Chapter 8: Aligning Information and Formatting Paragraphs and Lists

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Overview

Professional-looking documents rely on accurate content alignment and styling—no matter how avant-garde a document's layout happens to be. Typesetters and layout artists have long recognized that effectively aligning page elements plays a large role in increasing a document's readability and "keeping the reader's eye on the page." Even people untrained in design can quickly see that "something's wrong" when they view a page that's been slapped together without regard to formatting and alignment. Therefore, when you work in Word, you should give serious thought to formatting and aligning document elements. If you learn to use Word formatting and alignment tools effectively—maybe even automatically—you'll be able to seamlessly integrate design tasks throughout the document creation process.

In this chapter, we look at formatting and alignment commands associated with a single type of element: paragraphs. And because a list is basically a series of paragraphs, we cover lists here as well. Now, paragraph formatting and alignment isn't as narrow a topic as it might sound at first. As a Word veteran, you probably know (or can intuit) that Word addresses document formatting and layout issues on three levels: character, paragraph, and section (or page). Character formatting issues include applying font styles and attributes (as discussed in Chapter 2, "Mastering Document Fundamentals," and Chapter 9, "Using Styles to Increase Your Formatting Power"). At the other end of the formatting spectrum, section formatting options control margins, headers, footers, gutters, and other page setup configurations (as covered in Chapter 15, "Mastering Page Setup and Pagination"). Paragraph formatting represents the middle ground of document formatting and alignment. Clearly, paragraph issues aren't as narrowly focused as character formatting tasks, and they aren't as encompassing as section setup commands. But don't let paragraph formatting's midlevel classification fool you—working with paragraphs is one of the most fundamental and essential skills you need to master to use Word effectively.

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