The appearance of your document helps convey not only the document’s message but also information about the document’s creator: you. A neatly organized document that contains consistently formatted content and appropriate graphic elements, and that doesn’t contain spelling or grammatical errors, invokes greater confidence in your ability to provide any product or service. Earlier in this chapter, you learned about methods of applying formatting to paragraphs. This topic covers methods of formatting the text of a document. Formatting that you apply to text is referred to as character formatting. In Word documents, you can apply three types of character formatting:
When you enter text in a document, it is displayed in a specific font. By default, the font used for text in a new blank document is 11-point Calibri, However, you can change the font of any text element at any time. The available fonts vary from one computer to another, depending on the apps installed. Common fonts include Arial, Verdana, and Times New Roman. You can vary the look of a font by changing the following attributes:
Although some attributes might cancel each other out, they are usually cumulative. For example, you might use a bold font style in various sizes and colors to make words stand out in a newsletter. You apply character formatting from one of three locations:
In addition to applying character formatting to change the look of characters, you can apply predefined text effects (sometimes referred to as WordArt) to a selection to add more zing. The available effects match the current theme colors.
You can apply any predefined effect in the gallery or define a custom effect These effects are somewhat dramatic, so you’ll probably want to restrict their use to document titles and similar elements to which you want to draw particular attention. To change the font of selected text
To change the font size of selected text
To format selected text as bold, italic, or underlined
To cross out selected text by drawing a line through it
To display superscript or subscript characters
To apply artistic effects to selected text
To change the font color of selected text
To change the case of selected text
To highlight text
Or
To copy formatting to other text
To repeat the previous formatting command
To open the Font dialog box
To remove character formatting
To change the character spacing
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