Office 2013 In Depth

Understanding Document Formatting

The overall look of your document depends on different types of attributes and layout settings, which many Word users lump together under the general term of formatting. However, text or character formatting relates to how the characters look (settings such as bold, 14 point, and red), whereas paragraph formatting is concerned with line spacing, indents, borders, alignment, and so on. Other document layout settings, such as margins, columns, and page orientation, fall under the Page Layout settings. So when you create documents in Word, you must understand that although they are distinctly different in how they are applied to the document and how they change the document, the character formatting, paragraph formatting, ...