Documents, Email and Online Services

A report is a document that tells the reader what you found out, in an order that makes it easy to follow and to check. A school project, a science fair write-up, a survey of your ward, an office’s monthly report and a university thesis are all reports. They share the same parts:

1. a title page: the title, who wrote it (your name and class), and the date;
2. the contents: the headings, with the page each starts on;
3. an introduction: what you wanted to find out, and why;
4. the body, in sections with headings: what you did (the method), what you found (the results), with tables and figures;
5. a conclusion: what it all means, in a few sentences;
6. the references: every source you used, in a set style.

In Grade 6 you learned what goes on one page: a heading, body text, a picture, its caption and its credit, inside margins (Grade 6, The parts of a page). A report has many pages, and that changes one thing: you can no longer fix everything by hand. Change one paragraph on page 3, and every page after it moves. A word processor has four tools that keep a long document in order by themselves: styles, an automatic table of contents, page numbers and captions.

Styles, not bold

Most people make a heading by typing it, making it bold and a bit bigger. It looks like a heading. But to the word processor it is just ordinary text that happens to be bold.

A style is a named set of formatting (font, size, color, spacing) that you give to a paragraph: Heading 1 for the main sections, Heading 2 for the parts inside a section, Normal for body text. Give a line the style Heading 1, and two things happen: it looks like a heading, and the word processor knows it is one. That second thing is what makes everything else work:

• Change once, change everywhere. Change the Heading 1 style to dark blue, and every Heading 1 in the report turns dark blue at once.
• The contents build themselves, from the lines with a Heading style, with their page numbers.
• The navigation pane (a list of headings beside the document) lets you jump to any section of a long report.
• A screen reader (Grade 6) can jump from heading to heading for a reader who can’t see, but only if the headings are real headings. The same idea gave you <h1> and <h2> in HTML in Grade 8 Grade 8: Headings, paragraphs and lists.

A table of contents that writes itself

A table of contents lists the report’s headings with the page each one starts on. Typed by hand, it goes wrong the moment you add a paragraph: every page number after it is now out by one, and nobody notices until the teacher does. An automatic table of contents is made by the word processor from the lines marked with Heading styles, and it can be updated in one step whenever the pages change.

Page numbers, headers and footers

The header is the strip at the top of every page, above the margin, and the footer the strip at the bottom. Whatever you put there appears on every page: the report’s short title in the header, say, and the page number in the footer. You don’t type the page numbers: you insert a page number field, a small code that the word processor fills in with the right number on each page, and keeps right as pages move.

Two more habits keep a long report tidy:

• Start a new section on a new page with a page break, not by pressing Enter until the cursor reaches the next page. Those empty lines move the moment you change anything above them. A page break always starts the next page, wherever the text above ends.
• Leave the title page without a number. Most word processors have a setting “different first page” for this.

Tables and figures, with captions

A table shows numbers or facts in rows and columns. A figure is anything else that isn’t text: a chart, a diagram, a photo, a map. In a report, each one has a caption: a number and a short title that says what it shows, such as “Table 1. How 60 customers paid at one shop on one day”. The numbers let you point to them from the text: “Cash was still the most common way to pay (Table 1), but QR codes were close behind (Figure 1).”

The usual rule in school and science reports: a table’s caption goes above the table, a figure’s caption goes below the figure. A reader looks down a table from its title; a figure is looked at first, and then its caption explains it. Some styles put both captions above, APA style (below) among them: if your school or teacher gives you a style, follow it, and be the same all through.

Word processors can number captions for you: insert a caption, and it gets the next number, Figure 1, Figure 2, and renumbers them all if you add one in the middle. A table or a chart is usually made in a spreadsheet first (Grade 7, Formulas that do the work) and then put in the report.

A reference list

In Grade 7 you wrote a citation with five parts: who, when, the title, where, and when you looked (Grade 7, Citing what you used). A report does it in a citation style: a set of rules for exactly how to write a source, so that every reference looks the same and a reader can find it. A widely used one in schools and universities is APA style. It has two parts that work together:

• an in-text citation in your sentence, where you use the source: the author and the year in brackets, “(Karki, 2024)”, or “Karki (2024) found that…”;
• the reference list at the end, under the heading References, with the full details of every source you cited, in alphabetical order by the author’s surname (or the organization’s name). Each reference starts at the margin and its later lines are indented, a hanging indent, so that the names stand out down the left.

The pattern in APA style:

When a page has no date, write (n.d.), “no date”. When a page is made to change all the time (a page of live figures, say), add the date you looked, as in Grade 7: “Retrieved October 3, 2026, from” and the address.

An online form asks for your marksheet, citizenship certificate or a signed letter: a scan of a paper document. You may have no scanner at home, but a phone can do the job, if it is done the right way.

A photo of a page and a scan of it are not the same thing:

• A photo keeps everything the camera saw: the table under the page, your shadow, the page a little turned and narrower at the top, the paper gray in dim light, and the faint grain every camera adds. And it has millions of pixels.
• A scanning app finds the page’s four corners, crops away everything else, straightens the page so it is a rectangle again, whitens the paper and darkens the ink, and saves it as a PDF. Many can also put several pages into one PDF, and read the text on the page (this is called OCR, optical character recognition), so the PDF can be searched and copied.

What decides a scan’s file size is what decided a photo’s in Grade 8 Grade 8: Pixels and kilobytes: how many pixels, and how they are saved. For a scan the pixels are measured in dots per inch (dpi), the number of pixels across each inch of the paper. An A4 page is 8.27 inches wide, so:

Colors matter as much. A color scan stores three numbers for every pixel; grayscale needs only shades of gray, and a document of black text needs nothing more; black and white stores only two colors, which pack very small, but lose a light stamp, a pencil mark or a photo on the page.

Merging, ordering and shrinking

A form often wants one PDF with several pages: the front and back of a citizenship certificate, or three marksheets. Merging joins several PDFs, or several scanned pages, into one file. Check the order of the pages and that each is the right way up, then check the file size. Read what the form asks for, too: one PDF, or each page as a picture (a JPEG or PNG). Most scanning apps can save either.

If the PDF is too big, there are three things to try, in this order:

1. Scan again with fewer dots per inch, 150 or 200 instead of 300, and in grayscale for black text.
2. Compress the PDF, which saves its pictures again at a lower quality, as a JPEG at a lower quality setting did in Grade 8.
3. Split it, if the form allows several files: one PDF a document.

Then open the final PDF and read it, zoomed in, as the office will: every number, every name, the stamp and the signature.

Chat apps are for quick messages to people you know. Email (electronic mail) is how schools, colleges, offices, employers, embassies and companies expect to be written to, and how they send the things that matter: results, offers, receipts, tickets and appointments. An email can be long, it can carry files, it is kept, and it can be found again years later by searching.

Every email address has two parts joined by @ (“at”): username@domain. In asmita.rai@ourschool.edu.np, the username is asmita.rai, and the domain, ourschool.edu.np, is the email provider or organization whose server keeps the mailbox. You read the domain from the right, just as you read a web address in Grade 7: .np for Nepal, .edu for education, then the school’s own name. How an email travels from your app to your provider’s server and on to the reader’s, using the protocols SMTP and IMAP, is in Unit 5 Grade 9: Protocols: rules for talking.

The parts of an email

Figure 7.3 shows who sees whom when one email goes to all three kinds of reader.

Reply, reply all, forward

When an email comes to you, you can answer it in three ways:

• Reply answers only the person who sent it.
• Reply all answers the sender and everyone else in To and Cc (never those in Bcc, whom you can’t see).
• Forward sends the whole email, with its attachments, on to someone new, with your note at the top.

Writing a formal email

A formal email, to a teacher, an office, a college or an employer, is a short letter. Its reader may get a hundred emails a day and doesn’t know you, so every part has a job:

1. A subject that says what it is about, and who it is from if that helps: “Absence on 9 and 10 Kartik, Asmita Rai, 9 B”, not “hi” or “request” or nothing at all. Many people decide from the subject whether to open an email now, later or never.
2. A greeting on its own line: “Dear Ms. Shrestha,” or, if you don’t know a name, “Dear Sir or Madam,”. “Hi” and “Hey” are for friends.
3. The point, first. One or two sentences that say why you are writing. Then the details the reader needs, in short paragraphs: dates, numbers, what you are asking for.
4. Attachments, mentioned in the text: “I have attached my CV.” Check that the file really is attached before you press Send; “I forgot the attachment” is the most common second email in the world.
5. A polite close: a line such as “Thank you for your understanding.”, then “Best regards,” or “Yours sincerely,”, and your full name, with your class or role on the line below.
6. Plain, correct words: full words, not “pls” or “u”; no emojis; no whole words in CAPITALS, which read as shouting; one exclamation mark at most. Read it once more, as the person who gets it would, before you send it.

In Nepali

A formal email in Nepali follows the same parts, in the way formal letters (निवेदन and पत्र) are written in Nepal. The subject usually ends in सम्बन्धमा (“about …”); the greeting is आदरणीय with the person’s title and ज्यू, for respect, followed by a नमस्कार; the request is made politely, often with अनुरोध गर्दछु or …पाऊँ भनी अनुरोध गर्दछु; and it closes with धन्यवाद and भवदीय (from a man) or भवदीया (from a woman) above the name. Type it in Unicode, as you learned in Grade 6 Grade 6: Typing in Nepali, so that it reads on every phone.

Now write some yourself. The widget below checks each part the way a busy teacher skims an email; it can tell whether each part is there, but not how well it is written, so compare yours with the model answers under it.

Attachments and their size

An email can carry files, but not big ones: most email providers limit one email, with all its attachments, to about 20 to 25 MB, and some offices’ mailboxes accept much less. Before attaching:

• Send a PDF of a document, not a photo of it or a file that needs a particular app to open. A PDF looks the same on every phone and computer.
• Name the file so the reader knows what it is without opening it: Asmita-Rai-CV.pdf, not IMG_20261012_0931.jpg or final-final.docx (Grade 8, Names that sort themselves).
• Shrink big photos first, as you learned in Grade 8; scan documents as above.
• For a big file (a video, a folder of photos), upload it to cloud storage and send a link, set so that only the people you mean can open it.

Spam and phishing in your inbox

Spam is unwanted email sent to huge numbers of people at once: advertisements, “offers”, chain letters. Email providers move most of it to a spam or junk folder by themselves; mark any they miss as spam, so the filter learns. Don’t reply to it, and don’t press its “unsubscribe” link unless it comes from a company you really did sign up with: replying tells the sender that your address is real.

Phishing (Grade 7, Phishing: the fake page) comes by email too, and often looks more official there, with logos and a polite tone. The name an email shows as its sender can say anything (“Nepal Rastra Bank”, “Your Principal”); the address behind the name can’t be faked so easily. Tap the sender’s name to see the full address, and read its domain from the right, as you read links in Grade 7. An email from notice@nrb-kyc-update.com is not from Nepal Rastra Bank, whatever its name and logo say. And an unexpected attachment, even from a friend, can carry malware (Grade 7): check with them another way before you open it. Phishing is one kind of social engineering: Unit 6 shows the feelings these tricks press on, and why you check through a channel you choose yourself Grade 9: People: social engineering.

Email has many uses, which an exam may ask you to list: personal (news, invitations, congratulations to family and friends), education (asking teachers questions, sending homework, getting results and notices), business (writing to customers, suppliers and offices, sending bills and receipts), marketing (newsletters, offers, surveys) and official use (applications, appointments, government notices). Compared with a letter on paper it is fast, nearly free, carries files, and is kept and searchable. Compared with a chat message it is better for anything formal, long or that must be kept, and it doesn’t need the other person to have the same app.

A video call, or video conference when there are many people, lets people see and hear each other live over the internet: a class taught online, an interview for a college, a meeting of an office spread across Nepal, a family in Dang talking to a father in Qatar.

Before, during and after

Before the call:

• Test your camera, microphone and connection five minutes early. Charge the phone, or plug it in.
• Find a quiet place, with the light in front of you (a window behind you turns your face into a shadow) and a plain wall or a blurred background behind.
• Dress as you would for that meeting in person: for a class, as for school; for an interview, as for an interview. You are seen.
• Remember the data: a video call uses about 3 to 8 MB a minute (Grade 7, Making a data pack last). On a slow connection, turn the camera off and keep the sound.

During the call:

• Join on time, with your real name showing.
• Mute your microphone when you aren’t speaking, and unmute to speak.
• Raise your hand (there is a button) or write in the chat to ask a question, so two people don’t talk at once.
• Look at the camera when you speak, not at your own picture.
• Share your screen only after closing everything private; share one window, not the whole screen, when you can.

Ethics in a call are the same as in a room: respect others’ turns and opinions, no rude messages in the chat, and never record a call, or take photos of the people in it, without their permission. Recording a teacher or classmates and posting it is unkind, and in many countries it is against the law.

Hosting a meeting

The person who starts a meeting is its host. To run one:

1. Schedule or start a meeting in a video-calling app; it makes a meeting link (and often a meeting ID and passcode).
2. Share the link only with the people invited, by email or a message, never on a public page: strangers who find a link can join and disrupt a meeting.
3. Admit people from the waiting room as they arrive, so only those invited get in.
4. Manage the meeting: mute someone with a noisy background, let one person share a screen, and end the meeting for everyone when it is over.

In Grade 8 you kept your own files in the cloud, synced between your devices (Grade 8, The cloud and sync). A shared document is a file kept online that several people open and change, even at the same moment: a group project written by four students in four different homes, each seeing the others’ typing appear as they write.

Who may do what

When you share a document, you choose what each person may do:

Share with named people (by their email address) when you can. Sharing with “anyone with the link” means exactly that: anyone the link is forwarded to, anywhere, can open it. Give editing only to the people who need it: a teacher who will mark it usually needs to comment, not edit.

Comments, suggestions and history

Three tools let a group work on one document without spoiling each other’s work:

• A comment is a note attached to a word or a passage, shown in the margin: a question, an idea, a problem. Others can reply to it, and when it is dealt with, it is resolved (hidden, but kept). Typing @ and a name in a comment sends that person an email, and in many apps can assign them the task.
• Suggesting (in some word processors called track changes) shows your changes in color, with what was deleted crossed out, for the writer to accept or reject one by one. Use it on others’ parts of the work.
• The version history keeps every saved change, with the time and who made it, and can go back to any of them (Grade 8, Versions, not “final”). It also shows who wrote what, so in a group project it is honest work that shows, and copying that shows too.

Working together, kindly

A comment is read without your face and your voice, so it can sound harsher than you meant. Comment on the work, not the person; say what is good as well as what to change; and make a suggestion rather than just a complaint: not “this is wrong”, but “I think this number is 37, not 47: see Table 1?”.

Working with people far away needs a little more care. A student in Tokyo is 3 hours and 15 minutes ahead of Nepal, and one in London 4 hours and 45 minutes behind (5 hours and 45 minutes in their winter): agree on a time that suits both, and write it with the time zone. Write in simple sentences, since many people in the world use English as a second language, as you do; explain words only Nepalis know (dal bhat, Tihar, a ward); and agree at the start who does which part, and by when.

Not long ago, applying for a passport, a tax number or a government job meant a day in a queue at an office, often more than one. Now much of it can be started, and some of it finished, on a phone. The government’s use of computers, the internet and phones to give its services and information to people is called e-governance (electronic governance).

E-governance is grouped by whom it serves:

• G2C, government to citizen: a student checking her SEE result, a family applying for a passport, a person paying a tax or a bill.
• G2B, government to business: registering a company, filing its taxes, bidding for a government contract.
• G2G, government to government: offices sharing records and files with each other, a ward office sending birth registrations to the national system.
• G2E, government to employee: a government teacher checking her salary, leave or pension online, or training online.

The same changes have come to learning. E-education is teaching and learning with computers and the internet: lessons, videos, exercises and exams on a phone or a computer, like this book. It lets you learn at your own pace, anywhere, often cheaply; but it needs a device and a connection, it misses the help of a teacher face to face, and its quality varies, so check who made what you study.

Filling in a form safely

Whatever the service, an online application goes the same way:

1. Find the official site, by typing its address or from the office’s own notice, not from an ad or a link in a message. Government sites in Nepal end in .gov.np; read the address from the right (Grade 7).
2. Read the notice first: who may apply, the last date, the documents needed, the photo’s and scans’ sizes and formats, the fee.
3. Get your documents ready before you start: scans that fit the limits, a photo of the right size (Grade 8), and the numbers you will need (citizenship, national ID, symbol number).
4. Fill in the form carefully. Names and dates exactly as on your citizenship certificate or marksheet. Nepal uses two calendars, BS (Bikram Sambat) and AD: check which one each date field wants.
5. Check everything on the preview page before you submit: a wrong date of birth can take months to correct.
6. Pay the fee, if there is one, only through the site’s own payment page, its address still the official one and starting https (Unit 6, What HTTPS protects, and what it doesn’t).
7. Keep the proof: the submission number or reference number, the payment receipt with its transaction ID, and a PDF or printout of the submitted form. Save them with a clear name (2083-07-09-passport-application-receipt.pdf) in a folder you will find, and in a second place. Without the number, the office may not be able to find your application.

There are several ways to pay without cash:

• A digital wallet is an account in an app, opened with your mobile number, that holds money you load into it from a bank, a card or an agent; it pays shops, bills, fees and other people.
• Mobile banking is your bank account itself, in your bank’s app.
• A card (debit or credit) is used at a machine in a shop or online.
• A QR code is how most of these pay in a shop: the shop shows a printed code, or one on a screen, and your app reads it.

A wallet or a bank must know who you are before it lets you move much money: this is KYC (know your customer, Grade 7), checked with your citizenship or another document. A young person’s account is usually opened by a parent.

A QR payment, step by step

1. Scan the shop’s QR code with your wallet or bank app. The code holds the shop’s account (and sometimes the amount).
2. Check the name the app shows. It should be the shop’s, the person’s or the office’s name you mean to pay. A thief can stick his own code over a shop’s (Grade 7).
3. Type the amount, if it isn’t filled in, and check it: Rs 450, not Rs 4,500.
4. Enter your PIN, in your own app only, hiding it from people around you.
5. Get the receipt: the app shows that the payment succeeded, with a transaction ID, a number that identifies this one payment. The shop’s app or speaker announces the money arriving.

The money doesn’t travel as a picture or a message from your phone to the shop’s. Your app asks your wallet or bank to move it; a payment network passes the request between companies; the shop’s bank or wallet adds it to the shop’s account and tells the shop. That is why only the receiving app proves money arrived (Grade 7, Fake payments and prizes).

Six rules keep your money safe:

1. Your PIN and the codes sent to your phone are for you to type, never to tell. No real company, office or delivery person ever needs them.
2. Check the name before you enter the PIN. Once paid, money is hard to get back.
3. Scanning and entering a PIN sends money. It never brings money in (Grade 7).
4. Lock the app with a PIN or fingerprint, and the phone with a screen lock (Grade 8).
5. Don’t pay a stranger in advance for something you haven’t seen: a phone from a social media page, a job abroad, a room to rent.
6. If something goes wrong, act at once. Paid the wrong person, or see a payment you didn’t make? Call the wallet’s or bank’s official helpline straight away, with the transaction ID. A complaint the company doesn’t settle can go to Nepal Rastra Bank, which licenses and supervises them.

E-commerce (electronic commerce) is buying and selling goods and services over the internet: from a big shopping site, a shop’s own website, a page on a social media app, or another person selling something they no longer need.

A real shop, or a fake one?

A fake shop is a page or website that takes payment and sends nothing, or sends something worthless. Some live for a few weeks, collect money, and vanish. Before you pay a shop you don’t know:

• Is the price believable? A new phone at a third of its price is the oldest bait.
• Who is behind it? A real business has an address, a phone number that answers, and is registered (a PAN or VAT number, and in Nepal now a registration for selling online). Search for its name with the word “scam” or “review” (read across, as in Grade 7).
• How old is it, and what do buyers say? A page made last month, with comments turned off or only perfect reviews, is a warning.
• How do you pay? “Pay first, only to this personal wallet” is a warning. Cash on delivery (COD), paying when the parcel reaches you, protects you from a shop that never sends anything. Ask whether you may open the parcel before paying: if not, COD doesn’t protect you from a wrong or broken item.
• What if it is wrong? A real shop says how many days you have to return or exchange a thing, in what condition, and who pays to send it back.

When it arrives

• Open the parcel on camera if it was expensive, or while the delivery person waits, and check that it is what you ordered.
• Keep the bill, the order number and the messages until the return period is over.
• Return or complain in time: read the return policy for the number of days. If a shop won’t answer, complain on the shopping site itself, then to the authorities.
• Review honestly, so the next buyer knows: what was good, what wasn’t.