Thread: Word Pad

IF YOU DON'T need such advanced features of Microsoft Word as smart quotation marks and macros, but you do want more composing and editing options than are available in Notepad, Windows' free Word Pad word proces¬sor may be just the program that you have been looking for. To open it, click Stan-All Programs (or just Programs)¬Accessories-WordPad. Following is a quick summary of several little-known features of WordPad that may con¬vince you to keep Word on the shelf.

Zoom with a view: If you want to mag¬nify or reduce the size of text on your screen in WordPad, all you have to do is hold down the <Ctrl> key and spin the mouse wheel forward or back¬ward. (This trick also works in brows¬ers and with a number of other appli¬cations.) Or you can select the text that you want to appear larger or smaller and press either <Ctrl>-<Shift>-> (the right-pointing bracket) or <Ctrl>-¬<Shift>-< (the left-pointing bracket), to increase or decrease the characters' on-screen size. (Note that this method affects the on¬screen appear¬ance of the text only, not the actual font size of the characters in your document. (The text will print out on a page at the same size as before.)



Beadrag: Do you want to move an out-of- place paragraph, into its proper position? Just hover your cursor over any part of the paragraph, triple-click your mouse to select the text block, and then drag it to the right location.

Cycle through list styles: You have two ways to tell WordPad to automat¬ically format a paragraph with a bullet and ahanging indent: Click the Bullets icon on the far right of the toolbar, or select Format-Bullet Sryle. (Click the button again to remove the style.) If you've selected all or part of one or more paragraphs, however, press <Ctrl>-<Shift>-l repeatedly to cycle through various list styles, including bullets, numbers, and letters.

Bonustip: To indent a paragraph that is under a list style without adding the bullet or number, just press <Shift>¬<Enter> at the end of the list paragraph to create a line break.

Undo/redo: You can press <Ctrl>-Z repeatedly to step back to previous ver¬sions of your editing; press <Ctrl>-Y to step forward again.

Setthetable: WordPad can't create tables on its own, but you can create a simple one in Excel or another spread¬sheet, and then copy and paste the cells you need into your WordPad document.

Spell it out: WordPad lacks a spelling checker, but that doesn't doom you to spelling accommodate with one m. The free tinySpell app works with any word processor, alerting you to misspelled words as you type or stepping methodically through all the words you copy to the Clipboard.