Office 2013: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Editing and Formatting

Way back in prehistoric times, when cave-dwellers hunted woolly mammoths by day and then hunched over firelit typewriters at night to bash out their memoirs, editing text was a difficult chore. If you made a mistake, you had to get out the messy correction fluid and paint over it. If you wanted to move a paragraph or section, you had to insert a new piece of paper and type the document all over again from scratch. And forget about varying fonts with italics or boldface—that wasn’t going to happen on a typewriter.

Word processing has made life way easier for anyone who’s ever had the urge to put words on paper. And Word 2013 takes “easy” to a whole new level. You can format text in any font, size, or color; move words, sentences, paragraphs, and sections wherever you want them; and quickly search for, find, and replace words and phrases. This chapter shows you how to get your document looking the way you want it, whether you’re italicizing a single word, adding a header or footer, inserting a list, or formatting the entire document.

Selecting and Moving Text

First things first: you have to grab the text you want to move or change. The surefire, old-school way is by using your mouse. Position its pointer at the start of your selection and click. Keep holding down the mouse button, and drag the pointer over your selection. As you drag, Word highlights the text, as shown in Figure 3-1. When you’re finished dragging, let go of the mouse button.

Figure 3-1. As ...