formatting

Not too long ago, a reader wrote to me asking if there was a way to quickly see if Keep With Next was in use in a paragraph in an MS Word document. I answered the reader with an article explaining how to have your Show/Hide feature activated to see ... the non-printing characters in a document so that you can see whether or not Keep with Next is in use. One of our cutting-edge readers has responded with a quicker, even easier method: In MS Word 2007, you can add the "Para Keep w/ Next" formatting command button added to your toolbar. If the specific formatting is in use, the ... (view more)

Changing the size and font of comments in MS Word is easy and painless! You can use standard formatting commands to modify the text in comment balloons as you type. Follow the steps below to learn how: On the Format menu, click Styles and ... Formatting, which will open the Styles and Formatting task pain in the right margin. In the task pane, under Pick formatting to apply, make sure the Comment Text entry is visible. If it is, continue; if it is not, follow the steps below: On the Show drop-down menu, click Custom. In the Format Settings dialog box, under Style to be visible, click Comment Text ... (view more)

You may have MS Word so customized that you only use a limited number of styles in your documents. If that is the case, wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to scroll through all the styles associated with your Word document? The good news is that ... you don't have to do all that scrolling if you don't want to. You can limit the Style list to only those styles that you use on a day to day basis. Follow the steps below to find out how: Click on View | Task Pane (or use the quick key CTRL + F1). Use the drop-down arrow and select Styles And Formatting. Click the drop-down arrow in the Show area ... (view more)

When applying formatting to a single word or the random phrase I usually will do it manually, but we all know that I am the queen of saving time and keystrokes and so, if I have lots of changes to make in a document, you can bet that I will be doing ... it in the quickest manner possible. It simply is not efficient to keep manually repeating the formatting process. Fortunately, there is a key combination that will greatly simplify this and I am going to share it with you! The key combination is CTRL + Y. This key combination remembers the last set of formats applied. By set, I mean multiple ... (view more)

Formatting worksheet content has been problematic in the past because compared to MS Word or even PowerPoint, Excel was pretty rigid in this area. However, if you use the new formatting capabilities in Excel, there will be no more problems! Your ... workbook is comprised of sheets, that are comprised of rows and columns, that are comprised of cells. Start by formatting the most of your workbook that you can in one fell swoop, such as applying a theme and setting workbook defaults. One of the easiest and most time-saving things you can do when formatting workbooks is to set your formatting ... (view more)

There are a couple of ways to make formatting easier for you in Word 2007 and I am all about time saving and fewer key strokes! It isn't always easy to find everything on the Ribbon in Word 2007, but this should help you out. You could change case ... and clear formatting in older versions of MS Word and now I will tell you how to do it in the latest version! To change case in your document, follow the steps below: Open the Home tab. In the Font group, click the Change Case command. You can also use the shortcut Shift + F3 to do the same thing. The command Clear Formatting is very intuitive and ... (view more)

We all know that if we want to copy formatting from one paragraph to another, we simply Highlight the formatting we want to copy and click on the Format Painter and then drag it across the paragraphs where we want the same formatting. But if you ... double-click on the Format Painter icon, it extends the functionality and you can use it repeatedly without moving your cursor to that point from where we want to copy your format. The icon will remain "pressed." Once you are finished copying formatting, click on the Format Painter again or press Esc to turn off the function. When you become a member ... (view more)

You can use the Clear Formatting command to remove formatting and styles from text in MS Word. When you remove all formatting and styles from text, it adopts the attributes of the Normal style. You can remove formatting and styles from a single ... instance or from all instances of that formatting or style. Clear Formatting command appears at the top of the Pick formatting to apply list in the Styles and Formatting task pane whenever the Show option is set to Available formatting, Formatting in use or Available styles. Since the Normal style is a paragraph style, all font, paragraph, tab, border ... (view more)

MS Word's Format Painter is a very cool means of copying just the format of one word or paragraph, then pasting (or painting) it onto others. It's a shortcut that is very easy to master and pays off handsomely in a document with inconsistent ... formatting. Format Painter works on two levels: character and paragraph. You can copy just the character formatting -- fonts, font sizes, font attributes -- or character style from one word and apply it to other words. Or you can copy the paragraph formatting (line spacing, alignment, indentation, et al.) or paragraph style from one paragraph and apply it ... (view more)

A newsletter or article usually begins with a larger title or headline. To have a headline span the width of several columns in MS Word, it must be formatted with a different number of columns. Formatting Pages with Section Breaks Whenever you have ... different page-level formatting applied to a single document, you need to break it into different sections with something called a "section break." In doing so, sections of a document can be formatted with different margins, page orientation, number of columns, headers and footers, page numbering, et cetera. For example: in a newsletter ... (view more)