style

Sometimes bulleted lists are difficult to read. When bullet items have more than two lines of text (which frequently happens when writing instructions), it would be nice to have bullets that are have more space between them. I find that as I age my ... ability to read items that are close together is lacking. One way is to enter a bullet item, press enter (to go to the next bullet item), then press enter again, enter the text for the bullet item, and then return to the extra bullet and pressing Backspace to remove it. That seems like quite a few key strokes don't you think? A better solution ... (view more)

In MS Word, the headings in an outline are automatically formatted with the styles Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on. What if you don't like the appearance of the style? You may want the Heading 1 styles to be centered, in a different font, or with a ... border or shading. You may want the Heading 3 to be in Verdana rather than Times New Roman. Whatever your preferences might be, you can make a single formatting change, and all the text using that style will immediately be reformatted. To begin, modify the style so that every heading with that style will reflect the new format. This ensures that ... (view more)

To use one of the fill effects options, choose Format | Background, click the drop-down list, and then click Fill Effects. When the dialog box appears, you can choose between four possible background types. To apply a gradient background, follow the ... steps below: Click the Gradient tab. The Fill Effects dialog box now includes the options that are available for applying a gradient background. You can now select one of the options that are described after step 2. After you have chosen a fill option for your presentation, click OK to return to the Background dialog box. From there, you can: ... (view more)

You can use the Clear Formatting command to remove formatting and styles from text in MS Word. When you remove all formatting and styles from text, it adopts the attributes of the Normal style. You can remove formatting and styles from a single ... instance or from all instances of that formatting or style. Clear Formatting command appears at the top of the Pick formatting to apply list in the Styles and Formatting task pane whenever the Show option is set to Available formatting, Formatting in use or Available styles. Since the Normal style is a paragraph style, all font, paragraph, tab, border ... (view more)

In a well designed style-based document, few, if any, paragraphs are actually left in the Normal style. Since most paragraphs have a specific role to play in a document, they should be formatted with the appropriate style. Normal style is typically ... reserved for paragraphs with unique or ad hoc formatting. Normal style's main role is to hold the document's basic formatting, particularly the document's base font. That way, if you need to change the base font, you need only to change the Normal style. Once Normal is changed, other styles based on Normal will change as well. Changing the Document ... (view more)

After your document is finally finished and formatted just the way you wanted, you often have to send it to another person who is collaborating with you on the document. When it comes back to you, sometimes it doesn't have the same formatting as ... when you last saved it. If a document comes to you single spaced with no line spacing between the paragraphs, rather than clicking at the end of each paragraph and pressing [Enter], you can add line spacing to the entire document in two easy steps: Press Ctrl+A. Press Ctrl+0 (zero). MS Word adds a 12-point line space before each paragraph, which is ... (view more)

Sometimes you may want MS Word to place a tab character in your footnotes -- for example: between the actual footnote reference number and the text of the footnote. Unfortunately, Word doesn't allow you to do this automatically. In fact, Word ... doesn't even allow you to specify what character should appear between the footnote reference number and the footnote text, as you can with numbered lists. Instead, Word places a space between the footnote reference and you text. There are a number of ways you can go about making sure that the footnote includes a tab separator. Please note though that ... (view more)

Have you ever tried to modify a block of text in MS Word that refuses to comply to your editing? Here's a really useful tip: you can 'start with a clean slate' by removing *all* formatting from the paragraph selection; simply select the block of ... text and press Ctrl-Shift-N to start fresh. Alternatively, you can use Word's Reveal Formatting task pane to modify the formatting. In Word 2003, hit Shift-F1; in Word 2002, select Reveal Formatting from the Format menu. When you click on an underlined link, an options dialog will display settings that you can modify. By checking the Distinguish style ... (view more)