Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

110 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

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, para-

graph formatting, and other elements of text.

Note: In Office 2001, you could navigate around the Formatting Palette using the Tab key. (By pressing

Shift-c-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.) Unfortu-

nately, Microsoft no longer provides this feature in Office X.

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

Style menu. And, of course, you can still use the keystrokes for Bold (c-B), Italic (c-I), and so on. The

buttons on the Formatting Palette respond accordingly.

Character Formatting

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.

Choosing Fonts

Installing Office X adds about 50 fonts to your Library→Fonts folder—an unan-

nounced gift from Microsoft.

To change the font of text you’ve already typed, select the text first, using any of the

methods described on page 59. 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.

The Formatting

Palette

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.

chapter 3: formatting in word 111

Now, open the Font menu to reveal your Mac’s typeface names in their own type-

faces (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.

Character

Formatting

Figure 3-2:

Top left: When you pick from the

Font menu, you get to see what

each font looks like.

Top right: If you use the

Formatting Palette to choose a

font, the fonts you’ve used most

recently are conveniently

grouped together at the top.

Bottom: The Font dialog box

(Format

→

Font or

c

-D). Not

only are there more font style

options here than in the

Formatting Palette, you also

receive a preview at the bottom

of the box. If you like what you

see, click OK.