Text Formatting Basics

Microsoft Word offers a wide range of text formatting options that you can use to make your documents more interesting and readable. Most text formatting can be broken down into two types:

• Font or character formatting applies to individual characters of text. Examples include bold, italic, underline, and font color. The actual font or typeface used to display characters is also a part of font formatting.

• Paragraph formatting applies to entire paragraphs of text. Examples are indentation, justification, line spacing, bullets, and numbering.

This chapter introduces text formatting using basic formatting techniques. Chapter 4 continues the discussion of text formatting by covering advanced formatting techniques.

Tips

• When properly applied, formatting can make the document easier to read, as illustrated in Figures 1 and 2.

  Figure 1. A document with no formatting.

  
  
  

  Figure 2. The same document with font and paragraph formatting applied.

  
  
  

• Don't get carried away with formattingespecially font formatting. Too much formatting distracts the reader, making the document difficult to read.

• Page formatting, which enables you to format document pages or sections, is covered in Chapter 5.