Guide To Good Text in Microsoft Office 2008
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
In this chapter, you'll discover the many ways you can format the text in your documents. There are two types of formatting that can be applied to selected text: character and paragraph.
- Character formatting refers to the font, size, styles, and color applied to—and that only affects—selected text within a paragraph.
- Paragraph formatting concerns itself with formatting that affects entire paragraphs. In addition to setting a default font for the paragraph, formatting can include line spacing, space before and after the paragraph, alignment, and so on.
To make it simpler to consistently format a document's text, you can define and apply character and paragraph styles, as explained at the end of this chapter.
Character Formatting
You can change the look of selected text by applying different font, size, style, and color formatting. You can format text in several ways, as described below. Use any method that's convenient for you.
To apply character formatting:
Select the text you want to format.
Using normal selection techniques, you can select individual characters, words, paragraphs, or the entire document.
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Do any of the following:
- Click the Formatting Palette tab in the Toolbox. In the Font section (Figure 4.1), select any combination of font, size, color, highlighting, and style effects.
Figure 4.1 You can apply most types of character formatting by selecting options from the Formatting Palette.
- Choose Format > Font or press
. On the Font tab of the Font dialog box (Figure 4.2), select font, size, color, and effects, and then click OK.
Figure 4.2 For more complex formatting needs, you can select options from the Font dialog box.
- Select font, size, color, highlighting, and style options from the icons and drop-down menus on the Formatting toolbar (Figure 4.3).
Figure 4.3 Basic character formatting options can be selected from the Formatting toolbar.
- Click the Formatting Palette tab in the Toolbox. In the Font section (Figure 4.1), select any combination of font, size, color, highlighting, and style effects.
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- To show or hide the Formatting Palette, you must open or close the Toolbox. Choose View > Formatting Palette or click the Toolbox icon on the Standard toolbar (Figure 4.4). To show or hide the Formatting toolbar, choose View > Toolbars > Formatting.
Figure 4.4 Show or hide the Toolbox by clicking this icon on the Standard toolbar.
- To restore selected text to the standard font and size for the paragraph, select the text and choose Clear Formatting from the Styles section of the Formatting Palette (see Figure 4.1) or from the Style drop-down list on the Formatting toolbar (see Figure 4.3).
- To increase the size of selected text by one point, press
. To decrease the size by one point, press 
. - You can use keyboard shortcuts (Table 4.1) to apply the most common font effects to selected text.
Table 4.1. Font Effect Keyboard Shortcuts
Shortcut
Description
Boldface
Italic
Underline
Small caps
All capital letters
Cycle through case selections
- The font effect icons (such as Bold), as well as their keyboard shortcuts, work as toggles. Issue them once to apply the formatting; issue them again to remove the formatting.
- You can change the letter case of selected text by choosing Format > Change Case. Select an option from the Change Case dialog box (Figure 4.5) and click OK.
Figure 4.5 You can change the case of selected text by selecting an option in this dialog box.
- Applying a bold or italic effect to selected text is not the same as using the actual bold or italic version of a font, if one is available. By choosing the bold version of a font (Arial Bold or Baskerville Italic, for example), you will normally get more aesthetically pleasing and typographically correct text than you will by applying the bold or italic effect.
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