Wrap It Up: Select All, Save, Exit

Here's our last trick. Sometimes you may want to highlight everything in a document, so that you can Copy and Paste it into another file. But dragging the mouse through a long document can be rather tedious.There's a trick to help us with that.

Here's how it works. We go to the "Edit" menu and click on "Select All." As you can see, everything in the document has been highlighted. Now we can use Copy and Paste or Cut and Paste commands (and many formatting commands), and they will affect the entire contents of the document. What a time saver! We won't do that now, so to de-select, we'll just click anywhere within the area that has been selected.

Finally, let's save our document again. Since our document already has a name, we can use the "Save" instead of the "Save As" command. We can either go to the "File" menu and click on "Save," or we can just click on the "Save" icon in the toolbar. Let's use the icon.

Since this is a Text document, we'll get a warning that some of the formatting features cannot be saved. We realize that, and we save it again as "Text Only." Now our document has been saved again with all of our most recent changes.

It is a very good idea to save the document at regular intervals while we are working on it. That way, if the computer "goes down" for any reason, we won't lose all the changes we have made. Many people have learned this lesson the hard way.

Keep in mind that if we had wanted to keep the old version unchanged, we could have used the "Save As" command and given the document a new name. Then we would have both the old and the new versions of the document on disk.

Now let's close the file. We could do this by going to the "File" menu and clicking on "Close," but there's an easier way. See the "X" at the right-hand end of the Menu Bar? Let's click on this to close our software.

Finally, we need to close our word processing software. We could do this by going to the "File" menu and clicking on "Exit." Instead, let's click on the "X" in the very upper right-hand corner of the screen in the Title Bar.

Here we are back at the desktop. Congratulations! You have earned an A+!