Revised February 8, 2000

Word Pro Basics

Word Pro used to go under the name of Ami Pro, with ami the French word for friend (Dummies, p. 55)

Figure 5.1 Word Pro Status Bar controls - Try out each one

Status bar - Wempen doesn't mention that you can move the status bar to the top.  Most of the functions found on the status bar are found at the top in Microsoft Office applications so if you want to move the status bar, you click the status bar at the very left, and choose "Move to top"

Use of enter button (p. 64) - Do not press Enter to start a new line in the same paragraph since it will wordwrap automatically when you get to the right edge of the paper -- So what's the harm in pressing enter? Here are some reasons I thought of:

• If you change the document and add or delete text, the line break will no longer occur at the right point

• If you change the font size or the margins, the line break will no longer occur at the right point

• If you send the document to someone else and they try to print it on a different printer, the line breaks may not occur at the right point

Insert and Type Over Modes (p. 64) - The insert key acts as a toggle switch between these two modes.  There is also a third mode, called Markup Edits mode, where anything you add or delete is marked with a different color or text style so you can tell what's changed (Dummies, p. 61).

Difference between Backspace and Delete keys (p. 64-65) - backspace gets rid of text to the left of the insertion point, delete gets rid of text to the right of the insertion point

Selecting text - Drag across it with a mouse.  In addition, there are various other ways to select text.  Table 5.2 shows how to select a word, a sentence, and a paragraph.  If one wants to select several words, several sentences, or several paragraph, one does the action specified in Table 5.2, and then without releasing the mouse, drag to the last item you want selected.  This is different than just dragging the mouse across the text to begin with, because if one selects first, then the mouse moves in these increments across the text.  Note that if you start typing while the text is still selected, it replaces the text -- you need to click elsewhere to deselect the text first.  If you make a mistake, use the Undo feature.

Setting the levels of Undo - Choose Files, User Setup, Word Pro Preferences and set the undo level.  You generally want as many levels of Undo as your computer can do without slowing down. (Dummies, p. 69-70)

Viewing Modes (p. 66) - Layout, Draft, Outline, and Page Sorter - The default is layout, draft displays more quickly

Zoom Mode (p. 67-68) - Class exercise - play around with different options using sample file

Splitting the view (p. 68-69) - The larger the monitor, the more useful (because text of a given point size will appear larger on bigger monitors) - allows you to do a left/right split or a top/bottom split -- in contrast, Microsoft Word only allows you to do a top/bottom split

Showing Hidden Characters (p. 69) - I couldn't find the Show/Hide Tabs and Returns button on the toolbar; Try out Clean Screen view (perhaps you want to do this when you are first trying to write something -- so that you aren't distracted by formatting issues

Finding and Replacing Text -

(1) Various options for search - Whole words only, words starting with, words ending with, wordings containing

(2) Alternatively, you can use wildcard characters -- wildcard characters are preceded by carat sign - ^* instead of the * that you would use in Windows Explorer

(3) You can search for certain non-printing characters using the ^ -- e.g. tabs, end of paragraph, etc.

Spell Checker - Lotus SmartSuite uses the same dictionary across applications (Dummies, p. 19) - so if you add a word to the user dictionary in one application, it will be in there for other SmartSuite applications as well

    -Use of a spell checker is no substitute for proofreading -- errors that spell checker won't catch (when you have misspelled a word, but the spelling you have used is valid spelling for another word)

Using Find and Replace to change formatting (p. 75) - class exercise to walk through the steps