5 Killer MS Word Formatting Tips

Posted on September 2, 2008 at 5:39 am

1. Use Themes. For folks who want to focus on the look and feel before the actual content of their Word document, themes are best for this purpose. It sets the format of the fonts from the header to the bullets as well as the background graphic and colors. Using themes also save you time from making your own color combination. To use themes, click the Format menu and then Theme:

You should see the window where you could choose from several predefined themes:

There are more MS Word themes available online so if you have the time, go and search for them on the Microsoft website and also from other non-MS sites. You should be able to find good ones for free. Themes are very useful for making easy to maintain good looking web sites too. In addition to Themes, you can also download free Microsoft Word Templates for great looking documents.

Note: You can save Word files as HTML files. Make sure to test your HTML files on popular non-MS web browser software like Mozilla Firefox and Opera – there could be some incompatibility issues that you will see since MS has their own way of doing things.

2. Another essential time saving feature of the Theme window is the Style Gallery wherein you can choose from different professionally designed document templates. On the Theme window, click Style Gallery:

You should see the Style Gallery wherein you can choose from several templates:

The chosen template style will take effect once you clicked OK. This makes sure that the document you write is formatted correctly based from the preset templates. Also, check out my previous post on how to use AutoText and AutoCorrect in MS Word.

3. To simulate a newspaper like column in your document, use the columns to split your document into columns (don’t use tables for this task!). Under Format, click Columns:

Choose the number of columns:

The output will be like below:

3. Use auto-format to properly format quotes, ordinals and fractions. On Format menu, choose AutoFormat:

You should see the AutoFormat tab with all of the predefined rules it could apply to your current document:

If you agree to the “replace” rules, leave them all check. Otherwise uncheck them before hitting OK to apply the changes.

4. There could many times that you apply several types of formatting to different parts of your document. Sometimes it is hard to visually determine if you did the exact format on two items that you want to be the same. The first paragraph could be size 11 and the next could be size 12, or the indention spaces could be not the same. To help you with this task, point your cursor to the part that you want to see the format then click Reveal Formatting (under the Format menu). You should see the Reveal formatting panel at the right hand side with the information containing the font, alignment and indention:

If you click another portion of the document, that part’s formatting should appear on the Reveal Formatting panel.

5. The last tip will be about fonts. Fonts are essentially both the look and the message of your magnum opus.

A couple of font trivia from the top of my head:

1. Barack Obama is using a single main font, which is widely talked about on the Net.

2. The font of the logo of the PS3 is Spiderman which caused a lot of buzz among font critics. Here is one site discussing this topic.

You have probably known how to set the font type by now so we will focus on some other aspects like effects. To open the Font window, click Format > Font:

The effects are all applicable by checking the corresponding box beside it. It is also smart enough not to allow users to enter conflicting options like enabling “Small caps” and “All caps” at the same time. The selected effects will be seen on the Preview at lower part of the window.

Another useful formatting option is the Character Spacing wherein you can scale the spacing within each character. The effect is like stretching the text on a horizontal direction:

The Text Effects tab in the meantime allows you to add blinking effects from a couple of predefined options:

That pretty much covers what you can do with the fonts in Word. The last tip I would like to share is when choosing fonts, consider it’s compatibility with the printer. If you notice that the appearance of the hardcopy (i.e. printed document) is not the same as the font on the computer screen then it could probably be that you’re using a non-TrueType font. You could verify this by opening the font window and looking at the line at the bottom, you should see if it as one of the following type:

If you used a scalable printer font, try choosing a TrueType font and see if it fixes your problem. To know more about the history of scalable and TrueType fonts (AKA the font wars) I suggest that you read this informative article from webopedia.com. If you can’t get the look you want by using effects, you can read my article on how to create your own fonts. If you see a font online and don’t know what it is, you can read this article on how to identify unknown fonts.

I am sure our more savvy readers have more formatting tips that they can share with us. Feel free to post them on the comments section! Also, check out some of my other articles on Word, such as essential MS Word shortcuts and how to hide text in Word.

Ben Carigtan writes about computers, technology and how to get the best out of them.

» Filed Under MS Office Tips

Comments

One Response to “5 Killer MS Word Formatting Tips”

Yusuf said on : September 2nd, 2008 at 2:04 pm

My favorite tip:

To increase font size Ctrl + “]”

To decrease font size Ctrl + “[”

Line spacing:

Ctrl + “1″ single line spacing

Ctrl + “5″ 1.5 line spacing

Ctrl + “2″ double line spacing