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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Basic Word Processing

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It happens millions of times a day. Someone sits down at a computer, opens Microsoft Word, and starts typing. When he wants to start a new paragraph, he hits Return a couple of times and keeps going. When he's done, he clicks the Print button and voila!—a page of text that's perfectly fine for handing out at a meeting or posting on a bulletin board.

Of course, if that were the extent of your Office X ambitions, you wouldn't be reading a book about it. As you'll discover later in this book, Word X offers a staggering array of advanced features that were once found only in page layout programs and graphics software (not to mention space shuttles).

These first three chapters (all 140 pages of them), however, cover the basics: how to start a document, type into and format the document, print it, and, finally, save it all. These may sound like standard Mac techniques, no different from TextEdit or SimpleText and not worth rehashing. But as you'll soon discover, Microsoft has its own, greatly enhanced idea of the Macintosh Way.

The first thing you see when you initially launch Word is the Project Gallery (see Figure 1-1), where you indicate what kind of document you wish to create.

Figure 1-1: The Project Gallery opens automatically when you first launch Word. When you wish to open another new document, just open the Project Gallery again by choosing File→Project Gallery or pressing Shift--P. Back left: The List view (use the lower-left pop-up menu) offers a better overview than the Catalog view and saves you some scrolling. Right: The Catalog view.

If your reply is, "Well, duh—a word processing document!" then you must still be under the impression that Word is a word processor, which it stopped being some time in 1752.

The Project Gallery is proof. The icons in this window represent the kinds of documents Office X (not just Word) can create for you. (Use the scroll bar to see all of them.) They're canned templates for mailing labels, résumés, budgets, brochures, fax cover letters, and dozens of others—even Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage documents like spreadsheets and blank email messages. The idea is that you can use Word as the launching point for your entire Office X experience, without having to know ahead of time which of the four Office applications is most appropriate for creating the document you want.

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New, Open, and the Project Gallery

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The first thing you see when you initially launch Word is the Project Gallery (see Figure 1-1), where you indicate what kind of document you wish to create.

Figure 1-1: The Project Gallery opens automatically when you first launch Word. When you wish to open another new document, just open the Project Gallery again by choosing File→Project Gallery or pressing Shift--P. Back left: The List view (use the lower-left pop-up menu) offers a better overview than the Catalog view and saves you some scrolling. Right: The Catalog view.

If your reply is, "Well, duh—a word processing document!" then you must still be under the impression that Word is a word processor, which it stopped being some time in 1752.

The Project Gallery is proof. The icons in this window represent the kinds of documents Office X (not just Word) can create for you. (Use the scroll bar to see all of them.) They're canned templates for mailing labels, résumés, budgets, brochures, fax cover letters, and dozens of others—even Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage documents like spreadsheets and blank email messages. The idea is that you can use Word as the launching point for your entire Office X experience, without having to know ahead of time which of the four Office applications is most appropriate for creating the document you want.

If you'd rather not visit the Project Gallery every time you launch Word, simply turn off "Show Project Gallery at startup." You can also choose Word→Preferences, click the General button (in the list at left) and turn "Show Project Gallery at startup" on or off.

When the Project Gallery opens, the Word Document icon is highlighted as shown in Figure 1-1. If you click OK (or press Return or Enter) now, a new blank Word document opens, just as if you'd chosen File→New Blank Document (or pressed -N).

Opening any kind of document in the Project Gallery works the same way: Click the list items in the Category list on the left (see Figure 1-1) until you see the desired template or document type on the right. Then double-click the document icon to open it.

For instance, say you're writing a letter. Click the flippy triangle next to the Business Forms category (Figure 1-1). (You may have to keep clicking to find the type of document you're seeking. Résumés, for example, are filed under Home Essentials, maybe because Microsoft pictures you unemployed and lying around the house.)

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Creating a New Document

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There are at least four ways to create a new document from scratch. They are as follows:

• Choose File→Project Gallery and click the Word Document icon, as described earlier.
  Within the Project Gallery, you can jump from the category list at left to the templates in the right or middle panel by pressing Tab. Once you've highlighted one of these lists, pressing the up and down arrow keys moves you up or down the lists. When the templates are in icon view, you can press all four of the arrow keys to highlight successive icons. (Sorry, Mac OS purists: You can't jump to a particular template by typing the first letters of its name.)

  When you've highlighted a category (in the left-side list) marked by a "flippy triangle," press -right arrow to expand it, or -left arrow to collapse it again. And when you've finally highlighted the template you want, pressing Return or Enter, of course, opens it.
• Choose File→New Blank Document.
• Press -N.
• Click the New Blank Document button (the very first icon) on the Standard toolbar that appears just beneath your menu bar.

However you do it, the result is a fresh, empty document.

In fact, this new document is not really empty at all. Behind the scenes, it's already loaded up with such settings as a default font, margin settings, keystroke assignments, macros, style sheets, and so on. It inherits these starter settings from a special document called the Normal template.

You can read much more about Templates in Section 6.4. For now, though, it's enough to know that you can modify the Normal template so that each new document you open automatically contains your own favorite settings.

If you're entering the world of Word for the purposes of editing an existing document, just double-click the document in the Finder (or click it in the Dock, if that's where you stashed it). If you're already in Word, though, simply choose the fastest of the following options:

• Click the Open button in the Project Gallery.
• Choose File→Open.
• Press -O.
• Click the second (arrow-from-folder) icon on the Standard toolbar.

No matter which method you use, the standard Open File box appears (Figure 1-2). Actually, it may not look so standard to you, since it's Apple's new OS X Open dialog box. It features several advantages over the pre-Mac OS X Open box: It has a column view, just like the OS X Finder, and a From menu to make it easier to access the document you seek. (See

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Word Processing Basics

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Once a document is onscreen, your administrative efforts are complete, and the creative phase can begin. Odds are good that you've word processed before; nevertheless, 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 in Section 4.3.
• 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 in Section 3.4.1.2. 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 in Section 3.1, 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 is not dependent upon the positions of your tab stops.
• Don't press Return at the end of a page. Word automatically wraps the text to the next page. If you want your next thought to start at the top of a new page, choose Insert→Break→Section Break (Next Page) instead. Now, no matter how much you edit before or after the section break, your new section will always start at the top of a new page.
  Word makes it easy to open documents; almost too easy, if you're trying to keep certain documents private or unmodified. Never fear: Word offers three levels of document-protection features designed to keep spies and busybodies out of your files.

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A Window into Word

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The tools you use most often—those for navigating your document and for basic formatting—are clustered around the main text window, which is shown in Figure 1-4.

Figure 1-4: A Word window is surrounded by controls, gizmos, and levers. Almost anything you click, drag, or double-click produces some change to your document or Word's own settings.

Word X's title bar does all the usual Mac things—sends the window to the Dock when double-clicked, moves it when dragged, etc.—but it has a few unheralded powers, too. It also performs like a Mac OS X folder window in two key respects:

• To find out what folder your document is nested in, -click the document's title. As shown in Figure 1-5, a pop-up menu appears, identifying your document icon's location on the hard drive. Click any folder or drive on the list to open it into a new window.
  

  Figure 1-5: Left: When you -click the document name, you can choose and open, in a Finder window, any folder or disk in the list. Right: After clicking and holding for a second, you can drag the tiny icon into any folder or disk on your desktop.
• See the tiny Word icon next to the document's name in the title bar? That's your document proxy icon, which works just like the folder proxy icon in every Finder window title bar. As shown at right in Figure 1-5, you can drag that icon just as you would any icon in the Finder. You might do so to move the current document to a different folder, to copy it to a different disk, or even to drag it directly to the Trash. In true Mac OS X fashion, you see a translucent ghost of the icon as you move it. (You have to hold the cursor down on this icon for about one second, making it turn dark, before you can drag it in this way. If you drag it too quickly, Word thinks you're simply trying to move the window on the screen.)

The document proxy icon appears faded out (disabled) whenever you've edited your document without saving the changes. (And you can't drag it to move, copy, or trash your document when you haven't saved changes.) Only when you choose File→Save (-S) does the icon spring to life, ready for dragging.

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The Views

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Word can display your document in any of five different views. Each offers different features for editing, reading, and scrolling through your work. Some people spend their entire lives in only one of these views, while power users may switch regularly back and forth between them.

In any case, using the Word X views feature doesn't change your actual document in any way; regardless of what view you're using, the document prints exactly the same way (the exception: Outline view). Views are mostly for your benefit while still preparing the document onscreen.

Here are the five Word views, as they appear in the View menu.

You can also switch views by clicking one of the four icons at the lower-left corner of your document window, to the left of the scroll bar.

Normal view presents the Standard toolbar, the Ruler, and all the window accessories described in the previous section (see Figure 1-4). In Normal view, your entire document scrolls by in a never-ending window, with only a faint dotted line to indicate where one page ends and the next begins. Normal view is where you can focus on writing your document; many page-layout elements, including headers and footers, drawing objects, and multiple columns, don't appear at all in Normal view. As a result, Normal view offers the fewest distractions and the fastest scrolling.

This view shows what your document will look like if you convert it to a Web page, as described in Chapter 7. (And if you'd never in a million years dream of using Microsoft Word as a Web-design program, then this is only the first of many discussions you can safely skip in this book.)

For example, in Online Layout view, you don't see any page breaks, even if a particular page requires 47 consecutive feet of scrolling; as far as Word is concerned, that's what the Web is like. The Ruler goes away, too, because Web pages don't actually offer true indents or tabs. (Your existing tabs and margins still work, but you can't make changes to them in Online Layout view.) Any backgrounds, drawings, and images you've added to your document are visible, and look as they would when your document is viewed in a Web browser.

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Every Conceivable Variation on Saving

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The first thing to do with a completed file—or even a file just underway—is, of course, to save it onto the hard drive, preserving it in case of an unforeseen system crash or accidental surge-suppressor power-switch toe-press. If you're still not in the habit of pressing -S every few sentences, paragraphs, or minutes, Word's AutoRecovery feature may save your hide.

If you have more than one Word document open at a time, hold down the Shift key as you choose File→Save. The Save command becomes Save All, which saves the changes to all open documents one by one. When you hold down Shift, you'll also notice that Close becomes Close All.

At preset intervals, Word saves the current document into a separate AutoRecover file. If your Mac freezes, crashes, or blacks out in a power failure, the AutoRecover file opens automatically (once you've recovered, that is). If you're satisfied that the "Recovered" file is the most recent and the one you want to keep, save it under a new name and continue working. (The file under the old name is the file as it was when you last conducted a real Save.)

Although AutoRecovery functions in the background as you work, it produces a momentary and detectable slowdown. In other words, you want Word to save often, but not too often. To set the AutoRecover interval, choose Word→Preferences and click the Save button. Under "Save options," turn on the "Save AutoRecover" box and enter a preferred number of minutes in the adjoining box.

The first time you save a document, or anytime you choose File→Save As, you open the Save dialog box (see Figure 1-9).

Figure 1-9: Word can convert your document into many formats. If you save it as a "Microsoft Word document" (the proposed choice), then any recent version of Microsoft Word—specifically Word 98 or 2001 (on the Mac), or Word 97/2000/XP (Windows)—can open it without any conversion or translation. To share with earlier versions of Word, choose their names from the pop-up menu.

If you're new to Mac OS X, this may be your first experience with a sheet—a new type of dialog box that scrolls down from, and is attached to, the title bar of a window. See Microsoft Scores X for more on the Save and Open sheets.

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Printing

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Even in our era of email, you can't use a Mac for very long without printing something. As with so much else in Word, printing can be as simple or as complicated as you care to make it.

It doesn't get any simpler than this. Click the printer icon on the Standard toolbar to print one copy of your document. No dialog box, no page ranges, no options.

This method is still simple, but more specific. Choose File→Print (or press -P) to open the Print dialog box, where you can tell Word how many copies of which pages of your document to print (and—new in Mac OS X—which printer you want to use, if you have several).

The Print dialog box has been restructured in Mac OS X. Instead of a series of dialog boxes for page range, layout, and so on, the box is now comprised of a series of panels that you expose by choosing from the pop-up menu in the middle of the box. This remodeling was much more than cosmetic, however, as you can now do things from the Print window (such as add a border or create an Adobe Acrobat [PDF] document), which used to require opening a separate dialog box—or a separate program!

The features in the Print box vary depending upon which printer you chose above, but here are a few of the classics.

Section 1.7.2.1: Copies and Pages

This is the default pop-up menu choice when the Print dialog box opens. Often, these are the only settings you need.

• Copies. Enter the number of copies you need. Hit Return to print, or Tab to move on to more settings.
• Collated. Turning on this box prints out each copy of your document in page order. For instance, if you print multiple copies of a three-page letter with collating turned off, you'll get two copies of page one, two page twos, and so on. With collating turned on, you'll get page one, page two, page three, followed by another complete set of pages one, two, and three, and so on.
• Pages. The All button is initially selected, but you can also hit Tab and enter page numbers for a page range. For more control over which pages to print, read on.
  If you don't see "Print odd/even pages only" or other common printing options, choose Microsoft Word from the pop-up menu, as described in Figure 1-10.

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Chapter 2: Editing in Word

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Despite all the innovations in Office X, some things haven't changed, including the basics of editing your text. Adding, deleting, or moving text around works essentially the same way as it did in Word 1.0, which fit on a single floppy disk and had to be started up with a hand crank.

Most of the editing and formatting techniques in Word and the other Office programs require a two-step procedure: select, then do. That is, first select the thing (word, paragraph, sentence) that you intend to act upon; then use keystrokes or menu commands to tell the Mac what to do to it.

Dragging with the mouse is the way we all first learned to select text. In this time-honored method, you click at the start of where you want to select text, and while holding down the mouse button, drag until the text in question is highlighted.

For the first 17 years of Microsoft Word's life, you could only select one chunk of text at a time. But in Word X, you can select bits of text far apart from each other simultaneously and then cut, copy, and paste them all at once. (More on this later.) At last, you can grab a single sentence from the first paragraph of a document and a couple sentences from the second—and scrap everything else. Progress!

Assuming you mastered dragging a long time ago, here are some more streamlined ways to select text. (Some of these moves are second nature to power users.)

• Shift-arrow. If you undershoot or overshoot the mark when dragging manually, don't start over; remember the Shift–arrow key trick. After you release the mouse button, don't click again or do anything else. Hold down the Shift key and then press the arrow keys to expand or shrink the size of the selection—one character or line at a time. Add the Option key to expand or shrink the selection one word at a time.
• Dragging with the mouse and Option key. When dragging with the mouse, you'll notice that Word highlights text in one-word chunks, under the assumption that you'll very rarely want to edit only the first syllable of a word. Even if you begin dragging in the center of a word, the program instantly highlights all the way from the beginning to the end of that word, including the space after it. Usually, this behavior is what you want, and lets you drag somewhat sloppily.

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The Many Ways to Select Text

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Dragging with the mouse is the way we all first learned to select text. In this time-honored method, you click at the start of where you want to select text, and while holding down the mouse button, drag until the text in question is highlighted.

For the first 17 years of Microsoft Word's life, you could only select one chunk of text at a time. But in Word X, you can select bits of text far apart from each other simultaneously and then cut, copy, and paste them all at once. (More on this later.) At last, you can grab a single sentence from the first paragraph of a document and a couple sentences from the second—and scrap everything else. Progress!

Assuming you mastered dragging a long time ago, here are some more streamlined ways to select text. (Some of these moves are second nature to power users.)

• Shift-arrow. If you undershoot or overshoot the mark when dragging manually, don't start over; remember the Shift–arrow key trick. After you release the mouse button, don't click again or do anything else. Hold down the Shift key and then press the arrow keys to expand or shrink the size of the selection—one character or line at a time. Add the Option key to expand or shrink the selection one word at a time.
• Dragging with the mouse and Option key. When dragging with the mouse, you'll notice that Word highlights text in one-word chunks, under the assumption that you'll very rarely want to edit only the first syllable of a word. Even if you begin dragging in the center of a word, the program instantly highlights all the way from the beginning to the end of that word, including the space after it. Usually, this behavior is what you want, and lets you drag somewhat sloppily.
  If you dislike the way Word automatically selects in one-word increments, you can turn it off by choosing Word→Preferences and clicking the Edit tab. The checkbox called "When selecting, automatically select entire word" is the on/off switch for this feature.
  Every now and then, however, you do want to edit only the first syllable of a word—perhaps to correct a typo. In those situations, Word's tendency to highlight the entire word can induce madness. On those occasions, press the Option key as you drag. Word responds by respecting the precise movements of your mouse.

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Moving Text Around

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Three commands—Cut, Copy, and Paste—appear in every word processing program known to humankind, Word included. But Office X has more powerful ways of manipulating text once you've selected it.

To copy text, highlight it as described above. Then choose Edit→Copy (or click the corresponding Standard toolbar button), click the mouse or use the arrow keys to transport the insertion point to your new location, and choose Edit→Paste. A copy of the original text appears in the new locale. To move text instead of copying it, use Edit→ Cut and Edit→Paste; the selected text moves from one place to another, leaving no trace behind.

Alternatively, after selecting the text, you can also Control-click the selection (or click the right mouse button if you have one), and choose Copy or Cut from the contextual menu. Similarly, when you arrive at the place where you want to paste, you can Control-click, then select Paste.

If this procedure sounds like a lot of work, you're right—especially if you're trying to choose these menu commands using a laptop trackpad. Cut/Copy and Paste is the sequence you'll probably use extremely often. By learning the keystroke equivalents, the time you save avoiding the mouse really adds up. For example:

Function	Command	Keystrokes
Copy	Edit→Copy	-C or F3
Cut	Edit→Cut	-X or F2

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Navigating Your Documents

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Word X offers a multitude of ways to navigate your document, some of which aren't as immediately obvious as the scroll bar.

Using the scroll bar has its own reward; as you drag the "elevator" scroll-box handle up and down, a pop-out tooltip balloon identifies the major headings in your document as you scroll by. By scanning this readout, you'll know exactly where you'll be when you stop scrolling.

It's by far one of the most frequently asked questions among new (and unself-conscious veteran) Mac users: What on earth are all of those extra keys for on the standard Mac keyboard?

In many cases, the answer is "nothing." In most Mac programs, such keys as the Fkeys on the top row and the Num Lock key don't do anything at all. In Office, however, there's scarcely a single key that doesn't have a function. For example:

• Esc. Short for "Escape," this key provides a quick way of dismissing a dialog box without having to click the Close or Cancel button. It also closes a menu that you've pulled down, once you've decided not to use it. Esc acts the same as the -. key combination that Mac fans know and love.
• Home. This key moves the insertion point to the beginning of the line it's currently in. (You were expecting it to take your insertion point to the top of the document, weren't you? It's a trick; to do that, press -Home.)
• End. The End key, if you have one, takes you to the end of the current line. The -End combination takes you to the very end of the document.
  On some Macs, they're tiny; on others, they're full-sized. On some Macs, you have twelve of them; on others, fifteen. They're the function keys (or Fkeys) stretched along the topmost row of your keyboard.

  Once you're familiar with the many benefits of the Fkeys, you may become addicted. The following is how the function keys come defined in a new copy of Word X—but remember that it's easy enough to change their functions (see Chapter 17).

  F1 means Undo (the same as -Z). (There's no predefined Fkey for Redo, although -Y or Edit

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Finding and Replacing

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When editing a document, sometimes you know exactly what you want to revise, but just don't know where it is. For instance, you want to go back and read the paragraph you wrote about mansions, but you don't remember what page it's on. Or suppose you've found out that you misspelled Sarah's name all the way through an article. Now you have to replace every occurrence of Sara with Sarah—but how do you make sure that you've got them all?

That's where Find and Replace comes in.

If you just want to find a certain word (or even part of a word), choose Edit→Find (or press -F). The Find and Replace dialog box opens, as shown in Figure 2-6. Type the word you're looking for, and then click Find Next (or press Return or -F).

Figure 2-6: Top: The Find dialog box. Bottom: The expanded Replace box. The Format and Special menus at the bottom of this dialog box let you search for a font, typestyle, paragraph break, and so on. If you'd like to find all your italics and change them to boldface, or find all the dashes and delete them, this is the way to do it.

If you turn on "Highlight all items found in Main Document," the Find Next button changes to say Find All. Now Word will select all occurrences of the search term simultaneously. At that point, you can bold them all, italicize them all, cut them all, or perform other kinds of neat global maneuvers.

Now Word searches for your search term, starting from the position of the insertion point. If it finds what you're seeking, it scrolls to and highlights each occurrence of that word or phrase in your document. (If it doesn't find any occurrences, an error message tells you so.)

If Word finds an occurrence, but it's not the one you had in mind, you can keep clicking Find or hitting Return to find successive occurrences. When Word reaches the end of your document, it starts searching again from the beginning. When it finally wraps around so far that it finishes searching the whole file, another dialog box lets you know.

The Find box remains on the screen throughout the process, but don't let that stop you; you can pause and edit your document at any time. Just click in your document window, sending the Find box to the background. To resume your search, click the Find dialog box to bring it forward, then click Find Next.

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Spelling and Grammar

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Whatever your document—term paper, résumé, or letter to the milkman—typos can hinder its effectiveness and sully your credibility. When you let mistakes remain in your document, your reader may doubt that you put any time or care into it at all. Word helps you achieve the perfect result by pointing out possible errors, leaving the final call up to you.

A spelling-related feature (new since Word 2001) may have been benefiting you without you even noticing. When you incur a typo that even a Sominex-drugged reader would notice, such as wodnerful or thier, Word makes the correction automatically, instantly, and quietly. (Press -Z or F1 immediately afterward if you actually intended the misspelled version.) Technically, Word is using its spelling dictionaries as fodder for its AutoCorrect feature, as described in Section 2.6.3.

As a bonus, the spelling checker in Word X is smart enough to recognize run-together words (such as intothe and giveme) and propose the split-apart versions as corrected spellings.

There are two basic modes to Word's spelling and grammar features:

Word's factory setting is to check spelling and grammar continuously, immediately flagging any error it detects as soon as you finish typing it. Each spelling error gets a red, squiggly underline; each grammatical error gets a green one. These squiggly underlines (which also show up in the other Office programs) are among the most noticeable hallmarks of Office documents, as shown in Figure 2-7.

Figure 2-7: Top: When Word is set to check spelling and grammar as you type, errors are underlined as you go. Middle: Control-clicking each error opens a contextual menu that contains suggested spellings and commonly used Spelling and Grammar commands. Bottom: Choosing "About this sentence" prompts the Office Assistant to explain the grammatical issue (bottom). Press Option-F7 to move on to the next error.

If you can spot the problem right away—an obvious spelling error, for example—simply edit it. The squiggly underline disappears as soon as your insertion point leaves the vicinity. It's often more fun, however, to Control-click each error (see Figure 2-7), which opens a contextual menu to help you handle the correction process. Here are the commands you'll find in this contextual menu:

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Five Ways to Type Less

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At first glance, the Word window looks much like any computer screen. You type, and letters appear, just as in that classic Mac word processor, TextEdit. But there's actually much more to it than that. While you're typing, Word is constantly thinking, reacting, doing things to save you precious keystrokes.

As noted earlier, for example, Word corrects obvious spelling errors as you go along. But it also lets you create your own typing shortcuts, and even tries to anticipate your next formatting move, sometimes to the frustration of people who don't understand what the program's doing. The more you know what Word is thinking (it means well, it really does), the more you can let Word do the work, saving those precious brain cells for more important stuff—like writing.

Since the beginning of Word time, our screens have given us a continually blinking insertion point, located in the upper-left corner of the screen. That's where you typed, period. If you wanted to type in the middle of the page—for example, to create a title page of a report—you couldn't just click there and start typing. Instead, you had to take the ludicrously counterintuitive step of moving the insertion point over and down by tapping the Space bar, Tab key, or Return key until it was where you wanted it.

No more. The Click and Type feature lets you go directly to your desired spot on the page just by double-clicking. Here's how it works:

1. Switch to Online view or Page Layout view.
   These are the only views where Click and Type is available; choose from the View menu to change views.
2. Move the cursor around on the blank page, letting it hover for a second at the point where you'd like to place some text.
   In some cases, you'll see the cursor change to indicate that Word is about to provide some free formatting help. If your cursor is near the left or right margin, Word assumes that you want your text to be left- or right-aligned; you'll see tiny left- or right-justified lines appear next to the hovering insertion point (see Figure 2-12). When you hover in the middle of the page, the insertion-point icon changes to centered text. If your cursor is near the top or bottom of the page, the cursor changes shape again to illustrate that you're about to edit the document's

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Chapter 3: Formatting in Word

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Formatting is the part of word processing that lets you loosen up and have a little fun. You can dress up your bland 12-point Times with any typeface you choose—bold or italic for emphasis, color for variety, borders around certain paragraphs, and so on.

It's important to understand that Word offers independent formatting controls for each of four entities: characters (individual letters and words), paragraphs (anything you've typed that's followed by a press of the Return key), sections (similar to chapters, as described in Section 3.6), and the entire document. Attributes like bold and italic are character formatting; line spacing and centering are paragraph attributes; page numbering is done on a section-by-section basis; and margin settings are considered document settings. Understanding these distinctions will help you know where to look to achieve a certain desired effect.

The Formatting Palette, which debuted in Office 2001 and received a complete overhaul for Office X, puts Word's most common formatting commands within easy reach. It opens when you first open a Word document. If it's been hidden, you can bring it back by choosing View→Formatting Palette or clicking the Formatting Palette button on the Standard toolbar; both methods alternately hide and show the palette.

The options on the Formatting Palette change depending on what you're doing. When you click a photo or drawing, for example, the palette changes to show the tools you need to work with graphics. Most of the time, however, the Formatting Palette displays the commands you most frequently need to work with fonts, paragraph formatting, and other elements of text.

In Office 2001, you could navigate around the Formatting Palette using the Tab key. (By pressing Shift--F to highlight the Font menu, using the arrow keys to select a font, and then tabbing down to the Size menu, for example, you could keyboard your way through the entire Formatting Palette.) Unfortunately, Microsoft no longer provides this feature in Office X.

Some of the keystrokes still work, such as the Font trick mentioned above, and Shift-

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The Formatting Palette

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The Formatting Palette, which debuted in Office 2001 and received a complete overhaul for Office X, puts Word's most common formatting commands within easy reach. It opens when you first open a Word document. If it's been hidden, you can bring it back by choosing View→Formatting Palette or clicking the Formatting Palette button on the Standard toolbar; both methods alternately hide and show the palette.

The options on the Formatting Palette change depending on what you're doing. When you click a photo or drawing, for example, the palette changes to show the tools you need to work with graphics. Most of the time, however, the Formatting Palette displays the commands you most frequently need to work with fonts, paragraph formatting, and other elements of text.

In Office 2001, you could navigate around the Formatting Palette using the Tab key. (By pressing Shift--F to highlight the Font menu, using the arrow keys to select a font, and then tabbing down to the Size menu, for example, you could keyboard your way through the entire Formatting Palette.) Unfortunately, Microsoft no longer provides this feature in Office X.

Some of the keystrokes still work, such as the Font trick mentioned above, and Shift--S to highlight the Style menu. And, of course, you can still use the keystrokes for Bold (-B), Italic (-I), and so on. The buttons on the Formatting Palette respond accordingly.

Figure 3-1: In Word X, almost every conceivable formatting control resides in a single convenient window, a jam-packed command center called the Formatting Palette (shown here in two different states of expansion). Clicking the close button makes the Formatting Palette genie back into its toolbar button in true Mac OS X fashion.

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Character Formatting

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The Font panel of the Formatting Palette—the one that's open the first time you use the Formatting Palette—deals mostly with what your letters, numbers, and other characters look like.

Installing Office X adds about 50 fonts to your Library→Fonts folder—an unannounced gift from Microsoft.

To change the font of text you've already typed, select the text first, using any of the methods described in Section 2.1. If 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 to reveal your Mac's typeface names in their own typefaces (a Mac-only feature). This what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) fonts feature has a few ramifications, 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 still press the arrow keys to select a different font once the menu is open, but power users can no longer highlight a font's name in the menu by typing the first couple letters of its name. Microsoft promises to fix this bug—someday. (Service Release 1, discussed in Office Up to Date, does not fix this bug.)
• You can open the font list faster if you don't use the WYSIWYG fonts feature. Pressing Shift before opening the Font menu or Fonts list in the Formatting Palette allows you to see all the fonts listed in plain type.
  This is also the solution for the person trying to figure out the name of a font that shows up as symbols. (You can turn off the WYSIWYG feature for good by choosing Word→Preferences→General panel and turning off "WYSIWYG font and style menus," then clicking OK.)
  You may find that turning off WYSIWYG font menus turns off WYSIWYG only in the Formatting Palette and toolbar Font menus. The Font menu in the bar remains WYSIWYG until you quit and relaunch Word. Service Release 1, as described in Office Up to Date, fixes this glitch.

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Lists

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If you're in the business world, or even the business of organizing your thoughts, you can't get far without using numbered or bulleted lists.

Bulleted lists are an attractive way of presenting little nuggets of information. Here, for example, is a bulleted list that illustrates how useful they can be:

• Each paragraph is indented from the left margin (like this one) and is preceded by a bullet (the round dot shown at left).
• You can always create a numbered list by typing a number at the beginning of each line, but it won't be nicely indented.
• You may know how to create a bullet (•) at the beginning of every line by using the keyboard shortcut Option-8. But again, that won't produce the clean left margin on your bulleted paragraphs.
• Furthermore, creating lists manually can get messy. For example, inserting an item between two existing ones in a numbered list requires some serious renumbering. And if you want your list indented, you'll have to fiddle with the indent controls quite a bit.

Word has partially automated the process. A quick way to start a numbered or bulleted list is to click one of the list icons on the Formatting Palette (next to where it says Lists). Word promptly indents the paragraph containing the insertion point and adds a bullet (or the number 1). Even the indenting is perfect: The second and following lines of a list item start under the first letter, not all the way back to the left margin. To start a new list item, just hit Return. When you're finished building the list, press Return once more and then click the same icon in the Formatting Palette a second time.

If you create a numbered list this way, Word does the numbering automatically as you go. Better yet, if you insert a new list item between two others, Word knows enough to renumber the entire list.

When you click one of the list icons in the Formatting Palette, a new palette segment labeled Bullets and Numbering appears directly below, complete with its own flippy triangle (see Figure 3-4).

Figure 3-4: After clicking the icon for a numbered list, a new Bullets and Numbering panel appears (click the flippy triangle to expand it).

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Paragraph Formatting

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The lower half of the Formatting Palette pertains mostly to settings that affect entire paragraphs. Just as the Formatting Palette's top section offers the most useful controls of the Format→Font dialog box, its second section offers a subset of the Format→Paragraph dialog box (Figure 3-6).

Figure 3-6: Left: The Paragraph dialog box offers dozens of controls that apply to the selected paragraphs. Right: The expanded Formatting Palette reveals the most useful controls. For example, the controls at the bottom of this panel are a quick way to change indents.

And just as character formatting applies either to highlighted text or to text you're about to type, paragraph formatting applies to only a selected paragraph (the one containing the blinking insertion point), several selected paragraphs, or the paragraph you're about to type (from the insertion point's location).

When you click the flippy triangle next to Alignment and Spacing, the Formatting Palette almost doubles in size (Figure 3-6, right). All the commands here pertain to how your text lies on the page.

Section 3.4.1.1: Horizontal

These icons illustrate how your paragraph will be aligned with the left and right page margins: left aligned, centered, right aligned, or fully justified. (Justified refers to straight margins on both sides. Word automatically adjusts the spacing between letters and words to make the right margin come out even, exactly like a newspaper. Justification works best if you turn on hyphenation, too, as described in Section 4.3.)

You may find yourself changing alignment frequently when writing something like a newsletter, in which it's common to go from a centered headline to a left-aligned article to a justified column of classified ads. Fortunately, alignment is fully equipped with keyboard shortcuts: -R right-aligns the current paragraph, -L is for left alignment, -E centers the current line or paragraph, and -J justifies the current paragraph.

Section 3.4.1.2: Line spacing

Word's factory setting is for single-spaced lines, like the ones in this book. If you like more space between lines, or if you're required to use double-spacing for schoolwork or legal work, use these icons to change the spacing. The three line-spacing controls on the Formatting Palette correspond to single-spaced, one-and-a-half-spaced, and double-spaced text.

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Document Formatting

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When you start with a blank document, Word provides a one-inch margin at the top and bottom of the page, and a stately one-and-a-quarter inch margin at each side.

Most people never change these settings; in its own, almost accidental way, Microsoft has dictated the standard margin formatting for the world's business correspondence. But if you learn how to work with margins—as well as paragraphs and indentation—you can give your document a distinctive look, not to mention fit much more text on a page.

You can adjust the margins of a Word document in either of two ways: by entering exact measurements (in the Formatting Palette or the Document dialog box), or by dragging the margins directly onto the ruler.

To use the numeric option, choose Format→Document→Margins tab, or click the triangle next to Document on the Formatting Palette. There you'll find individual boxes that let you specify, in inches, the size of the left, right, top, and bottom margins.

To set your margins by dragging, which produces immediate visible feedback, you must be in Page Layout view. (Choose View→Page Layout.)

• Left, Right, Top, Bottom. To set margins by dragging, point to the line where the ruler changes from white to striped, without clicking. (The striped area is outside the limits of the margin.) When the cursor changes to a box with double arrows, drag the margin line to any point on the ruler you wish (see Figure 3-13). Now you can change the margins on both the horizontal and vertical rulers.
  

  Figure 3-13: Top: The house-shaped controls set indents (see Section 3.4.3). The line where the color of the ruler changes indicates the margin limits. Bottom: Drag the blue/white boundaries (circled) to adjust the margins.
  You may find it extremely hard to adjust the left margin, since the trio of indent markers (Figure 3-7) lie directly on top of the blue/white boundary. Let the cursor hover until the Left Margin tooltip appears and the cursor shape changes as shown in Figure 3-13. You may even find it worthwhile to move the first-line indent handle out of the way while you adjust the margin.

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Section Formatting

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The Formatting Palette doesn't say anything about section formatting; in fact, most people have never even heard of it.

Still, section formatting is important in a few special circumstances, such as these:

• Sections allow you to divide a document into chapters, each with its own headers or footers.
• Sections let you change from, say, a one-column format for your opening paragraph to a three-column format for the body of the article. They also let you insert a landscape-orientation page or two into a paper that's primarily in portrait orientation.
• Sections give you flexibility in printing; you can print your title page on colored paper from a different paper tray on your printer, for example.
• You can set different margins for each section of your document; this might come in handy if your training manual contains multiple-choice quizzes for which you could really use narrower page margins.

The bottom line: A section is a set of pages in your document that can have its own independent settings for page numbering, lines, footnotes, and endnotes. It can also have its own layout features, such as page borders, margins, columns, alignment, text orientation, and even page size. Finally, it can have its own printer settings, such as orientation and paper source.

To start a new section, choose Insert→Break, then choose one of the Section Break types—depending upon where you want the new section to begin (relative to the current page). For instance, to change the number of columns in the middle of a page, choos