Word Processing

Objectives

At the end of this tutorial, you will be able to: type a simple text in English and in French use common punctuations correctly

Tip: This tutorial has been written to help students who want to type documents the correct way. We have use Microsoft Word XP as it is popular among most of us, but we will soon post some similar tutorial using Open Office. Your computer is on and the word processing software is ready for use. Let us start.

Step 1

When you press a key to type the letters of the alphabet, you will get the small letters. To get capital letters, you have to press and hold the 'Shift' key and press the other keys. You cannot keep pressing and holding the 'Shift' key and type with one hand only. Instead you can press the 'Caps Lock' key to type in capital letters with your two hands. Notice the light is on for capital letters as the 'Caps Lock' is activated. Keep this light off when you are not using capital letters by pressing the 'Caps Lock' key again.

• Press any key ------ small letters
• Press 'Caps Lock' and type----- capital letters
• For single capital letters, no need to use the 'Caps Lock' key, but instead use the 'Shift' key. Press and hold the 'Shift' key and press the other key, you will get your single capital letter. Release the 'Shift' key.

Activity

Type the letters of the alphabet with both small and capital letters of each letter as follows: aAbBcCdDeE...zZ

Step 2

Spacing and Punctuations: Use the following rules:

• 1 space between words - press spacebar once only
• No space between a word and a punctuation - comma or full stop
• 1 space after a comma
• 2 spaces after a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark
• Press 'Enter' key twice to leave a clear line space after headings and paragraphs

Activity

Type a few lines from a book and follow the spacing and punctuations rules.

Step 3

Typing French

You can either insert the French letters with acsent from the Menu or use the 'Alt' key with some code to generate them.

Method 1: When you have to type a French character like é, à or è, go to the Insert tab in the Menu and select Symbol and click on the required character. Click Close to leave.

Method 2: Make sure the 'Num Lock' is on and use the numbers in the keypad for this activity. Press and hold the 'Alt' key and type a CODE in the keypad. Then release the 'Alt' key.

• Alt-130 -----é
• Alt-133------à
• Alt-135------ç
• Alt-138------è

Activity

Type the following sentences. Le bébé va à la rivière. Le garçon regarde l'éléphant à la télé.