Ever since I started posting help guides on my space, I've been asked hundreds of questions about how to do one thing or another. Recently I've noticed that more and more people aren't even sure about some of the basics, so I'm going to do my best to cover those in more detail. I'm going to start with the blog editor and the basic functions it makes available to you.

 

 

 

For those of you that are unfamiliar with programs like Microsoft Word and other word processing applications, you may not have come across cut, copy & paste buttons before (seen in the image below from left to right).

 

 

The first two of these buttons allow you to manipulate 'selected text' in some manner, but what is selected text?

 

Selected text is simply text that you have selected with the mouse (or keyboard). This is usually done by holding down the left mouse button at the beginning of the section of text you wish to select, then dragging the mouse cursor (with the left buttons still held down) to the end of the text you wish to select. You will notice when you do this that the text you have selected has been highlighted. Once text is highlighted in this manner it becomes 'selected text' and you may perform a wide variety of functions on it,two of which are cut & copy.

The Paste button works in tandem with the cut and copy buttons, in that any text that is stored in memory can be pasted into your blog at a point you have chosen (with the mouse).

 

 

 

 

The Paragraph button is a quick and easy way of helping you format your text. Again, you will need to select the text that you wish to format. The by clicking on the Paragraph button you will be presented with a number of formatting options. Your text will be formatted exactly as the text in those options appears to you, simple.

 

 

 

As with the Paragraph button, Font Style and Font Size are all about text formatting. The former changes the font you're using, the latter changes it's size. Again, the text you select will be changed to appear exactly as the text does in the options presented to you when you click on each of those buttons.

 

 

 

B, I & U stand for Bold, Italic and Underlined. These are further text formatting options that change the appearance of selected text. The Bold button will make text appear like this. The Italic button will make text appear like this and the Underlined button will make text appear like this. It's also worth noting that you can apply mutiple text formatting options to one piece of text, so you could have something that looked like this.

 

 

 

 

The buttons shown above are for text alignment. Pressing one of these buttons after having selected some text, will cause that text to be aligned to the left, centrally or to the right. Note: I would always advise you align your text to the left as it makes it far easier to read.

 

 

 

 

 The first two buttons in this group allow you to create either a numeric or bullet point list, like these:

To use lists, choose the type of list (numeric/bullet) and either the number one or a bullet point will appear. You can then enter each item in your list, pressing the return/enter key to move to the next line of the list. To stop entering items in the list, press the enter/return key on a blank line in the list.

 

The last two buttons in this group deal with adding indents to text. Indented text is text that has been moved from it's regular starting position at the side of the page, as follows:

 

You will also notice that indents can be used in conjunction with lists to create sub-lists as follows:

You do not need to select text in order to add an indent, merely click on the line you wish to indent and press the appropriate button (add/remove).