2007 Microsoft® Office System Step by Step

Manually Changing the Look of Paragraphs

As you know, you create a paragraph by typing text and then pressing the Enter key. The paragraph can be a single word, a single sentence, or multiple sentences. You can change the look of a paragraph by changing its alignment, its line spacing, and the space before and after it. You can also put borders around it and shade its background. Collectively, the settings you use to vary the look of a paragraph are called paragraph formatting.

In Word, you don’t define the width of paragraphs and the length of pages by defining the area occupied by the text; instead you define the size of the white space—the left, right, top, and bottom margins—around the text. You use the Margins button in the Page Setup group ...