Virtual School. Information Technology. Lesson 2.

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Skills Lesson 1 gave you very brief pieces of text to work on to show that you understand the main skills. The exercises below put those skills into practice. The Twelve Days of Christmas Use copy and paste. This song is very repetitive so it is an ideal example for word processing. When you have written something once it can be copied and then "pasted" back in very easily without unnecessary typing. 1. Here is the last verse. Copy it, then paste it into a new file in your word processor. On the Twelfth Day of Christmas my true love sent to me Twelve drummers drumming Eleven pipers piping Ten lords a-leaping Nine ladies dancing Eight maids a-milking Seven swans a-swimming Six geese a-laying Five gold rings. Four calling birds Three turtle doves Two French hens And a partridge in a pear tree. That was the last verse. It contains all the words you need for the other verses. 2. To create the first verse, select the line "On the Twelfth Day of Christmas my true love sent to me" save it, then copy it to the beginning of the song. Do the same with the line "And a partridge in a pear tree." Now your piece should read: "On the Twelfth Day of Christmas my true love sent to me And a partridge in a pear tree." Delete "Twelfth " and type in "first". Delete "And a" and type in "A". Add a "return" before the "A" and you should have: On the First Day of Christmas my true love sent to me A partridge in a pear tree. 3. Continue the other verses in the same way, by copying the lines from the last verse and "pasting" them to a place above the last verse. Don't forget to save your file. You should be able to see that cut and paste is much quicker than typing the whole song manually. The Twelve Days of Australian Christmas If you have finished writing the whole song it's now time to change it! 4. Take one word which you might like to replace to make it more appropriate for an Australian. I'll choose "partridge". I want to change every example to "kookaburra" the Australian bird and I want to do it without having to type it 12 times. 5. Find your word processor's search and replace tool. It may also be called "find and replace", possibly in the edit menu. 6. In the "find" or "search" box, type in the word you want to change (partridge). In the "replace" box type in the new replacement (kookaburra). Click the appropriate OK buttons and all the words will be changed. 7. Do the same by replacing pear tree with gum tree then continue with any other words from the song which you'd like to replace. Don't forget to save your file under a new name. Here are some more Australian words to help you replace the text: lorikeet, budgerigar, rosella, cockatoo, galah, emu, lyrebird, kangaroo, wombat, platypus, wallaby. Think of some other examples of text which could be changed by using search and replace. Here is one such example. The person's name is long and complicated; we don't want to write it out lots of times. So we use a single character, in this case a @ to replace the word temporarily. @B will later be replaced by the name "Bratislav" using find and replace. The Bratislav Ziboyinovitch Grezhinsky Story Use Search and Replace to show that repeating strings can be avoided. Copy the text below into a new file. Make sure you leave spaces as shown: @B @Z @G was a Cossack who fled Russia in 1942 and made his way to the USA. @B @Z @G, or @B as he came to be known, made a career as a commercial artist, signing his work either @B @Z @G, @B @G, or @Z @G at different times in the year. Eventually in Spring it was @B, in summer @Z, in Autumn @G, and in winter @B @Z @G. His eldest son he also named @B @Z @G (or @B @Z @G the Younger to distinguish him from @B @Z @G the elder, who was born in Minsk.) In fact this turned out to be incorrect, as in time it was discovered that @B @Z @G the elder's own father was also called @B @Z @G and so @B @Z @G the elder should have been @B @Z @G (until the birth of his son made him @B @Z @G the second.) When you have typed it in, use Search and Replace to replace the string @B with Bratislav, @Z with Ziboyinovitch, and @G with Grezhinsky. Be sure to spell these words correctly the first time, because if you make a mistake the mistake will be repeated a dozen times in your document!   Lesson 3 | Top