The HowToDoThings article toolbar can be a little confusing at times, so here's an explanation of how to use it!

This is the toolbar that appears above the article field when you click on "Write an Article" from your HowToDoThings contributor dashboard:

  1. Bold, Italic and Underline. Just like the tools in a Word document or most other content management systems, you can bold, italicize or underline anything in your article. Simply highlight the word, phrase or sentence that you intend to change and then click the appropriate icon:

  2. Bulleted and Numbered Lists. Every HowToDoThings article must include a numbered list. The numbers should indicate the different steps involved in accomplishing the "how to" process. The bulleted list adds bullet points beside each line in a list. This can be used within a numbered list or separate from a numbered list. Similar to bolding or italicizing a sentence, you can add the numbered list feature by highlighting the entire list (which will likely consist of the majority of the article) and clicking on the icon with the numbers 1, 2, 3, which is depicted below.

    *Note: If you need to create paragraph breaks within a numbered list, you can accomplish this by holding the shift key down while you press enter. This will allow a line break without adding another number to the list.

  3. Spell Check. When you have completed adding and formatting your article, it's always a good idea to do one final read-through and spell check. All you have to do is click on the spell check icon and the entire article field will be scanned for spelling errors. You can then go back through the article and correct anything that's amiss.

  4. Word Clean. If you're finding it hard to format or submit your article because you're cutting and pasting it from Word (or another program) into the HowToDoThings article field, you can use the Word Clean icon to remove any extraneous html that may be causing formatting problems. If you copy your article from Word, as usual, and then click on the Word Clean icon (depicted below), you can paste it into the Word Clean field that appears, then click "insert."  The content you added will then appear in the article body field without the associated html. You may need to reformat your article, but you shouldn't run into any more html issues.

  5. HTML. If you're a computer guru or just know a little bit about basic html, you can view the html of your article by clicking on the, you guessed it, html icon. You can make edits within the html field and then "update." You should see the changes updated immediately in the article body field.

  6. Image. If you'd like to add an image to your HowToDoThings article, you can! Just click on the image icon and add the URL of the site the photo is already hosted on.

    Or, if your image is saved on your computer, you can click on the "browse" icon next to the URL field.

    Then you can browse your computer desktop and files, find the image file you'd like to add and upload it to HowToDoThings. Then simply click on the image itself and click "insert" on the original field. You should see your image immediately appear in the article body field.

It's as easy as that!