Notebook Basics

From simple calculations to full publishable documents and sophisticated dynamic interfaces, everything you can do with the Wolfram System's standard interactive interface is done in a notebook. Carefully designed to leverage familiar word-processing metaphors, Wolfram System notebooks are uniquely powerful computational documents that support live computation, arbitrary dynamic interfaces, full typeset input, image input, automatic code annotation, a complete high-level programmatic interface, and in all, thousands of carefully organized functions and options.

do a computation

choose how to enter input (Wolfram Language, free-form, text, etc.)

( at beginning of input) use free-form linguistics to generate Wolfram System output

get information or help

right-click get a context-specific menu

Cell Groups and Outlining »

double-click a group bracket open or close a cell group

double-click cell brackets close all other cells in a group

Managing Computations »

abort a computation

copy input from above

Selecting and Typing »

triple-click select a function and its arguments

Subscript ()  ▪  Special Character  ▪  Convert to StandardForm  ▪  Why the Coloring?  ▪  ...

Styling & Formatting »

text cell (with default stylesheet) (Format Style ...)

section-heading cell (with default stylesheet)

create a new cell of the same style

Format Stylesheet  ▪  ...

Graphics Operations

drag rotate a 3D graphic

toggle canvas (Graphics Convert To/From Canvas)

Global Notebook Operations

Save As HTML, etc.  ▪  Notebook History  ▪  Check Spelling  ▪  Send To

Notebook Environment Customization »

Preferences  ▪  Option Inspector  ▪  ...

Menu Items »

File New  ▪  Save  ▪  Print  ▪  Exit  ▪  ...

Insert Table/Matrix  ▪  New Canvas  ▪  Option Inspector  ▪  ...