Bottom     Previous     Contents

Exercise one Getting started

In this tutorial you are going to create a (not too serious) report based on observations you have made of a 'foreign body' travelling through the various stages of a river's progress to the sea.

In the first part of the tutorial you will learn how to:

Make sure that you have made a working copy of EasiWriter in accordance with the instructions in the Installation guide.

If you have copied EasiWriter onto a hard disc, click on the hard disc drive icon to open a directory display. If you are using EasiWriter from a floppy disc, insert the disc into the disc drive and click on the floppy disc drive icon.

After a short while, the EasiWriter icon will appear on the icon bar at the foot of the screen.

The red vertical bar in the top left corner of the document window marks the caret. Any characters you type at the keyboard are added before the caret, moving it to the right.

Button bar

Between the Ruler and the Title bar are a series of buttons which you will use to issue commands to EasiWriter. Many of these buttons work differently depending whether you click on them using Select, Menu or Adjust. In this tutorial be sure to use Select (the left button) unless told differently.

Our plan was to throw a stick into the river and observe it travelling 

downstream. Unfortunately, our overseas foreign exchange student - Bob - 

forgot to let go, so we timed him instead.

Word wrap

The ability to start a new line automatically when the current line is full is known as word wrap and is one of the most useful features of a word processing program. Word wrap makes it possible for EasiWriter to reformat lines automatically if text is inserted or deleted, or if the margin positions, fonts and font sizes are changed.

Return

  1. Press Return.
    Notice that the caret drops and moves to the left margin. Pressing Return tells EasiWriter to start a new paragraph.
  2. Now type the following paragraph:
Actually, it worked out fine because Bob was more visible than the 

stick. Also he shouted "Help! I can't swim" when he surfaced, so we could 

make notes without having to look up.

You are now going to make a small correction to the paragraph you have just typed by replacing the word 'when' with the words 'each time'.

First you need to move the caret to where the changes are going to be made.

Moving the caret

You can move the caret to the left and right, one character at a time, by pressing the Left and Right arrow keys. If you hold down Shift at the same time the caret will move one word at a time. Pressing the Up and Down arrow keys moves the caret by one line at a time. The caret can also be moved with the mouse.

Delete characters

Delete can be used to remove unwanted characters.

Inserting text

Text is inserted into a document at the position of the caret moving it and any text following it to the right.

each time

You will see that EasiWriter automatically reformats the document as you type.

Delete a word

A better way to remove a word is to select it before pressing the Delete key. The following exercise will show you why.

  1. Position the mouse pointer over the word 'overseas' and select it by double-clicking.
  2. Press Delete.

Intelligent Delete

Note that EasiWriter not only removed the word, but also the space character to its left. Whenever you use Delete or Cut and Paste to remove or move words, 'intelligent' cut and paste comes into effect. EasiWriter will check for punctuation on either side of the word and add, or delete, space characters accordingly.

Undo

Sometimes you have second thoughts about what you did. The Undo command allows you to reverse your most recent action.

The word 'overseas' will reappear.

Redo

When you have Undone an action the command changes to Redo.

Saving a document

It is a good idea to frequently save a copy of your work to disc in case of problems such as power cuts.

  1. Bring the EasiWriter directory display into view by clicking on the document window's Back icon.
  2. Click on the Save button.
    The Save as: dialogue will appear.

  3. Name the document 'Exercise1'. Use Delete to remove the default document name of 'Untitled' or press Ctrl-U.
  4. Drag the document icon from the submenu to the directory display.

A copy of the document will be saved on the disc.

Closing a document

The document window will be removed from the desktop.

Summary

In this section you have learnt how to:


Next     Top