Office 2008 for Mac All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter II.3. Working with Text, Words, and Paragraphs

In This Chapter

• Taming text

• Formatting the easy way

• Applying, creating, and organizing styles

• AutoFormatting while you type

• Numbering your lines automatically

After you have your document underway, you discover how important formatting and fine-tuning your document are. Although the type of formatting and fine-tuning you do is related to your personality, some things are surprisingly universal. Foremost among these similarities is an observation: It's one thing to get down words, but as a Mac user, you want them to look their best. Readers appreciate the time that writers spend to make their work readable. Some writers enjoy creating documents that pay attention to finer details, such as the spacing among lines and characters, as well as kerning and paragraph formatting. This chapter covers Word's ability to help you create documents with style.

Triumphing Over Text

Before we begin the discussion about working with text, we want to mention the single most important feature in all of Office: the Undo button. The ability to easily back out of document changes makes it easy to be daring, but not reckless. Some things, such as file operations, can't be undone. But most of the changes you make in your Word documents aren't set in stone.

Most people know that each time you click the Undo button, the most recent change is undone. Some people even know that each successive click of the Undo button reverts the next most recent change, and you ...