access to formatting commands, and it can now open and create Microsoft Word files. Yes, you can get away with not buying Microsoft Office, and none of your email business partners will ever know the difference. Figure 7-8: WordPad’s new formatting ribbon makes it an even closer relative to Microsoft Word .
And it’s not just Word files. WordPad also can open and create plain text files, Rich Text Format (RTF) documents, and OpenOffice.org files. Using WordPad When WordPad first opens, you see an empty sheet of electronic typing paper. Just above the ruler, you find a ribbon full of drop-down menus and buttons that affect up to speed
Text-Selection Fundamentals Before doing almost anything to text in a word processor, like making it bold, changing its typeface, or moving it to a new spot in your document, you have to highlight the text you want to affect. For millions of people, this entails dragging the cursor extremely carefully, perfectly horizontally, across the desired text. And if they want to capture an entire paragraph or section, they click at the beginning, drag diagonally, and release the mouse button when they reach the end of the passage. That’s all an enormous waste of time. Selecting text is the cornerstone of every editing operation in a word processor, so there are faster and more precise ways of going about it. For example, double-clicking a word highlights it, instantly and neatly. In fact, by keeping the mouse button pressed on the second click, you can now drag horizontally to highlight text in crisp one-word chunks—a great way to highlight text faster and more precisely. These tricks work anywhere you can type.
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windows 7: the missing manual
In most programs, including Microsoft’s, additional shortcuts await. For example, triple-clicking anywhere within a paragraph highlights the entire paragraph. (Once again, if you keep the button pressed at the end of this maneuver, you can then drag to highlight your document in one-paragraph increments.) In many programs, including Word and WordPad, you can highlight exactly one sentence by clicking within it while pressing Ctrl. Finally, here’s a universal trick that lets you highlight a large blob of text, even one that’s too big to fit on the current screen. Start by clicking to position the insertion point cursor at the very beginning of the text you want to capture. Now scroll, if necessary, so the ending point of the passage is visible. Shift+click there. Windows instantly highlights everything between your click and your Shift+click.