Formatting a document

In this exercise, you will be formatting these instructions; as it stands they look dull and lifeless. When you have finished they will leap off the page. Well maybe not. But some of the things you will do here should save time and effort and make your work more impactful.

The ‘score your work’ button is at the end of the document, and you can check you progress periodically as you work through the exercise.

Keyboard shortcuts

Some people are huge fans of keyboard shortcuts; I’m not one, but there are some that even I must admit are very useful. First, you can use the keyboard to quickly add emphasis. For example, highlight the word ’bold’ in this sentence by double clicking on it and then press control + b (often abbreviated as ^b, ^ for the control key).

The same applies to underlining and italicizing words. Highlight the word ’underline’ and then press control + u (abbreviated as ^u). Finally, highlight the word ’italics’ and then press ^i. These are ‘toggle’ operations which means that if you were to select the word you’ve just emboldened, and press ^b again it will go back to normal text. The same applies to underlining and italicizing.

If you have applied some formatting to a paragraph – for example you’ve made this entire paragraph a heading and want to make it a normal paragraph again, you have two options. One is the trusty ^z which simply undoes your last action. Highlight this entire sentence and press ^b. Then press ^z to undo your formatting operation.

However, if you formatted the text a while ago, you’d have to ^z all the operations you took since which is a) time consuming and b) undoes a lot of stuff you may want to keep. So instead, place your cursor somewhere inside the paragraph and press Shift ^n. This only works for styles and not for character formatting operations.

Another useful shortcut is ^ or control + enter. This inserts a page break so that the text after this starts at the top of a new page. When you get to the end of this document, and have created the table of contents, insert a page break so that the table of contents is on its own page.

Headings

Headings are also really important, not only because they help the reader see how you have organized your writing, but also because there are tools like automatic table of contents generation that for longer documents saves you a huge amount of work. Make “Formatting a document” at the top of the page a level 1 heading (this is the highest level heading), and the heading (“Heading”) above this paragraph a level 2 heading. Apply level 2 headings to all the remaining headings in the document.

Laying out your text

My pet peeve: spaces. If you want the next sentence to appear towards the right side of the page you have a number of options.

Inserting spaces in front of the text like this is NOT one of them.

You can use multiple tab characters instead of multiple spaces but that’s only marginally less lazy. The proper way to use table is to set them at the distances across the page you want and then tab from one column to the next. Delete the spaces in from the text in the paragraph above, and use the ruler to set a single left tab at 2 inches; then insert a tab before the text (where the spaces were that you removed).

You can right align the paragraph (do it to this one).

Or, you can insert a table with two columns and place this text in the right hand column. You can put the table at the start of the sentence or at the end – it doesn’t matter since you’ll be moving the text in this paragraph inside the table anyway.

Once you’ve created a table, highlight the text, the previous paragraph, to be moved inside it. Now you can either drag it into the right hand column of your newly created table, or you can cut (^c) the text, place the cursor inside the table at the point you want to inset the text, and then paste (^v).

Now hover the mouse over the top left corner of the table (you will see a small blue box appear with two crossed double headed arrows inside) and right click to activate the context menu. Select borders and shading and remove all the borders (use None on the left side of the dialog box) from the table.

Lists

1. This is an item in a numbered list, but it’s been done by hand. That’s bad because if you add a point in the middle you’ll have to renumber the entire list. Make this sentence the second point in the list and the next one the third.

2. Now make all three items part of a proper numbered list (that is one ‘managed’ by Word) by choosing the appropriate icon from the ribbon.

2.a. You can make items nested; .i.e., create sub-items in a list

2.b. This would be the second sub-item under item 3 in the list

The easiest way to make items ‘nest ‘ one level down is to place the cursor at the very beginning of the line in a list item and hit the tab key. This will demote the list item. Similarly, placing the cursor at the beginning of the line in a sub-lie and hitting shift tab will promote the item; in other words bring it back as an equal member of the higher level list rather than a sub category. Make the last two items in the list sub-categories of the item above them.

Checking your spelling and your grammer.

The line above us underlined with a wavy line that is mostly green with patches of red. Green means you have a grammatical error, red a spelling error. Start with the spelling: right click on the misspelled words and select the appropriate replacements. The grammatical error is subtle. There is a period at the end of the sentence which makes Word think this is a sentence, not a heading. Word also spots when you have inserted two spaces between words rather than one. You won’t get a point on this step until you actually run the spell check.

In some cases, you may want to justify the text. All the paragraphs in this document are currently left justified with a ‘ragged right’ (which means that the right hand ends of lines don’t all line up neatly). Make the two paragraphs under this heading fully justified.

Footnotes

Some things are better added as footnotes. Footnotes enable you to add slightly tangential information that is not essential to the line of reasoning in your text—indeed its inclusion might detract from the flow of your argument—but you think is worth mentioning. Take the text between the dashes in the previous sentence and make it a footnote in the place from which you removed it.

Headers (and footers)

If you want some piece of text to appear at the top of the every page (for example ‘Highly Confidential’) you must place this in the header (or the footer if it’s to appear at the bottom of each page. Place the text ‘Highly Confidential’ in the header.

One really useful things to put on each page (either in the header of the footer) is a page number. Do it now; put a page number at the bottom of each page. Make it “Page n of N” where n is the page number and N is the total number of pages in the document.

Images and text flow

Word isn’t as good as some programs for doing creative page layouts, but it does have some features that are worth exploring. Here we’re going to ‘flow’ some text around the image, once we’ve made it smaller.

Reduce its size to 3 inches in width. Apply a shadow to the image so that the image appears to float over the page. In Word 2007 “Drop Shadow Rectangle” preset is ideal. Finally wrap the text around it (‘square’ or ‘tight’) so that the picture appears under the heading by this text appears to the right of the image. You will need to click on the image and move it up and down on the page to get it in the right place relative to the text and the headings.

Table of contents

Finally, add a table of contents below this paragraph using the Reference tab in the ribbon and the table of contents button. Now insert a page break right before your newly created table of contents.