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Welcome to our windows 7 beginner to advance video training series. Today, we will cover
some more useful features of Word Pad. Chapter 2 – Lesson 1 – Part 2, Microsoft Word
Pad. For our today’s lesson, I am going to create
another document, so you can understand the commands, better. In today’s lesson, you
are going to see and learn many interesting facts, which you may have not considered before.
So, stay tune with me, as I am typing our today’s exercise.
Formatting a document is not just about, increasing the font size or change font, or using bold,
italics, or alignments. I am typing this exercise in front of you, because there are a lot more
things, which you should consider in your mind, while drafting a document.
So, for today’s lesson, the first thing you should remember that, never press enter
key in the end of a line, while typing a paragraph. A paragraph means a continuous sequence of
words without any break. Pressing enter key means that, you are telling the word pad,
to insert a break, and this is the end of the line, and I want to start a new line or,
a new paragraph. This is the biggest mistake, which normally
the novice user do. They check in the ruler that the page is going to end, so they press
enter key to move to the next line. Do remember that; pressing enter means, you are telling
the application that, this is the end of the paragraph, and you are starting a new paragraph.
So, later when you will apply formatting on these lines, Word pad will assume them as
separate lines or separate paragraphs. All the word processor applications, assume enter
key as the beginning of a new paragraph. Here, I have typed two paragraphs as an example.
In first paragraph, I have pressed enter key in the end of each line of the paragraph,
whereas, the second paragraph is in continuous form, and have only one enter in the end of
the paragraph. Now, let’s see, how the formatting will
work differently on both of the paragraphs and what kind of difficulties you can experience.
The first fact you should notice between these paragraphs is, the “line spacing”. See,
the line spacing in the first paragraph and then the following paragraphs. If you click
on the Line Spacing button, in the paragraph section, do note down the default settings.
There is a check mark on 2 items. The first one is line spacing 1.15, and the second is
“Add 10 point space after paragraphs”. Now, what is happening in our first paragraph
is, Word Pad is assuming every line of the first paragraph, as an individual paragraph,
so that is why, it is adding a 10 point extra space to each line. Whereas, the second paragraph
only has a spacing of 1.15 in every line because it has written continuously without any enter
between lines. The second fact is, justifying the paragraph.
In our previous exercise, I explain you about left, center, and right alignments, but I
did not give any information about the fourth alignment option, which is “Justify”.
This is because “the justify” command only applies to paragraphs, not on individual
lines. Now, we have 2 paragraphs, let’s see, how justify command works? If, I select
the second paragraph and then click on Justify command, notice that, the paragraph has been
perfectly aligned from the right side. Both, the left and right side of the paragraph are
now equally aligned. This is what justify command is for. Justify command automatically
add extra spacing between words to align the paragraph from right side.
Now, let’s apply the “Justify” command to our first paragraph. You can see that even
after applying the command, nothing is happening. As I told you before that the justify command
only applies to paragraphs, and this is not a paragraph but 4 different lines.
Let’s see, the third fact about paragraphs. Now, I select the second paragraph again and
increase font size. You can notice that Word Pad is automatically adjusting the lines and
paragraph. If I do the same to our first paragraph, then see what happened? As I increased the
size to 14, the paragraph get imprecise and you have broken lines in between the paragraphs.
The lines get separated from the same location, where you had pressed enter key. You were
not noticing this before, because the font size was smaller. As soon as you increased
the size, you can clearly see the line breaks. The last and interesting fact about paragraphs
is “Indents”. In my previous lesson, we had discussed about Indents, and how you can
efficiently use them, instead of Tabs and Spaces. You can also apply indents to paragraphs.
Suppose, I want to have, half inch space in the second paragraph, then I can easily accomplish
this by, selecting the paragraph, and clicking on Increase Indent button once.
See what happens, when I do the same for our first paragraph. The paragraph again gets
broken because of the extra enters, that we have in the end of each line.
Now, let’s first make our first paragraph exactly as our second paragraph is. To do
this, you can remove additional enters, that we have in the end of each line. To remove
those enters, just click in the end of each line, and press Delete key from your keyboard.
This will start adjoining the lines together, and will make this a single paragraph instead
of many different lines. You may now have a good idea that how to compose
paragraphs. Let’s learn the Line Spacing feature in more comprehensive manners. Line
spacing is used to increase the gap between lines, and we do this to make our paragraphs
more appealing. If we check the current view of our document, you can see that on a letter
size page, if we will take the print out of this page, then there is a lot of uncovered
area at the bottom of the page, or you can say that half of the page is blank. To cover
some more area, we can increase the spacing between lines. To do this, just select the
lines or paragraphs, and choose an appropriate spacing, that you think will be nice for your
document. You can also add or remove spacing between
paragraphs by Adding a 10pt space between paragraphs. So, I am choosing 2 as line spacing
and also checking Add 10 point space after paragraphs. Now, let’s see the preview and
you can notice that our text is now covering more space on the page.
The next option that we are going to learn is indents. We have already discussed about
indents in our previous lesson, but let’s see the other features of indents. As discussed
in previous chapter, you can increase or decrease indents, using buttons available in paragraph
section. But those buttons only increase the left indent, means you can only increase the
left indent through those buttons. But, in Word Pad, there are total 3 types of indents
available. The first one is Left Indent, Second is Right Indent, and third one is, First Line
Indent. Looking carefully at the ruler, you can see
that we have sliders available. In the first look, they seems to be two sliders, but they
are actually three, which are, first line indent, left indent and then right indent.
In Word Pad, you can even manually adjust the indents through those sliders. To do this,
just select the paragraphs, and move the sliders. If you move the first line indent slider,
note that the first line of both paragraphs is moving along with the slider. This is an
easy way to increase the spacing of first line, for every paragraph in your document.
This will save the hassle of, pressing additional spaces or tabs.
You can also adjust the left indent through both the buttons, and the slider available
in your ruler. But there is a different in both ways. If you decide to increase the left
indent through buttons available in your paragraph, then do note that it will increase or decrease,
a default half inch space every time you press the button. Whereas, through ruler, you can
move the left indent, to the desire location, you want.
The third type of indent is, right indent. The right indent is used to increase the spacing
from the right side of the page, without pressing enter key. Means, if you do not want to be
your paragraph so long in the width, then you can reduce the width, just by increasing
the right indent. This is another reason that why mostly people press enter key, to shorten
their paragraphs, which is wrong. Whenever, you need to shorten your paragraph from the
right side, just select your paragraph and increase the right indent.
You can also change the, left, right, first line indent, line spacing, and alignment through
a single button. This button is called "Paragraph", is available under paragraph section of Home
Tab. Just select your paragraphs, and click this button, and you can change all the settings
in a single click.
Before, we continue with our lesson, let’s first save our document, and type a name.
Always do remember the location, where you are going to save your document. The default
location is, My Documents. Before, I finish this lesson; let me give you some information
about page margins. Page Margins are the blank area on all four
side of your page, which you see in the print preview window. You can adjust the margins
as per your contents. Say, you want to print your current document on a pre-printed Letter
Head, and that letter head is covering almost 3.5 inches of area of page from top. So, what
we will do is to open, Page Setup window, from Word Pad menu. Here you can see the pre-defined
margins. Those are the default margins for every new document, you create in Word Pad.
So, here we change the top margin to 3.5 inches. Now, let’s see the preview. Here you can
note that, we have now 3.5 margins on the top of our document. That means, when you
will take a print out either on a blank page, or on a letter head, your print will skip
3.5 inches page blank from top. With the same way, you can define margins for other 3 sides
of your page, as desire. Finally, let me clear you the difference between
margins, and indents. When you change the margin of your document, then do remember
that, it will get applied to all the pages of your current document. Suppose, if I change
the right margin to 2 inches, and apply the changes. You can notice, the gray area in
the ruler, from the right side has increased and all the contents of our page have adjusted.
But, the indents work only on your selection. Means, you can apply different indents settings,
for different paragraphs. In our next lesson, I will provide you some
more detail information about margins. We will also cover more features of Word Pad,
in our next part of, Word Pad Full Overview. Till then, have a nice day and thanks for
watching. Keep sharing our videos and subscribe to our channel for more upcoming videos.