One of the big time wasters of Microsoft Word is trying to figure out all of the
formatting in a document.
This can be especially time-consuming when you need to work with documents
created by someone else.
One helpful way to find out how a section of text is formatted is to explore the
font and paragraph groups in the Home tab of the ribbon. For example,
for this heading,
the font is Georgia 20 point bold,
and the font color is blue.
The paragraph group shows alignment, bullets,
and other paragraph formatting like line spacing. However,
this is a very manual approach and does not show formatting information
in place. If you want to know exactly how a selection of text is formatted,
use the Reveal Formatting option.
I call this a secret Word formatting trick because most Word users don't know
about it or know how helpful it is when editing and formatting documents.
So to easily view formatting for any current selection and
to open the Reveal Formatting Task Pane, press SHIFT+F1.
The Reveal Formatting Task Pane displays on the right of your screen.
Notice how in one place, we're able to see the font formatting for this text,
as well as other formatting options.
And if we click into other text, such as the body text,
we'll learn more about that as well.
The Reveal Formatting Task Pane is a great tool for troubleshooting formatting
in a document because you can see all the formatting for a selection at a
glance,
but it can also help to bring into focus the concept of the different levels of
formatting and how Word organizes formatting in a document.
In Microsoft Word, formatting is broken into four different categories,
character or font, formatting, paragraph page or document formatting,
as well as section formatting.
To learn more about the different types of formatting in Microsoft Word,
look for my video in this channel, the link is at the top.
The Reveal Formatting Task Pane clearly demonstrates how formatting is
organized with those levels of font, paragraph and section formatting.
To see more details,
all we need to do is look for the little triangle that's just to the left of
that category and we can click on it to expand.
And now here we have information about how the document is set up,
margins and paper size.
Not only do we have the information about the formatting,
but this also gives us an easy way to change the formatting.
So for instance, if I wanted to change the font, this is a hyperlink.
I simply click on Font,
and here I could perhaps change the font color
or the size. And once I apply those formatting changes,
they show up in the text and are updated here in Reveal
Formatting.
So this just gives us a peek behind the scenes so that we can more easily
make updates and changes to our documents. For this document,
once again, I'll open up Reveal Formatting with SHIFT+F1.
In this document, the main headings are formatted with styles.
We can see these here as heading 1, 2, 3,
and there are certainly other style options as well.
That's good to know because Reveal Formatting will identify which
styles are used as well for the selected text.
And for paragraph formatting, you simply need to be just in the paragraph.
You don't need to highlight the entire line of text.
So the formatting for this heading comes from the Heading 1 style.
If I move to this next heading, that is the Heading 2 style.
So this is giving me more information and making it easier to
understand exactly how this document has been formatted.
Reveal Formatting can do even more for us.
How frustrating is it when you need to edit long documents that other authors
have created, edited and formatted sometimes with a real patchwork of skills.
So not only does a Reveal Formatting tell me how this heading is
formatted,
but if it is your job to review and finalize a document others have worked on,
it might be helpful that you compare this to another selection.
So here I'll pick Compare to another selection and
I'll move to this other heading.
And now we can see the formatting differences between those two headings.
This can make it easier to be able to quickly make changes,
but we can take it even further. This doesn't have to be manually changed here.
I'll move to the second heading.
What I could do is Apply Formatting of the Original Selection,
but before I do that,
I'll Select All Text With Similar Formatting.
And now I will apply formatting from the original
selection. So now without even using styles,
which is certainly a better option for longer documents,
we're able to quickly update the changes to the formatting
by using Reveal Formatting.
And if styles are used within a Word document,
use the option Distinguish style source.
This will give us even more information about the specific style names that are
being used for this text.
So here I have Heading 1 and I'll move to Heading 2.
And that's our look at Reveal Formatting,
a little known but oh so helpful option in Microsoft Word for editing
and formatting your document.
For more tips on being productive with Microsoft Word or to sign up for my tips
newsletter, visit TheSoftwarePro.com/Word.
If this training was helpful,
please like this video and subscribe to this channel. This is Dawn Bjork,
The Software Pro. Thanks for watching.