Since I have been so busy with the upgrades and programming changes, Christi Schmidt, one of the paralegals in our office prepared a memo to our staff with some hints, suggestions and general survival tips and did an excellent job. She has agreed to let me pass portions of it on to you. Hopefully, some of the tips will help you also.
First of all, WordPerfect 8.0 operates in WYSIWYG mode. What You See Is What You Get. The document on the screen looks like what it will look like when it is printed. This means, a quarter of your document will not be hanging off the screen and if you have items lined up on the screen, they will be lined up when you print.
It is very important to remember that your cursor determines where the program is reading. Just because you scroll down and can see some specific part of your document on your screen, if you do not move your cursor to that point, your next command will not work like you expect it to. For instance, if you tell it to print a page, and you have not placed your cursor on the page you are looking at on the screen, a different page is going to print.
Some sample formatting choices without using the mouse:
Center Text is Shift F7
Control B will turn Bold on or off.
Control I will turn italics on and off.
Control U will turn underline on and off.
Control N = new document.
Other functions from 5.1 are now controlled by items on the Menu Bar and/or Tool Bar (such as Copy, Page, etc.) while other functions can be done with the tool bar or keys (Bold, Underline, etc.)
It is entirely possible to work in this program without the Mouse, but you will have to learn all of the new Codes (Control B, Control N for a new document, etc.) Do not forget that anything that is on the Menu bar can be accessed by hitting Alt and the character underlined, i.e. Alt F for the choices under the File menu and then Alt P to print, and so on.
If you want to insert a file into your current document, choose Insert from the Menu Bar and then choose File... After you put in the name of the file you want to insert, 8.0 will insert the new file in your current document at the cursor point (so be sure your cursor is where you want the new file to be). Also, Windows 95 and Corel 8.0 will allow you to name documents with more than 8 characters.
The box on the second row of the tool bar at the far right is Prompt As You Go. If the word is the box is red, it is a probable misspelled word and selecting the arrow will give you other alternatives for the word. If the word in the box is blue, there is a probable grammar or usage error. If the word in the box is black, alternate words from the Thesaurus can be chosen from the displayed list. If there is nothing in the box, there are no other choices. The funny little red underlines under a word indicate a probable misspelling.
Another function found to be a little tricky to find was inserting a new page number. Choose Format from the Menu Bar, choose Page and then Numbering. Click on the box that says Set Value. When the number there is deleted and the new number typed, it does not accept the change. The only way we have found is to click on the arrows beside the number to change the number to the one we wanted.
The Ask Perfect Expert choice under the Help Menu is a fairly useful tool. This can provide the answers to many of your questions. For another source, use Contents in Help and give that a try.
Saving is very easy. Just click on the little diskette on the Tool Bar.
So far, these are just a few of the tips we have come up with in our first two weeks of using WordPerfect 8. These articles will get into more detail as we learn more. For those of you who would like other subjects addressed, please let me know. My new e-mail address is vidavis@wallachmoore .com. Please let me hear from you.
I hope all of you have had a Most Excellent summer!