Chapter 7 -- Formatting a Word Document

Chapter 7

In this chapter, you'll learn the basic techniques for formatting a document—that is, for adjusting the document's appearance. You'll learn how to format individual characters as well as how to format entire paragraphs of text.

This chapter presents formatting techniques beginning with the most automated ones, and then moving on to methods that give you greater levels of formatting control. For many of the documents you create, you might be able to save time by using the more automated methods. For other documents, you might need to use techniques described later in the chapter to modify automatically applied formats or to achieve more exacting formatting results.

The next two chapters—Chapter 8, "Customizing Styles and Templates" and Chapter 9, "Arranging Text in Columns and Lists"—will provide additional information on formatting paragraphs.

In Microsoft Word 2000, you can also adjust the appearance of one or more entire pages. The appearance of a page is generally known as its setup rather than its format; this topic will be covered primarily in Chapter 11, "Designing Pages"

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As you learn the techniques presented in this chapter, keep in mind that you can reverse the effect of any formatting command by issuing the Undo command, using any of the methods discussed in the sidebar "Undoing and Redoing Editing and Formatting Actions".