I learned how to type before I had a computer. In fact, I
traded in my quill-sharpening kit for a manual typewriter and learned
how to type at night school. I was a graduate student at the time, and
yet the bun-wearing schoolmarm in charge actually shouted at me in front
of the class. My crime? Typing Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" from memory
when I'd finished the repetitive exercises she'd given me.
So it
is with some pleasure that I state that all typing teachers in that era
were irredeemably wrong. In fact, they have caused more trouble and
expense to computer users than anybody will ever know. As someone who's
spent the past 20 years digging up digital documents and correcting them
for publication, I can state this with some authority. Without
exception, well-trained typewriter typists make messy digital documents.
Oh, they may print out all right, but their redundant spaces and tabs
make any attempt to edit or change a font an exercise in frustration.
These are the top four typewritten crimes against word
processing:
Crime 1: Entering two spaces after a period.
Typewriters couldn't adjust letter spacing, so typing teachers taught
students to hit the spacebar twice so it was easy to see the end of a
sentence. Word processors handle spacing automatically, so there is no
good reason to do this anymore. In fact, it looks terrible.
Crime
2: Hitting the Tab key to indent a line. This terrible habit was the
only way to do it with a typewriter. It's a waste of effort now that you
can pre-format your document. If you have a document with a hanging
indent (where each line except the first one is indented), it's a
labor-intensive nightmare, especially when you need to make corrections.
Crime 3: Using combinations of tabs and spaces to line up text.
Ever heard of word processed tables? You will. Read on.
Crime 4:
Hitting the Enter key twice to space out paragraphs. Once again, a waste
of effort. One that I occasionally commit, but really
shouldn't.
So how do you do it right?
When you open your
document, set the page layout right away. In Microsoft Word, press
Ctrl+A to select the entire document, then pick Format, Paragraph. In
the Indentation section, under Special, select First Line. Under
Spacing, select the Auto option under Before. If you need to
double-space, select that here too.
When you want to make two or
more columns, don't use tabs. Instead, create a table with the right
number of columns. In Word, select Table and Insert, and make the
columns right. Then when the table appears, drag to highlight the whole
thing, and select Borders and Shading. Click on None to ensure you won't
see the lines on the table when you print it out.
How to
Clean Up a Mistyped Document
Of course, if you correct a
document that's already messed up, it will look even more of a mess. So
you need to know a few clean-up tricks using the search and replace
tool. In Microsoft Word, you open the dialog box with Ctrl+H or the
Edit, Replace menu. Tidying up the two-spaces-after-a-period crime is
easy: In the Find What box, enter a period and two spaces. In the
Replace With, enter a period with one space. Presto!
Tabs and
paragraph returns are harder to replace automatically, because you can't
hit a Tab or Enter key in a search-and-replace box. But you can enter
the code for these characters: ^t and ^p. Hold down the Shift key and
press 6, and you've got that caret symbol (^). Follow it with a P for
paragraph return or T for a tab.
Undoing the tabbed indent crime
becomes easy, then. In Find What, enter ^p^t. In Replace With, enter ^p
and click the Replace All button. Undoing the double-return crime is
also easy: replace ^p^p with ^p and click Replace All.
Now,
inspect your document. You may find a few indents made up of spaces.
These can be removed by replacing ^p followed by a space with plain ^p
and hitting Replace All several times, until Word tells you there were
no changes made.
About the only residual problem I've ever
found after going through these steps are blocks of data that used to
look like tables and weird page breaks because people hit Enter five or
more times to get over the page.
Page breaks are best handled in
Word by holding down the Ctrl key and pressing Enter. This inserts a
page break symbol.
Copying blocks of data out of "tables" made up
of tabs is requires a little-known Alt key trick: Hold down the Alt key
and use the mouse to draw a selection box around a column of text. Once
you've selected what you need, cut it and paste it into a real Word
table.
Now you've unlearned all the bad habits you learned from
typing teachers, make sure the next generation doesn't commit them: Buy
your kids a $30 copy of Type To Learn 3 from Sunburst Software
(www.sunburst.com). In fact, if you still hunt-and-peck, buy it for
yourself and try it out for a while. It's better for your wrists than
online gaming, and it's kind of fun too. Best of all, it's guaranteed
not to shout at you for typing poetry when you're done with your
exercises.
Contributing Editor Matt Lake writes SOHO
Advisor monthly for ComputerUser.
