Understanding this feature and how it works
This week we answer our first viewer question that comes from a previous video about cleaning up formatted text. If you have any questions about what you see in Foundational Things videos, or have new questions that come to mind, I would love to hear from you.
After answering the viewer’s question about Word Wrap in Notepad, we discover together what word wrapping is and how it works so you can use it to your best advantage.
Video Transcript
00:00:00:03 – 00:00:24:11
This week’s video features our first viewer question: From the “Cleaning Up Formatted Text” video, can you go over how you turned on word wrapping in Notepad?” Thanks for your question, and I certainly can. Plus, I’ll go over what word wrapping is and give a few examples. If you want to see the video this question comes from, you can click the link in the card or find it in this video’s description.
00:00:24:27 – 00:00:49:29
So, let’s get started. First, we’ll open up Notepad, which is a text editing app that comes with Windows operating systems. The Word Wrap feature is found in the Format menu. So, if we click on Format, we find that Word Wrap is an option in the dropdown. Notepad remembers whatever setting you used last time. If you’ve never used Notepad before, it starts with word wrapping turned off.
00:00:50:11 – 00:01:11:24
You can turn word wrapping on by selecting the Word Wrap menu item. The option is checked in the menu when Word Wrap is turned on. When word wrapping is turned off, paragraphs of the text may look something like this. There are multiple sentences in these paragraphs. When you look at the right edge of the app itself, we see that the text appears to be cut off.
00:01:12:06 – 00:01:36:11
But it isn’t really — it just can’t all appear at once in the window we’re looking at. We could scroll across and see all of the text in a line, but this isn’t very convenient much of the time. When word wrapping is turned on, lines of text within a paragraph will wrap around to the next line. Here we see that even when the size of the window changes, the text adjusts to the space we have.
00:01:36:21 – 00:01:59:19
We no longer need to scroll horizontally across to view the text when Word Wrap is on. So, what is Word Wrap? Word Wrap is a text editing feature controlling how (or if) text flows automatically from one line to the next line. Let’s look at one more example, this time with hard breaks at the end of a few lines.
00:02:00:01 – 00:02:22:00
For this example, I will be using Google Docs, which has word wrapping as a standard feature, as most word processors do. Let’s see how word wrapping impacts things in this scenario. When we are typing, sometimes we want to have the line end. So, we press the Enter key. That’s what I just did. And, sometimes that key is called Return.
00:02:22:14 – 00:02:45:26
Either way, it is a hard break. I did it again. This is an example of words not wrapping to the next line. But, when I keep typing, at some point the words wrap around to the next line. You just watched that happen. We are so used to this happening — and, it happened again — that we don’t even think much of it.
00:02:46:01 – 00:03:11:18
It is pretty common for word processing applications, text editors, and other kinds of programs to word wrap until we want to end a paragraph or a section like right now. So, that looks like a normal paragraph, right? But, remember those first two lines? We pressed Enter after them. We started a new line. (If you’re familiar with typewriters, this is like having both a line feed and a carriage return.
00:03:12:00 – 00:03:33:09
If you’re not, we’ll have a history lesson in a future video!) Why do I point out those first two lines with the line breaks? Because they are deceptive in this situation. If we copy this text and paste it somewhere else, or if we change the width of the page or the paragraph, something interesting is going to happen…
00:03:37:24 – 00:03:51:08
Because those two lines don’t word wrap, we have a gap after each of them. The only way to get those lines to wrap around and truly be part of the paragraph is to remove the hard breaks manually…
00:03:58:02 – 00:04:32:28
Now, when I return the paragraph to the normal width, you’ll see very little has changed. Except, there is one word that is so short it will wrap around. Did you see the word “I” sneak in to the end of the line before? That’s word wrapping! And now, we have a beautiful paragraph. Today, we’ve seen what word wrapping is, how a few different apps make use of it,
00:04:33:06 – 00:04:57:13
And, I also learned that not everything is left up to the word wrap feature. How the text we’re working with is typed up has an impact on how it displays. Understanding how word wrapping works can be a useful tool to help us clean up our text, but it isn’t responsible for cleaning up text. Computers can only do what they’re instructed to do, and this includes things like how we format our text.
00:04:57:28 – 00:05:19:18
I hope something in this video has helped you today. There are lots of techniques and tips that you can learn to make your relationship with computers better, and I’m happy to help you on that journey. If you appreciate what you’ve seen here, please like and consider sharing a comment or sending an email about what you found helpful. In order to get all of the latest Foundational Things content,
00:05:19:24 – 00:05:33:01
be sure to subscribe to this channel and join the email reminder list. The link to join is in the description. And, please reach out with your questions about what you’ve seen here today. Thanks for watching. See you next time.
