Office 2007 Bible

The Big Picture

Word has four levels of formatting: character/font, paragraph, section, and document. Things such as bold, italic, points, and superscript are called character or font formatting and can be applied to as little as a single character. I’ll talk about the other levels of formatting in later chapters.

Personally, I don’t like the adjective “font” formatting, because most people—including me—think of fonts as things like Times New Roman, Arial, and Tahoma. For me, character formatting is a lot clearer and less confusing, but because Word has a Ribbon with this chunk (or group) called Font, as shown in Figure 5-1, we’re kind of stuck with that terminology. We’re all stuck with another term, too: text-level formatting, which really means the same thing as font and character formatting. It helps, however, to think in terms of character formatting, as a character is the smallest thing you can format in Word.

Figure 5-1. Much, but not all, character (or font) formatting is accessible from the Home tab’s Font group.

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Note

Okay. I lied. Technically, the smallest thing you can “format” is a point between two characters, but the word “format” is debatable. To split hairs, you can insert a bookmark at a point so that no characters are enclosed. Is that formatting? I don’t think so, but somebody else might.

Note also that the Font group on the Home tab does ...