 Previous Section |
 Level Up |
 Next Section |
It is not enough to write dozens of words. To make a document text readable and easily understandable, you have to put it in a proper form. That means the visual appearance of the document should mirror its contents and ease the understanding of its structure.
The best way to get form into a document is by using so-called structuring elements such as headings, lists, tables etc. These elements are named paragraph styles in Word. If you use them to format your text you can afterwards easily adapt the overall visual appearance of your whole document by changing style options.
The other way of formatting is the direct text formatting. Most sighted people play too much with things such as changing fonts and font sizes, making parts of text bold, italic, underlined etc. Use these techniques rather sparingly! When you use them, try to be consistent using the same visual formatting for one and the same element of contents throughout the whole document. So if you start using italic font face to emphasize text, use the same font face in the whole document for this task.
A style is a pre-defined or user defined group of formatting options united under one common name which can be applied to a piece of text. Most of the time you use the 'normal' style to format text.
In a style, there are stored all formatting options of a paragraph or of a piece of text such as:
These are only few of the big amount of formatting options you can choose in Word.
To apply a style to a piece of text:
The best idea to get a structure in a text is to divide it into chapters, sections, subsections etc. Each of the sectioning parts starts with its heading - title.
There are 9 levels of pre-defined headings in Word. Each of them has a slightly different size and appearance. You should format the chapters with the highest level (heading 1), sections with the heading 2, subsections with the heading 3 etc. This way you have a clear hierarchical structure in your text which allows you to:
To quickly format a paragraph as a heading
For example to produce the heading 3 title press ALT+CONTROL+3.
To experiment with headings, please open the file 'Headings.doc' in your Accelerate Folder.
Use lists to format the enumeration of similar elements such as:
Word supports two kinds of lists:
The items of a bulleted list are marked by graphical symbols such as:
In the exercise file 'Lists.doc' in your Accelerate Folder you can find an example of a simple Word bulleted list.
It is also possible to make so-called multi-level lists. That means some items of a list are lists themselves. An embedded list uses different marking symbols and a higher level of indentation. See the corresponding example in the exercise file.
There are several ways to make a new bulleted list.
To make consecutive items in a list press ENTER once. With pressing ENTER twice you end the list.
As the name says, the items of an enumerated list are marked by consecutive numbers. Normally Arabic numbers are used, but you can choose between
1. Arabic numbers
2. Roman numerals
3. Small Latin letters or
4. Capital Latin letters.
There are several ways to make a new enumerated list.
To make consecutive items in a list press ENTER once. With pressing ENTER twice you end the list.
It is very easy to produce sub-lists in Word. Simply position the focus on the beginning of the list item which should be a sub list and press TAB. The item will get a deeper indentation and the bullet symbol or number format changes. You stay in the sub-list until you use SHIFT+TAB to go one level up.
Beside lists, tables are a very powerful way of visual presentation of data sets. For example, all spreadsheet programs work with tables.
Tables consist of cells organized in rows and columns. Each cell contains a data field. A row means a horizontal, a column a vertical grouping of cells.
Tables are a more compact way of visualizing various types of information about several objects of the same kind. One example for tables is the file/folder listing in the My Computer application formatted with the Details option of the View menu. It is a table with 5 columns and as many rows as files or folders are found in the currently viewed folder. Each column contains one specific type of information:
Date/time of the last modification
Each row of this table refers to exactly one file or folder showing up its name, size, type etc. The first table row is in this case the table header which indicates the information type for each cell in the corresponding column.
See the Details listing of the Accelerate Folder as a Word table in the file 'Tables.doc' in your Accelerate Folder. You find there also some exercise ideas.
To insert an empty table into the text:
Use the Table menu options also:
One very useful table tool is the Table Convert tool. You can use it to convert tables into text and vice versa.
If you want to very easily produce a table out of existing text, then make following steps:
The most important things when working with tables are moving between cells and selecting cells, rows and columns for further manipulation.
With TAB or SHIFT+TAB you move cell-by-cell forward or backward, selecting at the same time the whole contents of a cell. So use TAB and SHIFT+TAB to move through a row.
Attention! If you press TAB when the insertion mark is in the last cell of a row, it will be moved into the first cell of the next row. The same rule is also valid for SHIFT+TAB: If you use it in the first cell of a row, the insertion mark will be moved to the last cell of the previous row if any.
With UP and DOWN ARROW keys you move up and down cell-by-cell through a column.
For the long-distance movements through a table use the following shortcuts:
| To move the insertion mark | Use the shortcut |
|---|---|
| to the first cell in a row | ALT+HOME |
| to the last cell in a row | ALT+END |
| to the first cell in a column | ALT+PAGE UP |
| to the last cell in a column | ALT+PAGE DOWN |
To select one single cell, go to it with the TAB key.
To select a whole column or row:
For example, to select the first column of a table:
Click here to see a complete listing of table shortcuts!
After you made proper structuring of your document using Headings, Word has the ability to make a Table of Contents automatically. The entries in a Table of Contents are at the same time hyperlinks to the referred headings. That means that a left mouse button click on an entry in the Table of Contents will put the insertion mark exactly on the beginning of the corresponding section heading in the text.
To insert an automatic Table of Contents proceed as follows:
To see an example for a Table of Contents in Word and to do exercises, open the file 'Table of Contents.doc' in your Accelerate folder.
You can change the visual appearance of paragraphs, headings, lists, tables and all other styles throughout the whole document. This is the best way of formatting which guarantees the integrity of the document presentation. You have also the possibility to permanently store your style customizations for use in future documents saving them as document templates.
To customize the formatting of a style:
In Word you have of course also the possibility to set a piece of text in a different font, to make it bold or italic, or to change the size of letters in this region. Since these direct formatting actions in text don't unconditionally relate upon the document structure, I discourage you from using it. Go the other way using Word Styles and adjust these styles to fit some visual presentation options. By this means you can guarantee the integrity and the uniformity of your document using the same visual presentation for the same structure elements all the time.
Nevertheless you should know how to apply formatting options. You need this knowledge also for changing styles.
To see the examples of the direct visual formatting and to find some exercise ideas, open the file 'Direct formatting.doc' in the Accelerate folder.
The menu item Format (ALT+O) contains all formatting commands in Word. For the most important of them there are also buttons on the formatting tool bar and keyboard shortcuts available.
To apply a specific formatting such as a font, a font size, a paragraph alignment, etc. to a portion of text:
The following table contains only some of formatting keyboard shortcuts which should accelerate the work.
To format the selection as |
Use the shortcut keys |
|---|---|
centered |
CONTROL+E |
align left |
CONTROL+L |
align right |
CONTROL+R |
bold face |
CONTROL+SHIFT+B |
italic |
CONTROL+SHIFT+I |
Click here to see the complete list of formatting shortcuts.