Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Character Formatting

The Font panel of the Formatting Palette—the uppermost pane of the palette—deals mostly with the appearance of your letters, numbers, and other characters. You can also access most of these functions via the Formatting toolbar (choose View → Toolbars → Formatting if you don’t see it).

Choosing Fonts

Installing Office 2008 adds 126 fonts to your Library → Fonts folder—an unannounced gift from Microsoft.

To change the font of the text you’ve already typed, select the text first, using any of the methods described on The Many Ways to Select Text. If, instead, you choose a new font in the middle of a sentence or even the middle of a word, the new font will take effect with the next letter you type.

Now, open the Font menu or click the Name pop-up menu in the Formatting Palette’s Font pane to reveal your Mac’s typeface names in their own typefaces (Figure 3-2). This what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) font menu feature has a few interesting features, such as:

• If you have a very long list of fonts, you don’t have to scroll all the way down to, say, Zapf Chancery. Once the menu (or Formatting Palette pop-up list) is open, you can type the first letter or two of the target font. The menu shifts instantly to that alphabetical position in the font list.

  You can open the font list marginally faster if you don’t use the WYSIWYG fonts feature. Pressing Shift when opening the Font menu or Fonts list in the Formatting Palette lets you see all the fonts listed in plain type. Honestly, ...