Therefore before we start with Word Processing, let us see how to create a personal data directory, and then how to set our Word Processor to save all document files in that directory.

Creating a Personal Data Directory

Word Perfect 6.1 for Windows

Microsoft Word 6.0

Lotus Ami Pro

Lotus Word Pro

Microsoft Works

Creating a Personal Data Folder

Corel Word Perfect 7.0

Edit, Preferences, double click on file, then in Default document folder enter the drive and directory of your personal data directory. You can use the little button on the right side of the default directory box to bring up a file window (discussed below) to select the drive and directory.

Lotus Word Pro from Lotus Smart Suite 96

Select File, User Setup, Word Pro Preferences, Locations tab, and enter the desired drive and directory in the box labeled Documents. If you want to use a file window to select the drive and directory, click Browse.

Microsoft Word for Windows 95 7.0

Select Tools, Options, click on the File Locations Tab, select Documents, click Modify, and it brings up a file window (discussed below), and you need to either enter the desired directory and drive in the box labeled Location of Documents, or select the drive and directory from the other boxes in the file window.

Microsoft Works for Windows 95

Microsoft Works may have the ability to select a speciaol drive and directory, but I could not find it. If anyone knows where one can do this, please let me know and I will share it with the other members of the Word Processing SIG.

Now Let Us Get Started with Word Processing

It is difficult to try to explain how to do everything on every program, so I am going to spend most of my time talking about how to do something in Word Perfect 6.0 for Windows 3.1 (because that is the product I know best), and occasionally I will talk about how to do the same thing in Microsoft Works (because a lot of our members have that program). However I have all of the above programs installed on the Luggable, so if you have any questions about how to get something to work in one of the other Word Processors or on Windows 95, come to our Word Processing / Desktop Publishing meeting on the second Wednesday of each month, at 7:30 pm, in room U9 of Keplinger Hall, 5th and Harvard. Although we try to have a program scheduled for each meeting, we spend a little time at each meeting with a general question and answer session, and if you come before the meeting is scheduled to start, we can also field questions.

Some programs automatically open up a new document when you start them, while others will walk you through one or two selection screens in which you select whether you want to open an existing document, or start a new document. If you are using one of the programs that automatically opens up a new document, and you want to open an existing document, there is no problem -- just click File and then Open, and designate the file you want to work on.

Let us start with a simple letter. The style I prefer to use is to have the return address and date against the right margin, so I look at the bottom bar and see Times New Roman -- 12 pt -- Styles -- Left -- 1.0 -- Tables -- Columns -- 100%, and I click the Justification entry "Left" and select Right from the pull down menu.

With Microsoft Works, there are three symbols to the right of the U (which indicates underlined text). They are left align, center align, and right align.

I then type my street address and city, state, and zip. It is now time for the date. I could look at the calendar and just type in the date, but I can also select Insert and Date, and I see a menu Date Text, Date Code, and Date Format. I can use Date Format to select one of 12 formats for date, date and time, or time, but let us go with what we currently have selected. Whether I select Date Text or Date Code I get todays date, formatted as Date Format specifies. But these are not the same thing. If I store Date Text in the file on December 3, save it, and bring it up the next day, it will still show December 3. But if I select Date Code on December 3, it will show December 3, but if I save it, and bring it up on December 4 and print the document, it will say December 4. Normally I use Date Text, because I want to remember when I sent a particular letter, not have the date change to today's date. So I select Date Text, and press enter.

Now I am ready for the Name and Address of the person I am sending the letter to, and that should be on the left margin, so I go back to the bar and click Right, and select Left Justification. The cursor is now back on the left, so I press enter two or three times, type the name and address of the person I am sending the letter to, a blank line, the Dear Sir salutation, a blank line, and then the body of the letter. At the end I press return twice, type Yours truly, and press return several times, to leave room for my signature, and then type my name with a return.

The letter is now finished. I can print it by clicking File and then Print, or I could type Ctrl P, as the menu reminds me, or if I look real close I notice the fourth icon looks like a printer, and if I put my mouse there for a few seconds, sure enough, it says print, so I can click there and print the letter.

Now I want to save the letter. I can click File and then Save (or Ctrl S as the menu reminds me) to save the file, or File and Save As (or press F3, as the menu reminds me). What is the difference? The file I am working on right now does not yet have a name, so regardless of whether I do a Save or a Save As, it will default to Save As, and bring up the window to let me give the file a name. I just type a short name (from one to eight letters) and the system automatically appends a ".wpd" to the name and saves it). Once I have saved the file, it has a name, so now if I click File and Save (or press CtrlS) it will not bring up the screen asking for a name, it will just save the file over the previous file. But if I want to keep that previous file, I can always click File, Save As, and it will ask me for a new file name. If I type the same name in again, it will tell me that file already exists, and give me the size, date, and time the previous file was last updated, and ask me if I really want to replace it. If I want to leave that file alone, I click No, and enter a different name.

Notice that the third Icon from the left looks like a floppy disk. That is the Save icon. Like the File, Save, if the file is a new one that had not yet been named, it will default to File, Save As, but if the file already has a name, clicking the Save icon will save an updated copy of the file on top of the old one, without prompting for permission to overwrite the old data.

We have now finished our first Word Processing document, so let us go on to something else. Let us enter a report for work. if our letter is still on the screen, we select File, New (if we just started Word Perfect this is not necessary, but it does not hurt).

Type the title of the report, press enter, type "By" and your name, press enter twice, and begin typing the report. You know it would look better if the title and the byline were bold face and centered, and a little larger, so let us put the mouse cursor in front of the first character of the title, press down the left button, and holding it down, drag it over the title and the byline. Both lines be highlighted with white letters on a black background. This is referred to as a block of text that has been "selected". Now let us click on the word left in the center of the bottom bar, and select center from the pull down menu. Our title and byline suddenly move to the middle of the screen. Click the letter "b" on the icon bar, and the title and byline become bold face, and click the 12 pt on the bottom bar, and from the pull down menu which appears select 18 pt. Our title and byline are now centered, bold face, and 18 point type.

With Microsoft Works, we select Center Align (second icon to the right of the Underline icon, B still indicates bold face, and we click on the arrow to the right of the 12 to select a larger type size.

Let us resume working on the report, so click on the last line that we have typed of the report, and suddenly the point size indicator goes back to 12 pt, and the word center changes back to left, because that is the formatting used for the body of our report. Let us continue entering several paragraphs of the report, and then print out a draft copy and read it over. In reviewing the report, let us assume it looks like it would make more sense if we swapped the second and third paragraphs. We could position the mouse cursor in front of the first letter of the second paragraph and drag it over the whole paragraph to highlight the entire paragraph, but there is an easier way. Position the mouse cursor somewhere in the paragraph, and press the left mouse button three times quickly. The entire paragraph is highlighted. We can now click the little icon that looks like a pair of scissors, or click edit, and then cut, or noticing that on the "cut" line of the edit menu it says Ctrl+X we remember that we could have just held the control key down and pressed X. How would one remember Ctrl X? Notice that the letter X looks very much like a pair of scissors.

Regardless of which way we decided to cut the paragraph out, the second paragraph is now gone. Move the mouse cursor to where we want the second paragraph to go, and click once. Then either go to the icon bar and click the icon that looks like a bottle of paste (two to the right of the scissors), or click edit and paste, or noticing that on the "paste" line in the edit menu it says Ctrl+V we know that we could have just held the Ctrl key down and pressed V to insert the former second paragraph. Ctrl X looking like a pair of scissors is easy to remember, but why Ctrl V? If you have ever read anything about proofreading, you know that a profferader uses a symbol that looks a lot like the letter V to indicate that something is to be inserted at a particular point.

However we decided to do the insertion, we now have our former second paragraph back as the third paragraph, and we can continue working on our report until we finish it.

With Microsoft Works, the cut, copy, and paste icons are to the left of the B (Bold Face) icon.

Before we turn it over to the boss, we had better be sure there are no spelling errors. Click Tools, and Spell Check, and Word Perfect will go through the entire report and check the spelling of each word. Some times, like on peoples names, it may question the spelling of a word that is spelled correctly but which it just does not have in its dictionary. We can either click Skip Once, in which case it will leave that word alone, but stop if it sees it again, or click skip always, in which case it will not question that word again in this document, or if it is a word that we expect to use over and over again in many documents, we can click Add at the bottom of the Spell Checker Box and add the word to our Spell Checker dictionary, and then it will not stop on that word even in future documents. If a misspelled word is close to several words that are in the dictionary, it will list them as suggestions, and if you click on one of those suggestions, that word will replace the one you misspelled in your document.

There are a lot of additional things that you can do with a Word Processor than we have covered here, but we will leave them for a future article. Remember that we have a Word Processing / Desktop Publishing SIG meeting on the second Wednesday of each month, in room U9 of Keplinger Hall, 5th and Harvard. At the December 11 meeting we are going to explore some simple Desktop Publishing with our Word Processors, adding graphic images, and using columns, to prepare a simple newsletter. At future meetings we will do other interesting things with our Word Processors.

As indicated elsewhere in this paper, the Getting Started Class that meets on the first Wednesday of each month will not meet in January, because that is New Years Day, so the Getting Started With Spreadsheets and Databases will take place on February 5. However our Graphic Sig is being discontinued, at least for a while, due to health problems on the part of the Sig Leader, so we are going to use that meeting time, the Third Wednesday of each month, to start our Getting Started sequence of classes over, so on January 15 we will have Getting Started with Hardware. Please urge any new members that you know to attend both our First Wednesday and Third Wednesday classes if possible.

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