Applying Paragraph Formatting Directly

Paragraph formatting affects the appearance of entire paragraphs. Generally, you should format your paragraphs by applying appropriate styles. Doing so will make the formatting easier to modify and will enhance its uniformity. (If you don't have a suitable style for a particular type of paragraph, you can modify an existing style or define a new one, as explained in Chapter 8.) However, you might want to directly apply paragraph formatting to make an occasional adjustment to the appearance of a paragraph. For example, you might want to center a specific paragraph or increase its left indent. (If you make the same adjustment often, you should consider defining a new style that you can apply.)

Directly applied paragraph formatting overrides that specified by the paragraph's style. Note that even if you seldom apply paragraph formatting directly, you'll need to understand the techniques and concepts given here when you begin defining your own paragraph styles in Chapter 8.

The paragraph formatting that you can apply directly belongs to the last four formatting categories listed in Table 7-4 —that is, Indents, Spacing, and Breaks, Tabs, Borders and Shading, and Bullets and Numbering. In this chapter, you'll learn how to directly apply formatting belonging to the Indents, Spacing, and Breaks category of paragraph formatting—that is, the formatting, described in Table 7-8, that you can apply by using the Paragraph dialog box. The other three categories are discussed in Chapter 9. (Note that borders and shading can be applied either as a character format to one or more characters or as a paragraph format to one or more entire paragraphs.)

Table 7-8. Indents, Spacing, and Breaks Paragraph Formatting That You Can Apply Directly

Paragraph Formatting Option	Description
Indents And Spacing
Alignment	Justification of the paragraph text: Left (text aligned with left indent); Right (aligned with right indent); Centered (centered between left and right indents); Justified (aligned with both indents).
Indentation	Horizontal position of the paragraph text relative to document margins.
Spacing Before	Additional space inserted above the paragraph.
Spacing After	Additional space inserted below the paragraph.
Line Spacing	Height of each line of text in the paragraph—for example, single or double spacing, or an exact line height.
Line And Page Breaks
Widow/Orphan Control	Prevents printing the last line of the paragraph by itself at the top of a new page (a widow), or printing the first line by itself at the bottom of a page (an orphan).
Keep Lines Together	All lines in the paragraph will be printed on the same page— that is, Word will not insert a page break within the paragraph.
Keep With Next	Prevents Word from inserting a page break between the paragraph and the next paragraph.
Page Break Before	The paragraph is printed at the top of a new page.
Suppress Line Numbers	If you apply line numbering to the document, the paragraph is excluded from numbering. (See "Adjusting the Page Layout")
Don't Hyphenate	If you hyphenate the document, the paragraph is excluded from hyphenation. (See "Hyphenating Your Documents")

The following are the two basic steps for directly applying paragraph formatting:

1. To format a single paragraph, place the insertion point anywhere within the paragraph, or select all or part of the paragraph. To format several adjoining paragraphs, select at least a portion of each of the paragraphs.
2. Open the Paragraph dialog box by choosing Paragraph from the Format menu, and then select the desired formatting. Alternatively, you can apply certain paragraph formatting by pressing a shortcut key combination or by using the Formatting toolbar or the ruler. These three methods are discussed individually in the following three sections.

To remove directly applied paragraph formatting and restore the paragraph formatting that is specified by the paragraph's style, select the paragraph or paragraphs as described in step 1, and then press Ctrl+Q.

SEE ALSO

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For information about finding and replacing character formatting, see "Finding and Replacing Text".

Using the Paragraph Dialog Box

You can apply any of the formatting described in Table 7-9, by using the Paragraph dialog box. To open this dialog box, choose Paragraph from the Format menu, or right-click within the selected text, and then choose Paragraph from the pop-up menu that appears. Figure 7-12, shows the Indents And Spacing tab of the Paragraph dialog box, and Figure 7-13 shows the Line And Page Breaks tab. As with the Font dialog box, choosing formatting attributes in the Paragraph dialog box is easy because Word displays a text example formatted with the selected attributes.

NOTE

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Outline Level paragraph formatting (which you set on the Indents And Spacing tab of the Paragraph dialog box) is discussed in "Using Outline View".

Figure 7-12. The Indents And Spacing tab of the Paragraph dialog box.

Figure 7-13. The Line And Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog box.

The left paragraph indent is the distance that the left edge of the paragraph text is moved in from the left margin area (a positive indent) or out into the left margin area (a negative indent). Likewise, the right paragraph indent is the distance the right edge of the text is moved in from the right margin area (a positive indent) or out into the right margin area (a negative indent). The margins are the distances between the text and the edges of the page when the indents are set to 0. You set the margins when you adjust the page setup, as described in Chapter 11. The easiest way to learn how to use the various indentation settings is to change the values and observe the effects on the preview text.

SEE ALSO

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For instructions on setting the document margins and a description of the difference between margins and indents, see "Adjusting the Page Setup".