The visual text editor is certainly one of the areas you will be using more often in your WordPress blog admin panel. That’s where you create pages and posts to publish in your blog.
It’s a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that contains all the tools you need to edit and format text, add images, videos and sound clips to your blog post. We are going to explore some of those tools in this post.
- How to open the Visual Text Editor
You open the text editor when creating or editing a page or post. For instance, to write a new article, open the “Posts” panel on the left sidebar then click “Add New”.
(To create a new page, go to the “Pages” panel then choose “Add New” to proceed.) - How To Format Text
This visual editor offer a variety of tools to format your post for better presentation. If you are familiar with any rich text editor such as MicroSoft Word then you will find yourself at home here.
Just hover your mouse on each icon to discover its purpose. However you will gain more insights by actually trying out each one of those tools: you will become more proficient that way. - Although your post/page content is already set in the CSS stylesheet associated with your blog theme, you can still create localized text styles that only affect a paragraph or a few words.
- Changing Text Appearance
The visual text editor comes with a rich set of tools to change your article’s content appearance. They are easily recognizable. You can change your text to bold, italic, underline characters or add a strikethrough line although I never found a reason to use the last one. - Adding Media To Your Post or Page
To add a multimedia file (image, movie or audio) to your post, just position the cursor to the target position then click the appropriate icon to add a picture, YouTube video or sound file. - Toggle Full Screen Mode
In its default size, the text box area offered by the visual editor may seem too small in some instance. You can either drap the handle on the lower right corner to increase the height of that box. Even better, you can switch to full screen mode by clicking the “Toggle Full Screen” icon on the second spot from the right. The visual editor will then expand to give you a larger window to edit your article. You can toggle back to a normal window dimensions using the same icon/tool. - Get More Visual Editing Tools
To see more or less tools in your visual text editor, use the “Kitchen Sink“. Its icon is at the far right of the tool bar. - Pasting Text From Word
Simply copying & pasting text from your favorite word processor to the wordpress visual editor might lead to some formatting issues. A special tool -Paste From Word- is provided in the “Kitchen Sink” to solve that problem. It’s the icon with the Microsoft Word (W) logo on it. - Spell Check
The visual editor even has a spell checking feature as well. This functionality is avalaible in 11 western languages from English to Swedish. For some odd reasons as of the writing of this post, the “spell checker” I never seem to make it work. - Help
The visual text editor even offers a help tool which will certainly not give you more information than you already got from this post. However it’s worth checking out. - HTML Editor
But for those familiar with HTML and need more control, a second tab labeled “HTML” is adjacent to the ”Visual” tab. It opens the text editor in HTML mode so you can fiddle around with the HTML and CSS formating.Happy Blogging!!
