Welcome to the second part of 1984’s look into some of the features of ClarisWorks.
This article is based around ClarisWorks 5, but don’t worry if you’re working in a different version because most of these features were in ClarisWorks on the day it was born. Some of these tips you may have heard before, others you may have not. Over the next few months 1984 will be running a few more articles on getting more out of ClarisWorks so there should be something for everyone.
Useful Shortcuts
If you’re banging out words, and the smoke is pouring from your keyboard, the last thing you want to do is stop your furious clattering and start tooling around with the mouse just to reposition the cursor. Fortunately ClarisWorks has a number of keyboard shortcuts that help you navigate around text more quickly and efficiently.
 
These keys, or at least most of them tend to be consistent across most decent Macintosh text editors, are fairly easy to learn and make life a lot easier (particularly the word left / right).
You can also select text by hold down the Shift key while using any of the above combinations. So for example, holding on Option and Shift and pressing the left arrow will select the previous word.
Note that the Home, End, Page Up and Page Down keys you find on extended keyboards don’t actually move the text cursor, they’re work as though you were using the scroll bar with the mouse. This can be useful when you want to go up the document just to look at something. Typing anything or pressing one of the arrow keys will move you back to where you were typing.
Hanging Indents
Getting to grips with the text ruler and paragraph formatting is probably one of the most neglected areas in word processing in general. However there are a few handy, simple paragraph tips you can learn that will make formatting documents far easier and add some polish to their end appearance.
The text ruler underwent a bit of an overhaul in version five to look more like Microsoft Word’s text ruler, however the principle is just the same. Here are portions of the two rulers side by side. The one on the left being the old ClarisWorks ruler, and the one on the right ClarisWorks 5’s:
 
The ruler, which runs across the top of your word processing documents (if you can’t see the ruler, choose ‘Show Ruler’ from the Window or View menu), has markers from the left and right indents (from the margin) and a first line. You can also specify indents by choosing Paragraph from the Format menu. It looks something like this:
 
A hanging indent is an indent all but the first line of text is indented, therefore it’s ‘hanging’.
So let’s say you wanted to create a numbered list with a hanging indent (I know version five supplies a numbered list, but maybe you want more felxibility). The left indent would need to be 0.25” (maybe more if you’re using big numbers), the first line would have to be - (minus) 0.25”.
To use the hanging indent, you’d type your number, and then press Tab to take you to the left indent. All text after that would ‘be indented to the left. Press return to start a new (first) line, and do it all over again. The result would look like this:
 
Find / replace
In addition to finding and replacing words, you can find (and replace) formatting characters such as tabs and page breaks.
To enter these into the Find or Change text boxes, you can either hold down the Command key as you press the tab or return key, or you can use a code. See below:
 
Next Month
That’s all for this month. Next month we’ll take a close look at getting more out of the ClarisWorks’ drawing feature.
