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Markup that controls display of objects on a page

You can control how structural layer objects are presented, either as individual objects, or as a single object with shared properties.

Use The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie to practice things today. Open it and save it as a document on your client. It has already been set up for formatting (the original source text is available online).

Suggestion:

Don't try to format your text before you type a document.

You will find it easier in the long run to simply type your document and then format it all at once after you have entered your text. We'll look at examples.

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Breaks

Why might you want to insert page or section breaks?

A page break is pretty self explanatory - it causes the printer to generate a new page at the point of the break.

A section is a part of a document that has a specified number of columns and uses a common set of margins, page orientation, headers and footers, and sequence of page numbers. A section break thus will allow you to do different formatting in each section. This will be very useful when you combine it with headers and footers.

Types of breaks

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Headers and Footers

To quote Microsoft on it:

Headers and footers not only make your work look more professional; they prevent confusion and help readers to keep their bearings inside your document. Remember, people don't necessarily read a report or paper from front to back -- they flip ahead to the parts that interest them, and even extract and photocopy sections as it suits their needs. By setting Word to automatically add elements like page numbers, section titles, date, and author name, you ensure that each page bears the essential information that situates it within the whole of your document.

Remember, you defined where this header and footer would be when you did page setup. You can now change it from the Header/Footer taskbar. You need to format the header/footer to suit your document (influenced by themes). Make the header look like what you want it to look like by using table borders and fills to add color and distinction.

Because you have sections, you can format headers by section and have them display in conjunction with the needs of the document's section.

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Styles are a form of CSS

Use the styles sidebar to see the styles in use in the document or all the ways you have to format text within this document. You can create new styles or modify existing styles. Once the style is applied, it will remain constant unless you modify it again

You can directly access styles from the formatting toolbar.

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The key thing about Styles

They mark up your text so that you can use tools to find, manipulate, or operate with them.

They may make the object look different, or they may just make its properties behave differently. Your styles sidebar is the tool to use to change your style properties, just as you might have done when you modified a style in your CSS sheet.

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Styles and their uses

The styles and formatting sidebar allows you to control and modify all the styles in your document

When you make changes in the sidebar, you can make changes to your Style Sheet that affect all instances of the style. You can thus make document level style modifications. However, you can also apply the style changes only to one instance of the style in the document, and thus make a line level style modification.

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Templates

Templates set up a document for you, allowing you to place your text into the pre-set locations already formatted for style

They can be useful and can be modified to suit your particular needs. Every document you create in MSWord is based on some template (usually normal.dot) and every template has an associated document-level stylesheet incorporated in it. You can change any or all of the styles in any template by using your style tools and you can create templates tailored to your needs.

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Themes

... shows you the various groups of styles you can apply to your document, but is primarily to set the style for a Word-created web page.

Suggestion:

Select a theme that fits most of your needs and aesthetic preferences, and then modify the individual styles in the theme to custom-tailor it to your particular look.

This will be akin to the modification you did in CSS.

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Styles and templates apply CSS-like presentation layer instructions to any structural layer object contained in the document. Those objects include, among others, things such as

• paragraph objects - how the text relates to the page and to other paragraph objects
• font objects - how the letters look

One may, however, deal individually with the paragraph object and with the font object, either as a single object with a single set of properties or as individual objects, each with individual sets of properties.

Paragraph formatting

Indents and Spacing

Control how each paragraph behaves.

Alignment

One could use the formatting task bar, but this makes everything behave the same.

Outline level

If you want to use the outline tool, but don't want to change the look of the levels in use.

Indentation

Control the shape of the space in which the paragraph displays.

Spacing

control the separation between lines and between blocks of text. Automatic is useful.

Tabs

Another way to reach the tab control box. Define how you want your tabs to behave.

Line and Page Breaks

This can cause some stress.

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Text formatting - Fonts

You may hear that serif fonts are more readable than sans serif fonts. That may not be a valid scientific assessment.

Color

Customize as needed.

Underline

select underline from the formatting panel, or via the CTRL+U keyboard shortcut, but here is where you define the underline style.

Effects

strikethrough is better handled with Track Changes tool (in MSWord).

Superscript and subscript are useful for math work.

Shadow, Outline, Emboss, and Engrave are not too useful in print, but very useful for web applications.

Hidden text is tricky.

Default

Can change the built-in standard. Be careful.

Character Spacing

Useful for making things fit in a defined or confined space.

Text Effects

Not too useful for print, but may have some utility if you are sharing electronic versions of documents.

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Symbols (special font sets)

Useful for creating attentional focus or for adding non-English Çhä®âctérß to your text. Try with dropped cap for dramatic paragraph openings. If you are going to use a lot of them, create your own keyboard shortcuts.

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Special formatting

Borders and Shading

Useful for highlighting selected parts of text or for special purposes such as funeral notices or condolence letters.

Columns

A way to format all at once. More useful for publishing than for normal documents.

Drop Cap

A way to put some polish into your output.

Change case

Use the ? feature to understand your options.

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Page numbering

If you use headers and footers,

you can do numbering as part of those sections.

If you do not, this will create headers and footers with page numbers for you

Format including chapter numbers involves text formatting.

Page numbering done from the standard toolbar can end up fighting with page numbering done from the footer toolbar, so it's a good idea to decide which tool you want to use to number your pages.

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Footnotes

Choose either a footnote or an endnote and customize how they will display.

Use Normal view to see footnotes/endnotes as you work with text.

Use the browse tool on lower right corner of screen to browse the document by footnote/endnote.

Moving cursor over footnote reference in text brings up the footnote in a bubble window. Footnotes move with their mark in the text

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Other resources

• Word.Templates
• Word.Page Numbering

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