Format --> Font

My horoscope says that I'm going to be very busy for the next six weeks. It seems to me that it's already started! Now it's back to posting...and unfortunately, this isn't going to be an exciting post. It's more about fonts. Boring or no, you need to know about this screen.

To display the Font dialog, display the Styles (or Styles and Formatting) pane, right click on a style, select Modify, and then click Format and then Font.

Word 2010 Dialog



You've seen lots of these fields on the Modify Style dialog. They repeat on the Font page to allow you to bypass them on the Modify Style page and use them on this page while setting up a style with Effects.

Effects
Superscript causes text to appear above the normal line of type.
Subscript causes text to appear below the normal line of type.
Small caps causes text to appear in all uppercase letters but slightly smaller than normal upper case.
All caps cause text to appear in all uppercase letters.

This dialog isn't very exciting in Word 2007 or 2010. The dialog is much more fun in Word 2003. If you're a Word 2003 user, be sure to click each of the options and look at the change in the Preview. For example, you can create a text that looks as if it is embossed. The methods for making similar changes in Word 2007 or 2010 are different. We'll go over it in another post.

When you see the same fields and dialogs with similar names, it's easy to become confused. The way to remember what you are actually doing is to remember how you displayed the dialog.

If you access a dialog by right clicking on a style and selecting Modify, you are making a global change. The global changes you made appear each time you apply the style to text.

If you access a dialog by making selections from the main menu or ribbon, you are making a local change. The local changes you made appear only in selected text.

For the next post, I'm going to skip forward to Format-->Paragraph.