When last we spoke, I provided a tour through the out-of-the-box Picture Tools for editing images in SharePoint 2010 (via the contextual Ribbon), so the natural next stop on the tour seemed to me to be the text-editing equivalent of those tools.

As noted previously, upon clicking the  (Edit) button in the nav at the top of the page, it’s the text editing tools which appear by default in the Ribbon:

Once you’ve clicked the Edit button, all editable content blocks on the page will appear with a light blue border surrounding them, as you can see in this default text block image:

Editing text in SharePoint 2010 is as simple as clicking into the text block in question, placing your cursor at the desired spot, and making the desired changes … such as this basic edit of the default welcome message seen above:

Note in the image above that the blue border appears, which means that screenshot was taken while I was still in Edit mode, which is to say that you’re provided with an instant live preview of what your edits will look like on the page when saved (minus the blue edit border, of course).

We’ll come back to the default copy later in this mini-series, but for now let’s back up now and take a look at the text editing tools available in the Ribbon.  Moving in order from left to right, we begin with the Save & Close button, which allows you to do quite a bit more than simply save and close.  Take note of the drop down arrow that appears beneath the save icon in the Ribbon image above, which includes the following drop down options: Edit (grayed out, as you’re already editing), Save & Close, Save and Keep Editing, Stop Editing, and (provided SharePoint Designer is available) Edit in SharePoint Designer.  This last option will appear grayed out if SharePoint Designer isn’t available to the user in question.  Say, me, for example.  Which is just as well in my case, really … I’m dangerous enough with Full Control as it is.

Next up is the Check Out button and its own attendant drop down options.  Clicking the Check Out button will allow you to check out the page in question, ensuring that no one else will be able to edit the page until you’ve checked it back in (with an exception, as we will learn).  The remaining three drop down options will all appear grayed out until/unless you check out the page, and they are: Check In, Discard Check Out, and Override Check Out.  Not surprisingly, the Check Out button becomes a Check In button once you’ve checked out a page.

I checked out my page to look into the Override Check Out option which, sure enough, appears to provide (presumably approved/permission-based) users with the ability to override another users’ check out, discarding any changes that were in progress.  One additional note while on the topic of Check Out:  I made an edit to the copy while I had the page checked out, inserting a random character (and creating a typo in the process) to see what would happen, and was very pleasantly surprised to discover that when I attempted to check the page back in (with the typo, which appeared underlined in red a la Word on the page itself), a popup appeared including a text field for comments and, more importantly, a warning to the effect that a spelling error was found:

How can you not love a feature that protects you from yourself?

Tune in next time as we continue our tour through the Ribbon’s contextual text editing tools!

The SharePoint 2010 Web edit story so far:

• Part 1: How to Insert a Picture
• Part 2: Working with Pictures
• Part 3: Working with Text (1 of 3) – Edit Tools
• Part 4: Working with Text (2 of 3) – Clipboard, Font, and Paragraph Tools
• Part 5: Working with Text (3 of 3) – Styles, Layout, & Markup