

Editing a Document:

Editing a document is where you make any change to a document. We are going to teach you about the three basic ways to change a document.

 

Three ways to edit a Document

The three basic ways of editing a document are:

1. inserting something like: text, pictures, graphs, tables, drawings, etc.
2. Deleting text and
3. replacing or modifying existing text

You will find that any one of these three points are used any time you change a document. You might understand what they mean just by their names; but we are going to give a brief description for how we are going to use each point.

 

Inserting Text

Lets take a look at how you can insert text into a document. If it will help you feel confident, you have already done so. The document "Mary" is where you inserted all the letters, spaces and punctuation to make the poem. You then saved the document afterwards. It would not be a document unless you have saved or printed it. So, as you see! Inserting is not so hard. It is where you press any key on the key board to make a letter, number, punctuation or symbol appear. The only thing you will need to remember about inserting, is where to place your cursor. Always place your cursor on the letter, space, number, punctuation or symbol that you want to follow immediately after what you are inserting. The text that you are on will be pushed over to make room for what you are going to type.

For example: Lets say you left out an extra letter T in the word little. In this example, you can either place your cursor over the letter T that is still there, or on the letter L. Now type the letter T. You will get the same results. You will still have two T's next to each other and the letters l and e is pushed over one space to the right to make room for the new letter. If you now understand how to do this, up and down arrow through your poem and insert all the letters that you have left out. Remember to save each change that you have made. You can do this by pressing the command "control S". If the sounds were installed for your system, you will hear a "bling" sound. This is your confirmation that you have saved the adjustments you had just made.

There are other ways that you can have the computer insert text automatically for you and we will learn about that when we talk about pasting text.

Deleting Text

The opposite of inserting text is deleting text. This just means that you are removing letters, numbers, punctuation and symbols from the document that you did not intend to put there. This will happen often, and when you are editing the document "Mary", I am sure that you will use the process for deleting text.

How do I delete text:

Well! There are two ways to do that.

1. Place your cursor on the letter, punctuation, number or symbol that you do not want in your document. Now press the delete key and it will disappear. All the text that is after the cursor, will be moved over to the left, every time you press the delete key, to close the blank space where your text was taken out.

For example: Lets say you typed two letter Y's at the end of the word Mary. If you want to get rid of the extra Y, then move your arrows left and right until you find Mary and stop on the extra letter Y. Now press the delete key and the extra Y is gone and the rest of the letters that follow are moved over to the left to close the empty space. You should hear a sound that sounds like something falling if the sounds have been installed correctly.

2. The second way to delete a character is by placing your curser one place after the letter you want to delete. Now press the backspace key. This will delete one letter before the curser.

For example: If you had typed two Y's at the end of Mary, place your curser on the space after the word Mary and tap the backspace once. You will delete the last Y at the end of the word. You can tap the backspace key as many times you wish to delete more than one letter.

Now, take the time to delete all the extra letters and spaces in your document Mary and remember to save after everything you have deleted. This is by pressing "control S". If the sounds were installed for your system, you will hear a "bling" sound. This is your confirmation that you have saved the adjustments you had just made.

Replacing text with something else:

This again, will happen quite often and you will be shown two ways to replace text! However, you already know one way to fix this type of mistake. You can use the two steps above to achieve this task. First, you would want to delete the unwanted letter and then insert the new letter in its place.

Now, in the next lesson, we want to show you how you can replace a larger portion of text quickly and easily. There will be times when you have a larger section of text that you wish to replace with other text: such as, words or a whole line. To quickly replace this text requires you to know how to select text and then cut, copy and paste text. It is not easy to explain in a few words so we will need to show you in smaller parts. You may need to practice with this lesson a few times until it becomes easy for you before you move on to the next one.

To replace text, we are going to break it down in to four parts. It may seem like a lot at first; but you will see how easy it is after you try it a few times. The four parts are as follows:

1. Movement Commands
2. Selecting commands
3. copying and cutting text
4. then pasting text

You will need to memorize the movement commands to achieve the following lessons.

Enter on the next link to start the first section for learning how to replace text. Movement Commands

End of lesson.