Thank you, Sharon, for taking an interest. I was trying
to save newly typed text. My problem may be that I don't
understand the purpose of Wordpad in the first place. I
was trying to use it as a simple word processing program
to type plain text for my own offline use and save it in
My Documents. Wordpad Help doesn't explain about rich
text vs. plain text except that the latter
loses "formatting," but when I saved in rich text and
reopened the file, it was all in code. I couldn't even
get it to save in plain text. I couldn't find any other
help that even addressed the subject. What am I
missing? (Maybe I just need to take a course in Windows.)
You're welcome, Mabel, and you're on the right track with Wordpad.
It is a very simple word processor. It supports formatted text: colors,
bold, italic, underlining, mixing different sizes of fonts and so on. It
can also produce a plain text document. Plain text is... well, just plain
text. One size, one style. No fancy stuff.
It sounds like you have this part down pat already.
After you finish typing and formatting, you saved the file as Rich Text.
Sounds good and again on the right track.
Question: After you save the file, can you see the file's icon? What does
it look like?
It should match the shortcut icon for the Wordpad program but minus the
shortcut arrow.
OR it will look similar to the icon that is shown in Wordpad's title bar
(lefthand corner): similar to a Notepad icon but with a red "A" in the
lower right hand corner.
If you see any other icon on the saved file, what does it look like?
When you open a saved Wordpad file, the contents *should* appear exactly
the same as when you last closed it. You should see "Wordpad" in the title
bar of this window.
Questions:
How are you opening the file? Double clicking on the file or using File>
Open from Wordpad's menu bar? Try both ways. Is "Wordpad" shown in the
title bar using both methods?
Just in case you're wondering why I'm asking you 100 questions:
Many different programs are capable of creating files with the RTF
extension. Not all of them are Rich Text Files. And for those that are, all
RTF files are not created equal. Rich Text from one program may not appear
exactly the same in another program.
I can think of a recent example of this: A version of AOL was saving files
created with that program's text editor (File > New) as Rich Text Files
(RTF). Problem: Their text editor is not 100% compatible with Wordpad. It
was impossible to tell from Windows Explorer which program had created
which file. In newer versions, AOL has changed their extension to RTX.
