Anguilla Library Computer Club
Resources

Cut and Paste

In your first Windows lesson you typed a sentence into a word processor and highlighted a word in bold or italic. In your first floppy disk lesson you typed an entire letter, saved it on your diskette and printed it. Now you will learn to Save As to make a new copy of a file in a new file name, Cut and Paste to move some lines of text, Delete a block of text without pressing Delete 400 times, and Save to update your changes to the current file name.

Activity: Write A Thank You Letter

We will actually mail this letter, so get it right!

Insert an available diskette into the A: drive and run Write, WordPad, or Text Editor Pull down File Menu (Alt-F) and OPEN the file c:\lcc\thankyou on your hard drive.
This is a general thank you letter that anyone could use, followed by a list of people who donated computers. Your job is to customize this letter to represent you and address it to one of the donors. But first we need to give the file a new name: Use SAVE AS from the File Menu (Alt-F) to save the letter on the diskette with your name, e.g. a:\thelma1.
Modify the letter to have your name and village, the date, your age, how long you have been in the club, and your favorite program. The things to modify are in ALL CAPS--make those changes now, but do not change the text below this line: ------ List of Donors ------
Now address the letter to one of the computer donors using Cut and Paste:
1. Go down to the ------ List of Donors ------ and find the donor name which is closest to the first letter of your name. Highlight the name and address lines by swiping with the Mouse clicked or by depressing the Shift key while moving your cursor through the lines.
2. To move these lines to the top of the letter, first snip them out by using CUT from the Edit menu (Alt-E). The lines should disappear. They are not gone--they are in storage.
3. To insert the name/address where indicated in the letter, move the cursor up and select PASTE from the Edit menu.
4. Customize the Dear Mr./Mrs. line by hand. Make any other personal changes you want for this person, such as "how much I like your computer", "come back to Anguilla", etc.).
5. To finish your letter, you need to delete the Donor List at the end--it doesn't belong in the letter that you mail! Highlight the entire ------ List of Donors ------ area at the end of you file and press the Delete key. Review your letter for corrections.
Use SAVE from the File Menu to save your work on the a:\ diskette under the name you selected above.
Exit from the word processor, take your diskette to a computer with a printer and print the letter file. Sign the letter and give it to an instructor to be mailed.

Advanced: pull down the Edit menu. Do you see keystrokes next to Cut, Copy and Paste? These are shortcut keys. The standard Windows shortcuts are Control-X for Cut, Control-C for Copy and Control-V for Paste. You enter them by holding down the CONTROL key while you press X, C or V. Many common functions in the word processor have shortcut keys, but you can always use the menus if you forget them.
Optional: improve the appearance of your letter by selecting a larger font, putting some things in Bold, underlining certain key words, etc.