Google Docs Tutorial - Part 8 - Working with Documents
Google Docs Tutorial - Part 8. Now that you are comfortable with some of the general functions of Google Docs, you should become familiar with features of working with actual documents. To open a document, just click on its title.
The Banana Tree document was previously created in Chapter 1. It is important that you are familiar with the interface of the document screen. Below, you can see the Title, and right below the title is the Menu Bar. It contains a number of different menu options that when you clicked, will show a pull-down menu that lists different options for you to use in your document. Below the menu bar is the Toolbar. The toolbar includes shortcut buttons for a lot of the main Google Docs functions. These exist for your convenience, rather than using the menu listings. Below the Toolbar is an open area where you can type your document.
To explore some the functions of the Edit menu, you need to make sure that you have some text in your document. If you do not already have something typed here, go ahead and click in the big open area and start typing. For example, you can type “Start typing something.” As you can see, whatever you type will show up in the big open area.
If you make a mistake in your document, you can use the Undo function from the Edit menu. If you click on Edit, you will see that Undo is the first option listed. You can either click this first option on the menu or if you have not clicked on the Edit menu, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Z (on a MAC, Command+Z). Let’s go ahead and choose Undo.
You may not have noticed, but Google Docs erased the last character that you typed. Go ahead and click Undo one or two more times, and watch the screen to see Google Docs erase more of the characters that you just typed. As previously mentioned, the toolbar has a lot of the shortcuts that you can use while working in your document. You may notice that a backwards arrow button is shown on the toolbar. This should look familiar as it is the same arrow that sits next to the Undo command on the Edit menu. This is available, so that you can actually use the toolbar button instead of the Edit menu to undo your latest actions. If you click on the Undo button a few more times, you will notice it continues to “undo” your previous actions.
If you change your mind and want all of the things that you deleted to come back, then you can use the Redo function. Redo is also located on the Edit menu list, just below Undo. You can either click Edit menu, then Redo, or you can use the forward arrow on the toolbar. And, just like with the Undo command, you can activate a Redo by using a keyboard shortcut CTRL+Y (Command+Y on a MAC). As you continue to press Redo, you will see the words coming back that you had deleted previously. These functions should give you a great deal of confidence because you have just seen how you can undo and/or redo actions within your documents.
In this example, if you still have an unrelated sentence (i.e., “Start typing something.”) in the document, you should remove it. You can either use the Undo function or use the [Delete] key on your keyboard to delete the sentence character by character. Now that the sentence is gone, the example document appears as it was when you first opened it.
You may also want to move some items around in your document. The easiest way to move an item from one place to another in your document is to use the Cut option. Cut is another option found in the Edit menu. Note that it is below Redo and it also has a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+X. Before you can cut a string of text from your document, you have to select it. To select what you want to cut, you need to click and hold down your mouse (referred to as “dragging your mouse”) to select whatever you want to move. Notice below that a few paragraphs (shown in blue) are selected in order to be moved to another location in the document.
Select a section of your document now, and then click on the Edit menu and select Cut. This will remove the item from your document and save it in memory.
The next step in a move operation is to determine the new location for the text. Since we want to move the cut section to the lower part of the document, move your cursor there now. Add a few blank lines at the end of the document by pressing the [Enter] key at least one time. Now you can complete the move of the paragraph by choosing Paste from the Edit menu, or by using the keyboard shortcut. Let’s try using the keyboard shortcut – for a MAC, it is Command+V and on a Windows machine, it is Ctrl+V.
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In the image above, a string of text was cut from the beginning of the document and pasted into a later part of the document.
Of course, this section really belongs at the beginning of the document, so click Undo to move it back to its original location. Actually, you will need to click Undo a few times to return the paragraph back to where it belongs.
Another option that goes with cut and paste is the Copy operation. If you are going to use a phrase in your document multiple times, then you will want to Copy it and Paste it multiple times. If you want to use the title more than once, for example, then select the title and choose Copy from the Edit menu (this has the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+C or Command+C on a MAC). This operation saves a copy of the selected text to the computer’s clipboard, and then you can paste a copy of it anywhere you want within the document. Again, you must place your cursor at the location you want the text to be d, and insert by using the Paste command from the Edit menu or use the keyboard shortcut. Try it now and see if you can recreate this image. Once you get it, click Undo, and return to the original document.
To summarize the Undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste operations, it is significant to note that the bottom row of keys on your keyboard are Z, X, C, and V. These are the keys combined with the CTRL key (or Command on the Mac) which give you the most commonly used Edit menu shortcuts. Remember: Undo is Ctrl+Z, Cut is Ctrl+X, Copy is Ctrl+C, and Paste is Ctrl+V.
You may decide that a word you used in your document is not as appropriate as you thought it once was. Instead of going through the document and changing that word multiple times, you can actually use the Find and Replace (Ctrl+F) operation. For instance, instead of using the word “banana”, I meant to use the word “plantain”, which is another type of banana. To accomplish this, open the Edit menu, click on Find and replace…, and in the “Find what:” box, type the word “Banana”. In the “Replace with:” box, type the word “Plantain” to replace Banana (see below). Activate this operation by clicking the Replace all button.
Note that if you click on the down-facing triangle, there are a few advanced options available: Match case, Match whole word only, Regular expression-style matching, or Find previous. Match case will actually look for the word “Banana” with a capital “B” and add “Plantain” with a capital “P”. Match whole word only will only find instances of the isolated word “Banana” – not instances where “Banana” is a part of a longer or compound word (e.g., Bananarama, or Banana-monkey). Regular expression-style matching will look for strings of text with the word “Banana” whether is an isolated case or part of a compound word. Find previous performs a backwards (as opposed to forwards) search for the word. In this example, leave these options unchecked, and click the Replace all button. You will see a message showing Occurrences replaced: 26 that is informing you that the word “Banana” has been replaced with the word “Plantain” 26 times throughout your document. Click the X box to close (see below).
In reviewing the document, you can see the word “banana” has been replaced with the word “plantain”. If you look closely, because plantain was typed with a capital “P”, all of the instances of “banana” that were changed to plantain are now typed with a capital “P” – you may need to go through and change these to lowercase. This would be an instance where the Match case option would have come in handy. A general rule of thumb is to use lowercase in your Find and Replace fields, since lowercase will find lowercase or uppercase and your cases will stay consistent when replacement is done. Since this document is really intended to discuss bananas (and not plantains), you should click Undo a few times to return the document to its original state.
Another important operation in the Edit menu is using document styles. Click on the Edit menu and open Document styles… The window, pictured below, gives you the ability to change the styles of your overall document; you can set the basic style for your whole document, or you can completely turn off all styles. If you are writing a formal paper you will probably want some styles, particularly for consistency.
Two of the changes you can make here are the font (keep this as Verdana), and the font size (try using 12pt here to make the text a little bigger). You can see a preview of the changes that you make in the box to the right. You can also change your line-spacing – right now it is set as “Normal” but you could change it to “Double spaced” by clicking on the drop-down menu. Do you see how it changes in the Preview section?
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You also have the option to change your text alignment to Right-to-left (since the default is from left-to-right) – this feature would be useful if you were typing in Hebrew or Arabic texts, which are read from right-to-left. Lastly, you can change the of your document background color. Click on the box with the background color and you will see a number of colors that you can choose from – go ahead and click one. You can see that it has changed the color in the box; this will change the background color of your document. For now, let’s leave the background color white because it is generally easier to read. Click on the box again and select the white color box to return the background color to white. Now you set these styles as your document default styles by clicking the check box by Make these the default styles for all new documents. Instead, leave it un-checked and click OK.
Notice in the screen image below that you have made some changes to your document. The document text is now larger, and the paragraphs are double-spaced. If you want to change any of your document-wide styles, you will have to go back to the Edit menu and click on Document styles… For additional practice, see if you can change the font back to 10pt, instead of 12pt throughout the document without using the Undo command.
Now that you have learned some of the main features of the Edit menu, and started to work more within your document, you are ready to learn some advanced formatting features that Google Docs has available for your documents.
