In this lesson you'll learn how to have Word automatically format your document.
Automatic Formatting refers to Word's ability to analyze the structure of a document and recognize certain common elements, such as body text, headings, bulleted lists, and quotations. Word will then apply appropriate styles to the various text elements to create an attractively formatted document (for more information on styles, please refer to Lessons 24 and 25). You can accept or reject all or part of the automatically applied format, and can later make any desired modifications to the document. In addition to applying styles, Automatic Formatting can remove extra "returns" between paragraphs, create bulleted lists, and more.
Is automatic formatting right for you? You'll have to try it out to find out. Take a document that characterizes one you usually work on, save it under a new name (so the original is not changed) and experiment. You'll soon find out whether you like automatic formatting, or whether you prefer manual application.
You can apply automatic formatting to all or part of a document:
Figure 26.1
Use the AutoFormat dialog box to accept or reject the formatting applied by the AutoFormat
command.
If you select Review Changes in step 4 above, you can scroll through the document and examine each individual formatting change, then either accept it or reject it. The Review AutoFormat Changes dialog box will be displayed during this procedure, as shown in Figure 26.2. Scroll through the document using the vertical scroll bar; Word indicates the changes that were made using the following marks, as listed in Table 26.1. These marks also appear in the document in Figure 26.2.
Change made | Mark displayed |
New style applied to the paragraph | Blue paragraph mark |
Paragraph mark deleted | Red paragraph mark |
Text or spaces deleted | Strikethrough |
Characters added | Underline |
Text or formatting changed | Vertical bar in left margin |
The AutoFormat feature has a number of settings that control which document elements it will modify. You can change these options to suit your preferences:
Figure 26.3
Use the Options dialog box to set Word's AutoFormat options.
The first part of this chapter showed you how Word automatically formats an existing document. Word can also format certain elements of your text as you type them. For example, if you start a line with a dash and a space, Word interprets it as being the start of a bulleted list and formats it accordingly. To control which aspects of "format as you type" are active, follow these steps:
This lesson showed you how to use Word's automatic formatting capability. In the next lesson you'll learn how to use tables.
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