Office 2010: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Editing and Formatting

Way back in prehistoric times, when cave-dwellers hunted woolly mammoths by day and hunched over firelit typewriters at night, 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, you had to type your text all over again from scratch. And forget about varying fonts with italics or boldface. Not gonna 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 2010 takes “easy” to a whole new level. You can format your text in any font, size, or color; move words, sentences, paragraphs, and sections wherever you want ‘em; and quickly search for, find, and replace words and phrases (and Word 2010’s new Navigation pane makes searching faster and more powerful than ever before). This chapter shows you how to get things looking the way you want them, 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. Holding down the mouse button, drag the pointer over your selection. As you drag, Word highlights the text, as shown in Figure 2-1. When you’re finished dragging, let go of the mouse button.

Figure 2-1. As ...