Working and writing with Word (or equivalent programs such as LibreOffice Writer or Google Docs) means dealing with all the problems and difficulties of text formatting. Writing a document on the computer is easy, but formatting the text or changing the way it is presented, paragraphing, page breaks, margins etc. can become frustrating if you don't know the basics.
everyone will have the problem of seeing empty pages in the middle of a document, of not being able to divide the chapters, of seeing that the print is different from what you see on the screen.
You can improve a lot in the drafting of documents with Microsoft Word and limit errors as much as possible and without going crazy learning how text formatting works in Word and what tools are available to control it .
The instructions in this article are based on Word 2010, but should work with both previous and later Word versions unless otherwise noted.
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1) The three levels of Formatting in Microsoft Word
The first trick for formatting a document in Word is to understand how Word interprets text formatting.
The human mind thinks that a document is made up of words that form sentences, sentences that form paragraphs, paragraphs that make up pages, and so on.
For Word, however, each document is made up of three basic levels:
- Sections : Each Word document has one or more sections.
- Paragraphs : Each section has one or more paragraphs.
- Characters : Each paragraph has one or more characters.
Word makes it seem possible to apply formatting to an entire document or specific pages of a document, but in reality every rule is always applied to one of these three levels and not therefore to the whole document.
2) See the hidden characters
To learn how to format text in Microsoft Word and work with styles you must always keep hidden characters visible, at least until you become so good as to "see them" even if they are not visible to the eye.
On the main toolbar, click the button with the ¶ symbol, to see the non-printable and hidden characters that are the symbols of the structure of a document.
The sheet will now appear smudged with dots on the sides, and ¶ at the end of each line ending in a dot.
In Word, each button you press on the keyboard is a character, but only letters, numbers and punctuation are seen.
With the show hidden characters option, try pressing Enter, Tab and space bar to understand that these are also interpreted as characters, not printable.
When copying and pasting into text, these characters are also copied.
It can be a little ugly to see all those strange characters around the text, but you have to get used to it to check the formatting.
Re-pressing the ¶ key it is always possible to deactivate the hidden characters.
You can control exactly which characters to see and hide by going to File -> Options -> Display .
The only thing you don't see are the section breaks in the document, visible only when you switch to the draft view (menu View -> Structure ).
3) Check the sections
The sections control the entire flow of the document.
All Microsoft Word documents start with a single section that changes when the following changes are added:
- A manual section break is inserted.
You can create a new section manually by inserting a section break (on Word menu Layout -> Breaks )
There are two types of section breaks, one that breaks the text on the page, the other that keeps writing on the same page where the break is inserted.
In Word there also the odd and even page breaks.
- The formatting of specific pages is changed.
Remember that Word doesn't see pages, only sections.
When you change the formatting of a particular page or range of pages, Word creates a new section for them by automatically inserting a section break above and below.
Any page-level formatting changes are applied to the whole section.
Sections can really drive you crazy if you don't really understand how to manage them and what they are, especially because you need to use Design view to manage them.
A typical beginner's mistake is to switch to writing on a subsequent page without interrupting the page, pressing Enter several times.
4) Use paragraphs
Paragraph is arguably the most important element of a Microsoft Word document.
Success in formatting text all depends on understanding how it works.
The paragraph is a phrase that ends by wrapping, then using the. and then pressing Enter.
In Word, a paragraph is indicated with the sign ¶
The paragraph mark is an important and special character because it tells us everything about the structure of the text.
Seeing the ¶ allows us to avoid errors such as moving to the next page by pressing Enter several times or losing formatting in the copy and paste.
This is because the symbol ¶ is not also copied.
To write on Word it is essential to see these characters and always know where a sentence ends.
5) Use styles to organize and apply formatting
One style is the collection of formatting information that can be applied to a piece of text at once.
Styles are useful for applying the same formatting in a document.
Word's Home menu allows you to choose from some predefined styles that are of two types: paragraph styles and character styles.
Fast styles are available from a drop-down menu on the main bar.
- Paragraph styles include formatting that is applied to an entire paragraph, (tables, line spacing, borders and indents), and also character formatting (font type, size, color).
Paragraph styles are marked with the ¶ sign.
- Character styles contain information only about the formatting of selected characters within a paragraph.
Character styles include only formatting of characters, letters and numbers.
If you apply a character style within a paragraph, it overrides the paragraph style.
You can edit existing styles, but it's best to leave them where they are and create your own if you want to have this control.
In the new style creation options it is better to add it to the quick styles menu but do not activate the automatic update option.
It is better to use the same style automatically for the following paragraph in order to have a uniform document.
For titles or captions, it is better to use different styles.
All the basics of styles in Word are fully explained in the Italian Office guide on this page.
6) Prepare the document first
There is nothing more frustrating than trying to solve section problems in Word or solve a problem with the styles of a ready-made document.
The best way to write on Word is to do it without worrying about formatting and then, once finished, open a new document, prepare it properly and copy the text from the old to the new, pasting it as unformatted text.
Another article reports a program for pasting copied text without formatting.
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