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.

(Key1[shift, enter]) — do a computation

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

((Key0[==]) at beginning of input) — use free-form linguistics to generate Wolfram System output

(Key0[F1]) — get information or help

right-click — get a context-specific menu

(OrangeLink[Cell Groups and Outlining », paclet:guide/CellGroupsAndOutlining])

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

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

(OrangeLink[Managing Computations », paclet:guide/ManagingComputationsInNotebooks])

(Key1[alt, .]) — abort a computation

(Key1[ctrl, l]) — copy input from above

(OrangeLink[Selecting and Typing », paclet:guide/SelectingAndTypingInNotebooks])

triple-click — select a function and its arguments

(OrangeLink[Styling & Formatting », paclet:guide/NotebookFormattingAndStyling])

(Key1[alt, 7]) — text cell (with default stylesheet) ((MenuGrayLink[Format, paclet:guide/FormatMenu]) ▶ (MenuGrayLink[Style, paclet:ref/menuitem/Style]) ▶ ...)

(Key1[alt, 4]) — section-heading cell (with default stylesheet)

(Key1[alt, enter]) — create a new cell of the same style

Graphics Operations

drag — rotate a 3D graphic

(Key1[ctrl, d]) — open graphics drawing tools ((MenuGrayLink[Graphics, paclet:guide/GraphicsMenu]) ▶ (MenuGrayLink[Drawing Tools, paclet:ref/menuitem/ShowDrawingTools]))

Global Notebook Operations

(OrangeLink[Notebook Environment Customization », paclet:guide/NotebookAndInterfaceCustomization])

(OrangeLink[Menu Items », paclet:guide/MenuItems])