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One of the easiest ways to make your document look professional is to format the text within it. After all, most Word documents are largely made up of text. So this is where you can make the biggest difference. As such, it’s important to know the different options available. And how to apply basic text formatting in Word.
What is basic text formatting in Word?
Basic text formatting is often referred to as direct formatting. It’s formatting that you apply directly to text, as opposed to using a style.
I recommend using styles to format text wherever you can. And then applying basic text formatting where you need to. This could be, for example, where you’d like to apply bold font to text. I’ll take you through an example of how to do this below.
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What are the font attributes you can change?
There are several font attributes you can change. But changing the font type and size is the best way to change the overall look of your document.
This is again best done by using text styles in your document. And then modifying the styles to change the font type and size. That way, it’s easier to apply the change to all text in your document. You can choose to change heading styles, body text styles, or both.
Then you can apply or change font attributes to add emphasis to specific text in your document. Attributes include:
- Text style – whether text is regular, bold, italics, or bold italics;
- Text colour – automatic (or black) is generally used for body text. Otherwise, there’s a range of colours you can choose from the colour palette;
- Underline style and colour;
- Small caps and all caps – both work with capitalisation of text.
What are the paragraph attributes you can change?
Following are the paragraph attributes you can use to format text in your document:
- Alignment – whether text is aligned to the left, right or centre, or justified;
- Indentation – how far text sits in from either the left and/or right margins;
- Paragraph spacing – how much space appears between paragraphs;
- Line spacing – how much space appears between lines within a paragraph.
Example of how to bold text in Microsoft Word
The process to apply basic text formatting is fairly straightforward. But as an example, let’s look at how to bold text in a Microsoft Word document.
- Select the text
Use the mouse or keyboard to select the text you’d like to format with bold text. - Navigate to the Home tab of the ribbon
This is where you’ll find all the direct formatting options for text. They’re located in the Font and Paragraph groups. You can also open the dialogue box for either of these groups using the relevant dialogue box launcher. - Apply bold formatting
Click the Bold button (Home > Font).
- Repeat the process (if required)
Repeat the process for other text in your document you’d like to apply bold formatting to.
Otherwise, you can use this shortcut. Or copy and paste the formatting using Word’s Format Painter.
