The Little Word Processor that Could
Written: Jun 19 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: simple to learn and navigate
Cons: no spell checker
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| KaitiesMommy's Full Review: Microsoft Notepad |
Notepad is a great little word processor from Microsoft. It is very productive for such a simple program. I use this for quick notes and memos. You can actually do a lot with this program.
It is basically an electronic typewriter. Except no smell of whiteout. Under the file menu you will find options to 'open a new document', 'open a saved document', 'save', 'save as', 'page setup', 'print', and 'exit'. I am only going to go into one of these options – page setup. The others are pretty self-explanatory. Page setup lets you pick the paper size and source. It also allows you to select the orientation of the paper, either portrait or landscape, set the margins, pick a header and a footer, and lets you see a preview of your work in the right hand corner. From here there is a button that lets you pick what printer you want to print to. From there you can access the printer properties. This allows you to pick special options about the printer itself. Page setup is a good feature to have on such a simple word processor.
The edit menu contains 'undo', 'cut', 'copy', 'paste', 'delete', 'select all', 'time/date', 'word wrap', and 'set font'. The undo command will let you erase the last command that you executed. Cut, copy and paste is also useful. You can cut or copy text from another document and then paste them onto your Notepad document. The only difference is that cutting text will remove it from the original, copying it will just copy it, the original text will still be there. Time/date will let you insert the time and date into your document. Word wrap lets you continually type and when the words get to the end of the line, they wrap to the next line. Extremely helpful feature. This will help alleviate any problems with margins and such. The set font option will let you select the font, the font style and the font size you want. It has a preview window to show you what your text will look like. Another great feature.
The next menu is search, under which you will see 'find' and 'find next'. Lets say you have a 5 page document you are working on and want to correct something, but can’t remember where it is on the letter. So use the find option. Click on the option and a box appears. Type what key word you want it to find and it will search your document from the beginning to the end and find each time that the word is used. This saves you time and energy looking for that special place that you need to make a correction. I have used this many times and it is excellent.
The next section is help. There are two menu choices here, 'help topics' and 'about Notepad'. Help topics lets you read general topics on how to perform tasks in this word processor. It is helpful, but not that helpful. My best advice is to experiment with this program. Open it up and play with it, see what features you can use and how they work.
About Notepad just shows you copyrighting information and the version of the software.
The only thing I would like to see with notepad is a spell checker. There is no form of spell checker on Notepad. I would also like to be able to insert pictures and hyperlinks. But once again not available with this program. I think that Microsoft should think about adding these features, because Notepad is on every computer that runs Windows, but I suppose that is why they have Word.
If you happen to have Microsoft Word on your computer, you’ll find that you will almost never use Notepad. But Notepad is great for those without bigger word processing software. And very easy for even the computer illiterate to learn.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
KaitiesMommy
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Member: Nichole
Location: West Coast of Central Florida (just West of Tampa)
Reviews written: 115
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