Basic topic tasks

- [Voiceover] In this video, you'll learn how to create new topics from scratch and how to add and manipulate content in a topic. First thing we'll do is create a new topic from scratch. So the first thing you do is highlight the folder in which you want to create the new topic. Here there's just one, Contents, so we'll click that. I'll then click this Create a New Topic icon. This opens up the Add File dialog box and at the top there's a field labeled File Type, and the default setting there is Topic, because that's the most commonly created type of file.

Down at the lower left there's a file name field, and I'm going to type spaniels and this is all lower case because in some setups, on some servers, mixed case can cause a problem, so it's always safe to use all lower case, but check with your engineers. The first heading, I'm going to type the same thing as the file name and this is all I'm going to do, and I'll click Add. So here's my new Spaniels topic.

Now what I'll do is add some content. So I'm going to select this line and add some quick description, Part of the hunting dog breed, and then I'll list three of them, so three common types, Brittany, Cocker, Springer, and then I can add one deliberate spelling error.

So let's say that I misspelled the word, breed. I spelled it as bred, B-R-E-D. Now what I can do is spell-check and you notice that the word, cocker, has a wavy red underline. That's because the spell-checker doesn't recognize that word, but the word, bred, even though it's misspelled, is correct. So let me make a real spelling error there, call it bree, misspelled. So let's go ahead and fix the spelling errors. So I'm going to look for words with wavy red underlines.

Bree is one. I'm going to right-click, and this is going to give me a list of all possible spellings, and the one I want is breed, so that's good. Then I have cocker, and I'm going to right-click on that. And this is again going to give me a list of all possible spellings, but it's also telling me that this could be correct, in which case I can just say ignore, and then I can say, Add it to a project dictionary, if I want to maker sure that the project is using the same spelling and what's really useful, add it to a global dictionary, which means that multiple projects can use this same spelling dictionary.

This gives you a lot of consistency. For the moment I'll just say, Add to project dictionary, cocker is now unflagged, it's correct. I can also enter special characters, very easy to do. For example, if you've ever had to enter, say, a copyright symbol. You know how difficult it can be. But Flare has, up on the toolbar, the character icon, and if I click the pull-down, this is called Quick Character, and it's got predefined characters that I can insert with one click.

Here's the copyright symbol, for example. You can also customize this list, so it's a very useful feature. I can create bulleted lists quite easily. So, for example, I decide that I want to make the three breed types a bulleted list, so I'll select the three breed types and then up on the home ribbon, in the paragraph group, right here, there's one icon labeled Bulleted Lists. Flare combines bulleted and numbered lists in one icon, and when I click the pull-down, here are my options.

So I'll just make it a bulleted list, click on Bullet, it's now a bulleted list, and notice that the tab for this topic says spaniels.htm*. The asterisk means I've made a change, but I haven't saved yet. So what I'm gonna do is save, I'll do a Save All, and either click the Save All icon up at the top left, or press Control-Shift-F or click on File, Save, and one of the options, and now you'll notice the asterisk is gone, which means this file has been saved.

The last thing I want to do is take a look at this to make sure the topic looks OK, but I don't want to build the output, so what I'll do is a Preview, and on the upper toolbar at the left is my Preview icon, and if I click that, it's going to open up a preview window and here it is. This is how the topic will look in the output. It's not very impressive right now because we haven't done any formatting, but I could see this without having to spend time building the topic, building the output in the first place.