ICT: The E-Book.

Part Three: Word-processing

Word-processing could be considered a rather strange name for this application of computers as most of the processing takes place within paragraphs. As a demonstration, consider what happens if the text of this short passage from DH Lawrence’s ‘The Rainbow’ was formatted with a slightly bigger font:

‘In all these things there was the sound of a bugle to her heart, exhilarating, summoning her to perfect places. She never forgot her brown Longman’s First French grammar, nor her Via Latina with its red edges, nor her little grey Algebra book. There was always a magic in them.’

Words are pushed onto the next line to allow for the increase in the size of characters – a phenomenon known as word wrap. The format of the next paragraph, though, will be unaffected – essentially, the hitting of the return or enter key, in ending the paragraph, has signalled a formatting break. Care must also be taken when using the tab (or tabulation) key as this will insert spaces in your text that, whilst sometimes assisting in aligning text vertically down the page, can cause unseen chaos when the file is revisited for editing at a later date.

Apart from changing the font-type and font-size, which should be done on limited occasions within a document, changes of emphasis can be achieved by emboldening, italicising and underlining text with the appropriate buttons

on the formatting toolbar (within Microsoft Word), but bear in mind that many documents still have text underlined to indicate a hyperlink (a link to another document, often on the World-Wide Web).Colouring and highlighting text may also be used as a form of emphasis, but these limit the eventual uses of the document as colour printers may not always be available.

Returning to an old document to carry-out revisions can also be difficult if bulleting or indentation of text has been undertaken.

If you find that control of your document is actually lessened due to automatic insertion of symbols or numbers as ‘bullets’ before each phrase, selecting the text for formatting after it has been entered on screen, may be the answer. The same is true if you need to indent text by moving it in from the margin, but as a general rule, try to avoid indenting text at all – the modern technique, called fully-blocked formatting, tries to avoid the use of indents and tabs altogether (relying on a blank line to separate paragraphs).

On the same toolbar, (within Word), we find a series of straight lines on buttons:

These justify our text, so copying Lawrence’s paragraph above (select by dragging with the left mouse button depressed, right-clicking on the selected text to copy, left-clicking to set the insertion point and right-clicking to paste) we can demonstrate, for example full justification:

‘In all these things there was the sound of a bugle to her heart, exhilarating, summoning her to perfect places. She never forgot her brown Longman’s First French grammar, nor her Via Latina with its red edges, nor her little grey Algebra book. There was always a magic in them.’

This is done by again selecting the paragraph and clicking on the ‘full’ (or the fourth) icon. We now have left-alignment and right-alignment within our paragraph, but this is usually unnecessary – the eye automatically reaches the end of a line when reading, but likes assistance to locate the start of a line. As a general rule, left-justify everything!

Selecting and copying Lawrence’s paragraph again (note that to cut on the right-click menu or the Edit menu means to remove before possibly pasting elsewhere), we can re-format with larger margins and, if required, increased line-spacing:

This is achieved by again selecting the text, right-clicking and choosing to format the Paragraph…

Changing the margins of the entire document can be done by choosing ‘Page Set Up’ on the ‘File’ menu or by choosing to ‘View’ and adjust the ruler (hover carefully over its various bits and pieces to obtain ‘ToolTips’).

One of the more interesting features of a modern word-processor is the capacity to mail-merge. Here, rather than type out, or copy, the same letter several times with only a change to the addressee, Word will do it for you. We shall reproduce a note to several students within the Access file ‘SomeYearSevens97’ which advises them that they have been awarded an achievement certificate. (Use of the same facility with later versions of Access and the file SomeYearSevens2000) is even easier!)

This is the simple certificate that we will use:

Notice that the layout has been changed from portrait to landscape (wider than it is tall) and a custom size has been applied, all performed within ‘Page Set Up’:

Clicking ‘Mail Merge’ on the Tools menu reveals a dialogue box which breaks down into three steps.

The document to be merged, that is the certificate, appears in Step 1. An instruction to skip a certificate if the ‘Access’ field called Achievement says ‘No’, is embedded in the Word file; as is the instruction to paste the name of the successful student if an award is due:

The data-table from which the successful names are read, within the Access file SomeYearSevens97, is featured in Step 2 and clicking on the ‘Merge…’ button in Step 3 allows Word to pick the favoured 36 records from the total of 59 within the database. The completed certificates can be saved as one document to be printed-out at the user’s convenience.

All that remains when completing a document is to double-check that it is suitable for the intended audience. A check on spelling and grammar is available from the Tools menu and should of course be carried-out regardless of the intended reader; later versions of Word, though, provide increasingly sophisticated means of appraising a document from a simple word-count to an analysis of word-length.

There are other forms of presentation software that deserve a mention here; if a user is keen to produce a special document, let’s say a leaflet, then a Desk-top Publishing Package might be employed. Many may find Microsoft’s Publisher, for example, easier to use than Word, if that leaflet requires patterned borders and its message separated into three columns across the page.

It is relatively easy to produce a moving image, or animation, in Microsoft’s Powerpoint – a straightforward demonstration can be accessed with Leisure1.pps.