Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Advanced Microsoft Word – Formatting Your Document”.
In this advanced Microsoft Word tutorial, I’m gon na show you some of the most important and powerful formatting options in Microsoft. Word a few weeks ago, I posted my beginner’s guide to Microsoft Word and ever since I did that people have been asking for more Microsoft. Word tutorials and so I’ve decided to release a series of intermediate word tutorials and also advanced Microsoft. Word tutorials, and this is an example of an advanced Microsoft.
Word tutorial, but please watch for my other Microsoft Word tutorials as well. So, as I said, the topic of this particular video is on the formatting options in Word, and you can see here that I have a sample essay that I would like to format a little bit better a little bit differently, and I think the first thing that You need to know about formatting documents in Word is the importance of this little button here. This is the show/hide paragraph marks button and you can find it on the Home tab and ribbon and in the paragraph group there it is, and you click on it and what it does is. If it’s selected, it shows you the underlying formatting that is happening in Microsoft Word, and so these symbols that have appeared they’re not visible in my document really, but they are the underlying formatting, that’s happening, and so each time I see this particular symbol. That means that it’s a new paragraph when this document was created, I hit return and every time I hit return it put in one of those paragraph symbols and most people use word with this turned off and that’s fine.
You can do that, but I do think it is helpful from time to time to see what is actually happening in your Word document with regards to formatting. So now that that’s turned on, let’s look at some of the ways that I can format this document and let’s say that I would like to have on page two, a list of adolescent literature that I recommend and I would like that list to show up right At the top of page two well there’s a couple of ways. I could do that. I could go down to the bottom of page, one, for example, click and then I could just tap return or enter on the keyboard, and I could just press and hold that even and push the rest of my text onto P age, three, and so now, if You look at page two.
I have a completely blank document on which I can create my list of recommended adolescent literature, so that is acceptable. I could do that and it would work and I think it would look nice but notice. The formatting.
Each of those symbols is a new paragraph. There has got to be a better way to do this. Also, what’s gon na happen when I start entering my list of adolescent literature, for example the book of three Ender’s Game, The Hobbit as I enter, these look what’s happening to the text below it’s pushing down my third page of text. Now you might say that’s okay. I can just delete some of these paragraph symbols and that’s true. If I do that. Look, what’s happened, it’s solved that issue. It’S pulled the text back up, but there really is a better way to do what I’ve just done. So I’m gon na cut this list here of adolescent literature and I’m going to get rid of all of those paragraph symbols in word.
Instead of hitting Enter or return a dozen times to create the space that you need, there is a better way to accomplish what I want. So what I want to do is go down to the top of page two. This is where I’d like the list of adolescent literature that I recommend to appear, so I’m just going to tap return or enter to provide a little bit of space there and then I’ll paste in or type in.
My list of adolescent literature give me a minute to finish my list and then I’ll resume the video okay. So there’s my list, a pretty good list of some books that I highly recommend for adolescent readers. So now that I’ve got my list there.
What I would like to do is I would like to push the rest of this text onto page three. Now you may not want to do that, but in my case yes, that’s what I want to do the best way to do that, instead of hitting return 26 times. All I have to do is underneath my list here. I can just go into the Layout tab and click in the page setup group, click on breaks and choose page break and look what that did yet put in a line here, a page break line, but that’s only visible because I have this show. Paragraph marks button turned on so if I turn that off the page break line disappears, but that page brakeline does is it pushes all the rest of the text down to the next page? Now, if I wanted to add another book to the list notice that yes, it does push the page break line down a little bit, but it’s not affecting page three. I could add several more items to the list. Page three is still where I want it to be, so I hope that you see the advantages to using page breaks instead of just hitting Enter a few times now, instead of page breaks, some people prefer section breaks. If you go here to layout breaks, you can choose section breaks next page and it works very similarly, but with section breaks what happens? Is it designates this next page as a completely separate section of my document, and I could create another section break at the bottom of the page, so I’ll do that next page and the nice thing about section breaks is that now that I’ve established them, I could Have different margin sizes inside of this section? Okay, so i’ve just adjusted the margin and let me do that even more drastically, so these are very narrow margins, but notice up here in the first part of my document. It did not change the margins. Why? Because that’s a different section of my document and below the section that I just established look the margins were not affected there either, and this is also true of numbering.
If you have a numbering system within the section that will work, but once you get outside the section the numbering will restart. So to summarize page breaks and section breaks both work pretty similarly, but section breaks have an additional advantage that you can set off a part of the document as a separate section, and then you can change the margins. You can change the numbering and you can even change the orientation of one section of your document will look at orientation in a minute. Okay, I’m gon na go back up to page two and my list of recommended novels and I’m gon na clean that up a little bit and let’s say that I want this list of books to take up less space on the page. Instead of just one long list, why not have it be half the size? I can have half the list here at the left and half the list here on the right.
Well, there’s a couple of different ways: I could do that, but one of the easiest is to click and drag and highlight the list of novels in this case, and I could click here on breaks and do columns that way. But I’m just gon na go here to the columns button and I’ll click. How many columns! I would like how about two and look what it does it splits it in half and puts them in two pretty equal columns notice what’s happening here, though.
The title of this book doesn’t quite fit in the columns as they were created, so I’m gon na undo that just to show you another option that we have with columns. You can go down here to the bottom, where it says more columns and then decide at that point. Oh, I would like two columns column number one. I would like to be two-point-eight width and notice, as I shrink that it’s also changing the column width before column number two.
That’S because of this check mark equal column width, so I can uncheck that, and now I could have the second column actually be wider than the first column. You can also adjust the spacing if you need to, and if you want you can have a line between them notice that it’s applying it to selected text. But if you prefer, you can apply it to selected sections or the whole document. Then just click, OK and it changed how my text appears on the screen, I’m still not thrilled with how that looks. So I’m going to highlight the text, try it again more columns and let’s see if I can get all the text the way I want it now all of the titles fit in the spaces provided really quickly.
There’S a few other options. I want to point out in this article, in addition to page breaks and columns notice, that you also have line numbers. If you would like you, can number the lines and to show this best.
I’M gon na go back up to page one, but here in page one, if I select line numbers continuous notice that it does exactly what you would think, it numbers the lines it’s great for poetry, etc, but I’m gon na undo that in this case another couple Of things, I’d like to point out notice that you can change the size of the paper eight-and-a-half by eleven is what you typically want. But if you really wanted to you could format your document to be executive size or any of those other sizes listed here like legal, I’m gon na stick with letter. Next to that we have orientation. This is a simple but very important, formatting feature that everyone needs to know about by default.
Your word document is going to be in portrait orientation, but you can switch it to landscape if you would like to have a wider document instead of a longer document, I’m gon na switch it back to portrait and then finally, we have margins, and I showed this A little bit earlier, but if you click on margins, you can adjust the amount of space between the edge of the document and the text here at the left and also here on the right, as well as the top and bottom of each page. So those margin options are listed here you can also do custom margins and whatever you choose will affect your whole document. Unless you are using sections, if you’ve set up sections like I did, it will affect only the section that you’re currently in thanks for watching this advanced Microsoft Word tutorial. I hope that you found it to be useful. If you did. Please click the like button below and please consider connecting with me on my social media websites like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, and definitely do subscribe to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and watch for another video. From me, at least every Monday, and if you’re interested in learning more about any of these wonderful novels for young readers, look in the description below. I have links to each of these novels, including A Wrinkle in Time, a movie version of which is about to be released by Disney .