Carol Bratt

When you want the same text (such as a title) to appear on the top of every page, you are creating a header. On the other hand, text that appears on the bottom of every page is called a footer. Both headers and footers appear within the page margins ... and are unaffected by adding and deleting text in the document. You can set the measurement for headers and footers in the Margins tab of the Page Setup dialog box. Longer documents often must have certain text on every page, such as chapter titles, author names, dates, file names, or page numbers. You wouldn't want to have to type the text at the ... (view more)

Text can be typed in lowercase or small letters, uppercase or capital letters, or a mix of the two cases. Have you found yourself wishing you could change the capitalization of a section of text without having to retype the whole thing? You can, ... when you use the Format | Change Case Command. Proper nouns should be capitalized. The first word of sentences should be capitalized. Titles should be capitalized. What if you forget? What if you capitalize where you normally would not? You can change the case of all the text at once with a single command -- a great timesaver! To do so: Highlight the ... (view more)

In your documents, sometimes you have to include symbols other than the standard letters, numbers and characters that appear on the keyboard. MS Word has many interesting symbols for you to use: everyday items such as the degree symbol (98.6°),  ...Greek letters (ΦΒΚ or ψ), letters needed in foreign words (such as résumé or Senõr), and even cute little pictures (such as  and §). You must use these symbols when they're needed in the text, but the pictures, sometimes called "dingbats," can be used for decoration. To begin, click to the insertion point where you ...view more)

After you've gone to the trouble to apply all the various formatting options to your text, you may want to reproduce specific formatting in several places in your document. For example: suppose you decide that the body of a report looks fine with an ... 11-point Courier New font, but for definition, you decide to make the headings 14-point Arial Bold Italic in blue, with a bold blue underline. It would take a lot of time to highlight each bit of text and apply all those formatting commands. Instead, you can save time by copying the format you've already applied to text. At first, you might think ... (view more)

MS Word's default font is Times New Roman (12-point), a readable serif font suitable for most personal and business text. This default font setting is fine for most applications, but perhaps you'd like to distinguish your documents from ... run-of-the-mill by using a different font, such as Verdana. Rather than continually having to change the font for all your documents, you can change the default font (once) via your preferences: There's no need to select text. Simply choose Format | Font and click the Font tab. Set the options you want to use as a default. Click the Default button. This opens ... (view more)

Many presentations involve slides containing numbers. They could be financial figures, measurements or other key indicators. If these figures include decimals, they should be aligned at the decimal point. In this manner, your audience can easily ... compare numbers by looking at the figures to the left and right of the decimal point. Having said that: the default alignment when you use the Tab key is left alignment of the starting number. Some people try to use leading spaces to attempt to create decimal alignment, but it never works properly and looks strange to your audience when the numbers ... (view more)

When you are creating small worksheets, you don't think about changing the direction of the page, but some worksheets and charts require the page to be wider than it is tall. Similar to landscape paintings that typically are wider than they are ... tall, landscape page orientation enables you to fit wider items on the page. A page that is taller than it is wide has what is called portrait orientation, like portraits of people. Scaling lets you specify a certain percent to reduce or enlarge your worksheet. The Fit to Page feature allows you to force the worksheet to print on a specific number of ... (view more)

In Print Preview, you might notice that a single column of your worksheet flows onto a second page. Although you can scrunch it in by reducing the scaling percent or by turning the orientation to landscape, sometimes all you have to do is adjust the ... margins (I.E.: the distance between the edge of the paper and the printed information). On the other hand: in Print Preview Mode, you might notice that a small worksheet looks awkward in the top-left corner of the page because the rest of the page is empty. You can center the small worksheet to the page without having to adjust the margins. You ... (view more)

Although it's very easy to apply the previous font formats by clicking items on the Formatting toolbar in MS Word, many other options are available in the Font dialog box. Here you can change characters to superscript, subscript, outline, or ... embosses, choose from a variety of underlining styles, et cetera. Other tabs of the dialog box allow you to control the spacing of letters -- either squeezed together or stretched out -- as well as to add special effects such as a sparkle. These formatting options are used much less often, so they don't need to be placed on the toolbar. Nevertheless, you ... (view more)

As documents grow longer and extend past one page, MS Word automatically calculates how much room is available and starts a new page when needed (keeping widows, orphans, and other text flow options in mind). MS Word also allows you to specify where ... to begin a new page by inserting a hard page break where you want one. Sometimes you only need a short page, such as a cover page, or perhaps you want to start a new part of the text on a new page. You wouldn't want to have to press Enter repeatedly, just to force Word to insert a page break. Instead, you want to control where page breaks occur. ... (view more)