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An quick overview of formatting in MS Word, with emphasis on Character and Paragraph level formatting.
CONTENTS
One of the most basic things you do when word-processing is to format text. In Word, formatting is classified as falling into one of three types or levels:
Types of Word formattingFont (or Character) level formatting Paragraph level formatting Section level formatting [some folks also include formatting at the Document level ] |
In this tutorial we’ll focus on Character and Paragraph formatting since these are most relevant to styles.
Formatting that affects the look of individual characters is called Character or Font formatting.
Each character in a Word document can be given a different Font format.
Font formatting includes
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Characters are the building blocks, the individual bricks that, heaped together, compose a whole document.
The Font Dialog (available on the menu bar under Format, Font... ) summarizes the kinds of formatting that fall under category “Character Formatting”:
Figure A: The Font Dialog
The distinguishing characteristic of Character Formatting is that you apply it only to selected strings of characters. That is, you can apply Character Formatting to as little as one individual character in a document.
Paragraph Formatting affects at the very least a whole paragraph. (Recall that a paragraph is all the text bounded by a P mark.)
Paragraph formatting encompasses the things you do to affect the blocks we call Paragraphs, such as Alignment (Left, Center, Right, Full) and Line Spacing (single, double, etc). The full gamut of Paragraph Formatting possibilities includes:
Paragraph formatting includes
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The Paragraph Dialog (available on the menu bar under Format, Paragraph... ) summarizes most of the kinds of formatting that fall under category “Paragraph Formatting”:
Figure B: The Paragraph Dialog
Remember:
A major difference between
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When working with Word styles, it’s useful to keep in mind this categorization of formatting into Levels. The Font and Paragraph Dialog boxes remind you of this. And more importantly, the behavior of Paragraph and Character styles parallel this division of formatting into levels.
With this brief overview of Word formatting, we’re now ready to return to the main subject of these tutorials: Styles. And in particular, the subject of Tutorial 3, Paragraph Styles.
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