Word Processing I — Document Mastery — Handout

The one rule everything else rests on

Select, then command. The computer has no idea which words you mean until you tell it. Double-click selects a word, triple-click selects a paragraph, click-and-drag selects a phrase, Ctrl+A selects everything. If you press a formatting button and nothing happens, it is almost always because nothing was selected.

The exception is paragraph formatting — alignment, spacing, indents, lists and styles. Those apply to the whole paragraph the cursor is sitting in, so a single click inside the line is enough.

Three levels of formatting

• Character — bold, italic, underline, font, size, colour, highlighting. Applies to selected characters.
• Paragraph — alignment, line spacing, space before/after, indents, lists. Applies to whole paragraphs.
• Page — margins, orientation, paper size, columns, headers and footers. Applies to the document (or to a section of it).

Knowing which of the three you are dealing with answers most “why did that not work?” questions on its own.

Styles: the idea that separates beginners from everyone else

Making a line bold and 16 point changes how it looks. Applying Heading 1 says what it is. Only the second one is a heading, and the difference is not cosmetic:

• The navigation pane lists real headings. Bold text is invisible to it.
• A table of contents is generated from real headings. Bold text never appears in it.
• Change the Heading 1 style once and every Heading 1 in a sixty-page report changes with it. Direct formatting has to be redone by hand, heading by heading.

Fields: the parts that work themselves out

A field is a piece of the document the software maintains for you: the page number, a footnote number, a table of contents. You do not type them and you do not correct them — but a contents page is a field that only looks again when you tell it to. Update it last, just before you print. That is the single most forgotten step in producing a report.

Eight mistakes that mark out an amateur document

• ✗ Pressing Enter many times to start a new page
  The blank lines are ordinary paragraphs. Add one sentence higher up and everything slides onto the wrong page.
  ✓ Insert a real page break — Ctrl+Enter, or Layout ▸ Break ▸ Page.
• ✗ Pressing the space bar to line things up
  Spaces are a different width in almost every font, so the columns look straight in one font and crooked in the next.
  ✓ Use a tab stop, an indent, or — for anything with rows and columns — a table.
• ✗ Making a heading by choosing bold and size 16
  The computer still sees ordinary text. The navigation pane cannot find it and a table of contents cannot list it.
  ✓ Apply the Heading 1 / Heading 2 style. Then change the style if you dislike how it looks.
• ✗ Typing “1.”, “2.”, “3.” by hand
  Insert an item in the middle and you renumber the rest of them yourself, for ever.
  ✓ Use the numbered-list button. It renumbers itself.
• ✗ Typing page numbers by hand
  The same number appears on every page, and it is wrong as soon as the document grows.
  ✓ Insert ▸ Page Number puts a field in the footer that counts for itself.
• ✗ WRITING IN CAPITALS FOR EMPHASIS
  Capitals are harder to read, not easier, and in a letter or an email they read as shouting.
  ✓ Bold, or a heading style.
• ✗ Trusting the spell checker
  It compares words against a list. “Their”, “there”, “form” and “from” are all real words, so all four pass.
  ✓ Run the checker, then read the document yourself. Both, every time.
• ✗ Using Save when you meant Save As
  Save writes over the file you opened. Edit last year's report and press Save and last year's report is gone.
  ✓ Save As, with a new name, the moment you start from somebody else's document.

File types

Making a real PDF: press Print, then change the destination (or printer) to “Save as PDF”. That writes a genuine PDF file. There is no separate export button in this simulation that produces a file, and the module says so rather than pretending.

Keyboard shortcuts worth learning

A business letter, in order

• Sender's address — Your address, top of the page. Often right-aligned, or in a letterhead.
• Date — Written out — 20 August 2026 — under the sender's address.
• Recipient's address — Name, title, organisation, address. Left-aligned.
• Salutation — Dear Mr Okello, / Dear Sir or Madam,
• Subject line — RE: Application for the post of ICT Teacher. Bold, so it is read first.
• Body — Why you are writing, the detail, what you want to happen next. Short paragraphs.
• Closing — Yours sincerely (you named them) or Yours faithfully (you did not).
• Signature block — Space to sign, then your typed name and title.

Yours sincerely when you addressed them by name. Yours faithfully when you wrote “Dear Sir or Madam”. Getting this the wrong way round is noticed.

What belongs on a CV

• Name and contact details — Name large at the top; phone, email, and where you live. Nothing else.
• Personal profile — Two or three lines: who you are, what you do, what you are looking for.
• Education — Most recent first. Institution, qualification, years.
• Work experience — Most recent first. Role, employer, dates, then bullet points of what you actually did.
• Skills — Real, specific ones. “Word processing, spreadsheets, data entry” beats “computer literate”.
• Referees — Two, with their permission — name, title, organisation, phone.

An employer reads a CV for about twenty seconds, in a pile of forty. Design for that: name findable at a glance, sections obvious, achievements in bullet points, nothing misspelled, one or two pages.

Working on a document with other people

• Track changes
  Every edit is recorded as a proposal rather than applied silently: insertions underlined, deletions struck through, each marked with who made it. The document's owner then accepts or rejects each one.
• Comments
  A note attached to a piece of text that is not part of the document. “Is this figure right?” — a question to the author, which never prints as body text and is resolved when it has been dealt with.
• Reviewing someone else's draft
  You switch track changes on, make your edits, add comments where you are unsure, and send it back. You never quietly rewrite somebody's document — they cannot see what you changed, and they will not trust the next draft you send.
• Version control of a shared document
  Two people editing two copies produces two documents and no way to merge them. Either one person holds the master copy and takes everyone's tracked changes into it, or everyone works in one shared online copy. What loses work is neither of those: emailing “final” back and forth.
• Protection
  Marking a document read-only, or allowing comments and tracked changes but not direct editing. Used for a form, a policy, or anything that must not be quietly altered.

Honest note. Level 24 teaches this workflow with real comments and real revision marking on a real document — but there is no second person on this platform and no shared live document. You play the author and then the reviewer, in turn, on one machine. What is simulated is the colleague, not the tools.

About the spell checker in this module

It is real: it compares every word against a dictionary of about 2215 words plus the regular endings (-s, -ed, -ing, -ly), flags what it does not recognise with a red wavy underline, and offers genuine suggestions worked out by edit distance. It is also deliberately limited, in two ways the module states rather than hides:

• No grammar model. their/there, form/from and fine/find all pass, because every one of them is a real word.
• Capitalised words are skipped entirely, so that Ugandan names — Nabirye, Kyambogo, Nakato — are never flagged as errors. The cost is that a typo at the very start of a sentence gets through.

Run the checker, then read the document yourself. Both, every time.