Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Word Processing Basics

Once a document is onscreen, your administrative efforts are complete, and the creative phase can begin. While odds are good that you’ve processed words before, Chapter 2 covers the nuts and bolts of editing in detail.

As a reminder, here are the very, very basics of word processing:

• Don’t hit Return at the end of a line. Word automatically wraps the text to the next line when you reach the edge of the window.

• Don’t type hyphens to break end-of-line words, either. To divide words at the end of lines, use Word’s hyphenation feature, as described on Automatic Hyphenation.

• Press Return at the end of a paragraph. To create a blank line between paragraphs, don’t press Return twice; that can cause awkward problems, such as an extra space at the top of a page. Instead, change the paragraph’s style to leave more space after each paragraph, as described on Styles. Using this more advanced and graceful method also lets you edit, add, and subtract paragraphs at will. As you do so, the spacing between the paragraphs remains consistent.

• For similar reasons, don’t press Tab to indent the first line of a paragraph. If, instead, you set a first line indent using the Formatting Palette, as described on Indentation, Word automatically creates the indents each time you start a paragraph. Indents created this way remain consistent as you edit the document. In addition, the amount of indentation you choose isn’t dependent upon the positions of your tab stops.

• Don’t press Return at the ...