Moving your cursor and editing text on your tablet

You’ll probably do more text editing on your tablet than you anticipated. That editing includes the basic stuff, such as spiffing up typos and adding a full stop here or there as well as complex editing involving cut, copy, and paste. The concepts are the same as you find on a computer, but the process can be daunting without a physical keyboard and a mouse.

Curses! Tricks to moving the cursor

The first part of editing text is to move the cursor to the right spot. The cursor is that blinking, vertical line where text appears. On a computer, you move the cursor by using a mouse. A tablet has no such helpful device, but you do: your finger.

Tap the spot on the text where you want the cursor to appear.pp To help your accuracy, a cursor tab appears below the text. You can move that tab with your finger to precisely locate the cursor in your text. After you move the cursor, you can continue to type, use the Delete key to back up and erase, or paste text copied from elsewhere.

You may see the Paste Command button appear above the cursor tab. This button is used to paste in text.

Selecting text

Selecting text on a tablet works just like selecting text in a word processor: You mark the start and end of a block. That chunk of text appears highlighted on the screen. How you get there, however, can be a mystery — until now!

Text selection starts by longpressing or double-tapping a chunk of text. Upon success you see a chunk of selected text. Drag the start and end markers around the touchscreen to define the text.

While text is selected, the Contextual action bar appears above the text you selected, although your tablet may sport a custom action bar. You use the action bar to deal with the selected text.

In addition to the action bar, you can delete a selected block of text by tapping the Delete key on the onscreen keyboard. You can replace the text by typing something new.

To cancel text selection, tap the Done button on the action bar, or just tap anywhere in the text outside the selected block.

Cutting, copying, and pasting text

Selected text is primed for cutting or copying, which works just like it does in your favorite word processor. After you select the text, choose the proper command from the Contextual action bar. To copy the text, choose the Copy command. To cut the text, choose Cut.

Just like on a computer, cut or copied text on a tablet is stored on a clipboard. To paste any previously cut or copied text, move the cursor to the spot where you want the text pasted.

Dealing wit speling errrs

Similar to a word processor, your Android tablet may highlight misspelled words. A vicious red underline appears beneath the suspect spelling, drawing attention to the problem.

To remedy the situation, tap the red-underlined word. You see a pop-up list of alternatives. Tap a replacement or, if the word is correctly spelled but unknown to the Android tablet, choose to add the word to a personal dictionary.