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Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Office Word 2003 in 24 Hours - page 73

Summary

If your work requires you to write documents that are more similar than not, you can base your new documents on existing ones and then edit them without worrying about accidentally overwriting your originals . And when you need to dash off a letter, memo, or fax but don't have the time or inclination to fiddle with formatting, you can consider using a template or wizard. They can help you produce professional documents with a minimum of hassle. The next hour is the first of several on formatting; you will start by learning how to change the font of your text, as well as applying boldface, italic, underline, and other font attributes.

Q&A

Q1:	I don't have the templates that you describe in my Templates dialog box. What is going on?
A1:	When you install Office, you can choose which templates to include. Your company may not have installed all of the Word templates, or it may only have installed custom templates that someone designed specifically for your company. Check with your network administrator if you want to use a template that you don't see in your New dialog box. If you are using Word on a standalone computer, follow the instructions in Appendix A to add more templates to your installation.
Q2:	When I use the Memo Wizard, I don't want to change any of the default choices. Do I still have to click Next repeatedly to go all the way to the last wizard dialog box before clicking Finish?
A2:	No. If you want to keep all of the default options, just click Finish in the first wizard dialog box that appears. The Memo Wizard remembers the options that you chose the last time you ran the wizard. If you don't want to change them the next time you use the wizard, just click Finish in the first dialog box.

Part II: Formatting Documents

Hour

6 Formatting Characters

7 Formatting Paragraphs

8 Formatting Pages

9 Working with Styles

10 Working with Templates

Hour 6. Formatting Characters

Changing the appearance of characters is one of the parts of word processing that most people enjoy ”even stodgy workaholics and high-octane business managers. The formatting that you can apply to individual characters ”fonts, font sizes, bold, italic, underline, and so on ”is referred to as font formatting or character formatting . You can apply font formatting to as little as one character, or as much as an entire document. In this hour, you learn how to apply a wide range of font-formatting techniques, and then you find out about a few more tricks for handling this type of formatting in your documents.

The highlights of this hour include

Using other fonts and changing the font size
Applying boldface, italic, and underline
Changing font color
Adjusting character spacing
Applying text effects
Choosing a different default font
Copying and removing font formatting

Applying Font Formatting

By default, Word applies a Times New Roman, 12-point font to your text. To make any changes to this default setting, you use one of the font-formatting features described in this hour . As you're exploring the different formatting options, keep these three points in mind:

In general, you need to select the text you want to format before issuing the formatting command. This is your way of telling Word exactly what text you want to format.

There are two exceptions to the "select first" rule. First, if you're applying the font formatting to a single word, you can just click in the word without selecting it, and then issue the commands. The formatting is applied to the entire word. Second, if you haven't yet typed the text that you want to format, you can place your insertion point at the location where you want to type, turn on the font-formatting options, and then type your text. The text takes on the formatting you chose.

The easiest way to tell what font, font size, font style (boldface, italic, underline), and font color has been applied to a block of text is to click in it. The options in the Formatting toolbar show you the formatting that is in effect wherever the insertion point is resting.
If you want to apply the same font formatting to several blocks of text, a fast way to do it is to use the F4 key. F4, the repeat key, repeats whatever command you last issued. So if you used the Font dialog box to apply several types of font formatting to a heading, for example, you could then select the next heading, press F4, select the next heading, press F4, and so on. Each time you press F4, Word repeats the last command, which in this case is to apply all of the selections you made in the Font dialog box. (You can use F4 to repeat many other commands as well.)