Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Style-Formatted Documents
Setting Word for Optimum Work Environment
No matter what computer you are at, there are certain settings that optimize Word for a
beginning to somewhat experienced user. Under Tools -> Customize -> Options, make
sure that these two choices are NOT checked:
Notice on the toolbar the Paragraph mark (). You can toggle this on and off to find
where the ends of paragraphs are.
neither the best for the sake of aesthetic appearance, readability or access structure.
In this case, dissemination of a document to different groups of readers with
different style requirements is easy.
10. Better formatted documents will get you a better grade. (Probably, but we can't
rule out the possibility that a professor who is less informed about the correct use
of Word will grade you down for doing things correctly).
Of course, the "disadvantages" are that it is a less intuitive initial approach to document
formatting and requires a considerable investment in acquiring the new skills.
Choose Format -> Style. You will see the Style dialog box, shown in the figure below
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The Styles window, upper left, will show a list of available styles.
Immediately below the Styles winsow is a pop-up menu which can show three
things: Styles in use, All styles, and user-defined styles.
A Paragraph preview window, which shows the paragraph appearance for the
style selected in the Styles window.
A Character preview window, which shows the character appearance for the style
selected in the Styles window.
A Description of the characteristics of the Style selected in the Styles window.
Two buttons which allow the user to define a new style or modify an existing
style.
An Organizer button. We won't use this today, but it allows you to move styles
from one document to another.
An Apply button, which lets you apply selected changes before you close the
Styles dialog box.
It is worth noting here that if ever you want to use a built in style, such as, for example,
hanging indent, just put your cursor in the paragraph you wish to format, call up the Style
dialog box (Choose Format -> Style), select All styles in the List, and then find the style
you want and click on Apply. Once you have done this for one paragraph in a document,
that style will be added to the Styles in use
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Body Text
Word has a built-in style called Body Text. The point of the Body Text style is to format
a paragraph so that a) the text is readable and b) each paragraph is discriminated from the
surrounding text. In the days of typewriters, text was discriminated by a paragraph indent,
and sometimes by a space. If the document was double-spaced, then usually the only
discriminating mark was an indented paragraph. During the era of personal computers,
the standard formatting for body text has been evolving. The body text that is built into
Word reflects this evolution. For single-spaced text, the most common practice now is to
include an extra 6 points of space (half of a 12 point line) at the end of each paragraph.
Of course, when people are following other academic style manuals, such as APA, MLA
or Turabian, different body text formats will be in place.
The important point to realize about body text, is that most of the text in a document
should be assigned to that style. Then, if the occasion demands, the entire document can
be reformatted by redefining the body text style. We are now going to reformat the text of
this document.
Select All of the text by either choosing Select All under Edit or striking Ctrl-A.
For this to work properly, you must have your cursor inserted in the document.
First choose Default Paragraph Font from the pull down Style Menu. This is to
wipe out any non-standard text that was imported into the document.
Now type Body Text into the dialog box of the pull down Style Menu, and strike
the Enter key. Immediately, you should see all of the paragraphs in the document
add another 6 pts of space.
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The documents that are emailed to you from the library system will have carriage
returns at the end of each line and a double carriage return at the end of each
paragraph. Use this process to edit them
1. First, search and replace the double paragraph mark with a symbol that is
not contained in the document. Choose Replace All. (I almost always use
the vertical stroke mark [shift-backslash].) What this does is to mark
where the paragraphs in preparation for removing all the paragraph marks
at the end of each line.
2. Note: To get the paragraph mark into search, do the following. Click on
More. Choose Paragraph Mark from Special. Do it again: choose
Paragraph Mark from Special.
3. Now search and replace all the paragraph marks with a space. Choose
Replace All. (Caution: if there are bulleted or numbered lists in the
document, you need to mark them in some other way before you remove
the carriage returns. For example, you could put a double carriage return at
the beginning and end of each list, and then sort out the list elements
later.)
4. Finally, search and replace the vertical stroke mark (or whatever
distinguishing character you initially chose) with paragraph marks.
The documents that you create by copying and pasting text from the web may
only have double carriage returns at the end of each paragraph. These documents
are considerably easier to edit, because you only need to search and replace the
double carriage returns with single carriage returns.
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Now you have what we desire. A document in which paragraph marks are not used to
create vertical spacing, including visual paragraph definition. That is, your document now
contains only carriage returns to mark paragraph breaks, and no other carriage returns.
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