From the course: Working with Computers and Devices

Formatting text

From the course: Working with Computers and Devices

Formatting text

- [Instructor] Once you have some text in your Word document, you can start formatting the text to adjust how it appears on the page in terms of its size, color, font face, and so on. When it comes to formatting text, all word processors follow the universal rule that the item you want to format must be selected in order to be changed. Selecting text usually means taking your mouse cursor and dragging across the text you want to effect. A quick way to select a single word in your document is to double-click it. But in this case, I want to select this entire heading. So I'll just click and drag through it. So selecting tells the word processor that you want to effect only the text you've selected. After you've selected your text, you'll find your formatting tools. Here in Word, we see formatting tools under the home tab. So with my text selected, I'll come up to the toolbar. I'll click the B button, which makes my text bold. We also have other buttons for formatting here, like I for italicizing text and U for underlining. This is also where you'll find the menus to change the font of your selected text, like so. A useful shortcut in Word is the format painter, which lets you apply the same formatting to other text. So in this case, I made this heading bold, and I changed its font. With it still selected, I'm going to come up to the home tab again and find the format painter. I'll click, and then I'll select the second heading with the format painter tool. And just like that, the same properties are applied to this text. I can do it again by clicking format painter one more time and selecting this third heading. And there it is. But again, the key to formatting text in Word and all word processing applications is to first select the text you want to change, and then make your changes.

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