Character And Paragraph Formatting In Word August 15, 2009
Posted by Interesting Stuff in : Sofware and Computers , comments closedMicrosoft Office Word 2007 is sometimes criticized by designers for not affording them the accuracy provided by DTP software such as InDesign and QuarkXpress. However, over the years, the features available for formatting text and paragraphs in Word have been gradually enhanced. Today, there are features to control just about every aspect of your text.
A key distinction is between character and paragraph formatting. Character formats can be applied to any text you care to select; anything from a single character upwards. Paragraph formats apply to entire paragraphs; a paragraph being any text between two carriage returns. A second distinction is the way in which text is formatted: manually or through the use of styles. Manual formatting, where you specify the formatting attributes you want to apply to your text one item at a time, is suitable for short documents; especially those which will not be repeated at some stage.
Styles are best used when creating longer documents. Here, text formatting is encapsulated into a series of named styles, each with its own associated series of formatting attributes. To format one’s text, one simply assigns a particular style to it. If the attributes associated with a particular style are modified, all of the text which has been formatted with that style is updated and inherits the new attributes.
If formatting is being done manually, character formats are obtained in the Font group of the Home Tab of the Word ribbon. Character formats include such attributes as the typeface, size and color. Paragraph formats are found in the Paragraph group of the same Tab and include such attributes as the space between paragraphs, alignment and indentation.
If you decide to take the styles route for formatting, you can use Word’s built-in styles, your own styles or a combination of both. Here too, there is a distinction between character styles and paragraph styles. However, it is important to note that while character styles include only character attributes, paragraph styles include both character and paragraph attributes. Paragraph styles are used far more frequently than character styles and most people will be happy to use Word’s built-in styles (especially “Heading 1″, “Heading 2″ etc.) rather than reinventing the wheel and creating their own. The good thing about these styles is that you can modify the attributes associated with them simply by right-clicking on the name of a style and choosing “Modify”.
Character styles are not used that often but they can be quite handy. Suppose you are creating a promotional document about a service offered by your company and you want the name of the service to stand out wherever it occurs. No problem: simply create a character style and use it to format the text in question. If you are doing this as an afterthought, MS Word will even allow you to use the Replace command to apply the formatting.
You can learn more about Word formatting features on our Microsoft Word 2007 training courses.