The Edit -> Replace command is a very powerful tool indeed. If you’re writing a Russian novel and you decide on page 816 to change the main character’s last name from Oblonsky to Oblomov, you can change it on all 816 pages with the Edit -> Replace command in about half a minute. But here’s the drawback: You never quite know what this command will do. Newspaper editors tell a story about a newspaper that made it a policy to use the word African-American instead of black. A laudable policy, except that a sleepy editor made the change with the Edit -> Replace command and didn’t review it. Next day, a lead story on the business page read, “After years of running in the red, US Steel has paid all its debts, and now the corporation is running well in the African-American, according to company officials.” Always save your document before you use the Edit -> Replace command. Then, if you replace text that you shouldn’t have replaced, you can close your document without saving it, and then open your document again to get your original document back. Follow these steps to replace words, phrases, or formats throughout a document:

1. Choose Edit -> Replace, or press Ctrl+H.

2. Fill in the Find What text box just as you would if you were searching for text or formats. However, be sure to click the Find Whole Words Only check box if you want to replace one word with another. Depending on which options appear in the dialog box, you might have to click the More button to see all of them. (The previous section, “Finding a word, paragraph, or format,” explains how to conduct a search.)

3. In the Replace With text box, enter the text that will replace what is in the Find What text box. If you’re replacing a format, enter the format.

4. Either replace everything simultaneously or do it one at a time. Click one of these buttons: • Click Replace All to make all replacements in an instant. • Click Find Next and then either click Replace to make the replacement or Find Next to bypass it. The sleepy newspaper editor clicked the Replace All button. Do that only if you’re very confident and know exactly what you’re doing. In fact, one way to keep from making embarrassing replacements is to start by using the Edit -> Find command. When you land on the first instance of the thing you’re searching for, click the Replace tab and tell Word what should replace the thing you found. This way, you can rest assured that you entered the right search criteria and that Word is finding exactly what you want it to find.

Laying Out Text and Pages

This article explains how to format text and pages. A well-laid-out document says a lot about how much time and thought was put into a document. This article presents tips, tricks, and techniques for making pages look just right. In this article, you find out what section breaks are and why they are so important to formatting. You discover how to establish the size of margins, determine how much space appears between lines of text, indent text, handle lists, and hyphenate text, as well as number the pages and handle headers and footers. You will also discover how to lay out pages in newspaper-style columns and put watermarks on pages.

Paragraphs and Formatting

Back in English class, your teacher taught you that a paragraph is a part of a longer composition that presents one idea or, in the case of dialogue, presents the words of one speaker. Your teacher was right, too, but for word-processing purposes, a paragraph is a lot less than that. In word processing, a paragraph is simply what you put on-screen before you press the Enter key. For example, a heading is a paragraph. If you press Enter on a blank line to go to the next line, the blank line is considered a paragraph. If you type Dear John at the top of a letter and press Enter, “Dear John” is a paragraph. It’s important to know this because paragraphs have a lot to do with formatting. If you choose the Format -> Paragraph command and monkey around with the paragraph formatting, all your changes affect everything in the paragraph that the cursor is in. To make format changes to a whole paragraph, all you have to do is place the cursor there. You don’t have to select the paragraph. And if you want to make format changes to several paragraphs in a row, all you have to do is select those paragraphs first.

Inserting a Section Break for Formatting Purposes

Every document has at least one section. That’s why “Sec 1” appears on the left side of the status bar at the bottom of the screen. When you want to change page numbering schemes, headers and footers, margin sizes, and the page orientation, you have to create a section break to start a new section. Word creates one for you when you create newspaper-style columns or change the size of margins. Follow these steps to create a new section:

1. Click where you want to insert a section break.

2. Choose Insert -> Break.

3. Under Section Break Types, tell Word which kind of section break you want and then click OK. All four section break options create a new section, but they do so in different ways:

 -  Next Page: Inserts a page break as well as a section break so that the new section can start at the top of a new page (the next one). Select this option to start a new article, for example.

 -  Continuous: Inserts a section break in the middle of a page. Select this option if, for example, you want to introduce newspaper-style columns in the middle of a page.

 -  Even Page: Starts the new section on the next even page. This option is good for two-sided documents in which the headers on the left- and right-side pages are different.

 -  Odd Page: Starts the new section on the next odd page. You might choose this option if you have a book in which articles start on odd pages. (By convention, that’s where they start.) To delete a section break, make sure that you are in Normal view, click the dotted line, and press the Delete key.

Breaking a Line

To break a line of text in the middle before it reaches the right margin without starting a new paragraph, press Shift+Enter. You can also choose Insert -> Break and select the Text Wrapping Break option button in the Break dialog box. The paragraphs are identical, but lines in the right-side paragraph were broken to make the text easier to read. Line breaks are marked with the ↵ symbol. To erase line breaks, click the Show/Hide button to see these symbols; then backspace over them.

Starting a New Page

Word gives you another page so that you can keep going after you fill up one page. But what if you’re impatient and want to start a new page right away? Whatever you do, don’t press Enter again and again until you fill up the page. Instead, create a page break by doing either of the following:

 -  Press Ctrl+Enter.

 -  Choose Insert -> Break and select the Page Break option in the Break dialog box. In Normal view, you know when you’ve inserted a page break because you see the words Page Break and a dotted line appear on-screen. In Print Layout view, you can’t tell where you inserted a page break. To delete a page break, switch to Normal view, click the words Page Break, and press the Delete key. Change views by clicking the View buttons in the lower-left corner of the screen.

Setting Up and Changing the Margins

Margins are the empty spaces along the left, right, top, and bottom edges of a page. Headers and footers fall, respectively, in the top and bottom margins. And you can put graphics, text boxes, and page numbers in the margins as well. Margins serve to frame the text and make it easier to read. If you change margin settings, indents and page breaks change for good or bad throughout your document. When you start a new document, give a moment’s thought to the margins. Changing the size of margins after you have entered the text, clip art, graphics, and whatnot can be disastrous. Don’t confuse margins with indents. Text is indented from the margin, not from the edge of the page. If you want to change how far text falls from the page edge, indent it. To change margin settings in the middle of a document, you have to create a new section. To set up or change the margins, start by choosing File -> Page Setup. You see the Page Setup dialog box. The Margins tab offers commands for handling margins:

 -  Margins: Enter measurements in the Top, Bottom, Left, and Right boxes to tell Word how much blank space to put along the sides of the page.

 -  Gutter: The gutter is the part of the paper that the binding eats into when you bind a document. Enter a measurement in the Gutter text box to increase the left or inside margin and make room for the binding. Notice on the pages of this article, for example, that the margin closest to the binding is wider than the outside margin. Select the Top option button in the Gutter Position section if you intend to bind your document from the top, not the left, or inside, of the page. Some legal documents are bound this way.

 -  Two-sided documents (inside and outside margins): In a bound document in which text is printed on both sides of the pages, the terms “left margin” and “right margin” are meaningless. What matters instead is in the inside margin, the margin in the middle of the page spread next to the bindings, and the outside margin, the margin on the outside of the page spread that isn’t affected by the bindings. Choose Mirror Margins on the Multiple Pages drop-down list and adjust the margins accordingly if you will print on both sides of the paper.

 -  Apply To: Choose Whole Document to apply your settings to the entire document, This Section to apply them to a section, or This Point Forward to change margins for the rest of a document. When you choose This Point Forward, Word creates a new section.

Indenting Paragraphs and First Lines

An indent is the distance between a margin and the text, not the edge of the page and the text. Word offers a handful of different ways to change the indentation of paragraphs. The fastest way is to use the Increase Indent and Decrease Indent buttons on the Formatting toolbar to move the paragraph away from or toward the left margin:

1. Click in the paragraph whose indentation you want to change; if you want to change more than one paragraph, select those paragraphs.

2. Click the Increase Indent or Decrease Indent button (or press Ctrl+M or Ctrl+Shift+M) as many times as necessary to indent the text. You can also change indentations by using the ruler to “eyeball it.” This technique requires some dexterity with the mouse, but it allows you to see precisely where paragraphs and the first lines of paragraphs are indented:

1. Choose View -> Ruler, if necessary, to put the ruler on-screen.

2. Select the paragraph or paragraphs whose indentation you want to change.

3. Slide an indent marker with the mouse.

• First-line indent marker: Drag the down-pointing arrow on the ruler to indent only the first line of the paragraph.

• Left indent marker: This one, on the bottom-left side of the ruler, comes in two parts. Drag the arrow that points up (called the hanging indent marker), but not the box underneath it, to move the left margin independently of the first-line indentation. To move the left indentation and the first-line indentation relative to the left margin, slide the box. Doing so moves everything on the left side of the ruler.

• Right indent marker: Drag this one to move the right side of the paragraph away from or toward the right margin. If you’re not one for “eyeballing it,” you can use the Format -> Paragraph command to indent paragraphs. Choose Format -> Paragraph or double-click the Left or Right indent marker on the ruler to open the Paragraph dialog box, and then make selections in the Indentation area.

Putting Newspaper-Style Columns in a Document

Columns look great in newsletters and similar documents. And you can pack a lot of words in columns. However, the Columns command is only good for creating columns that will appear on the same page. Running text to the next page with the Columns command can be problematic. Before you put text in newspaper-style columns, write it. Take care of the spelling, grammar, and everything else first because making text changes to words after they’ve been arranged in columns is hard. Columns appear only in Page Layout view. Sometimes it is easier to create columns by creating a table or by text boxes, especially when the columns refer to one another. In a two-column résumé, for example, the left-hand column often lists job titles (“Facsimile Engineer”) whose descriptions are found directly across the page in the right-hand column (“I Xeroxed stuff all day long”). Creating a two-column résumé with Word’s Format -> Columns command would be futile because making the columns line up is nearly impossible. Each time you add something to the left-hand column, everything “snakes” it gets bumped down in the lefthand column and the right-hand column as well. There are two ways to create columns: with the Columns button on the toolbar and with the Format -> Columns command. Format -> Columns gives you considerably more leeway because the Columns button lets you create only columns of equal width. To use the Columns button, follow these steps:

1. Select the text to be put in columns or simply place the cursor in the document to “columnize” all the text.

2. Click the Columns button on the toolbar. A menu drops down so that you can choose how many columns you want.

3. Click and drag to choose how many columns you want. Word creates a new section if you selected text before you columnized it, and you see your columns in Print Layout View. Very likely, they don’t look so good. It’s hard to get it right the first time. You can drag the column border bars on the ruler to widen or narrow the columns, but it’s much easier to choose Format -> Columns and play with options in the Columns dialog box. If you want to start all over, or if you want to start from the beginning with the Columns dialog box, here’s how:

1. Select the text to be put in columns, or put the cursor in the section to be put in columns, or place the cursor at a position in the document where columns are to start appearing.

2. Choose Format -> Columns.

3. Choose options in the Columns dialog box and, as you do so, keep your eye on the Preview box in the lower-right corner. Here are the options in the Columns dialog box:

 -  Preset columns: Select a Presets box to choose a preset number of columns. Notice that, in some of the boxes, the columns aren’t of equal width. Choose One if you want to remove columns from a document.

 -  Number of Columns: If a preset column doesn’t do the trick, enter the number of columns you want in the Number of Columns text box.

 -  Line between columns: A line between columns is mighty elegant and is difficult to do on your own. Select the Line Between check box to run lines between columns.

 -  Columns width: If you deselect the Equal Column Width check box, you can make columns of unequal width. Change the width of each column by using the Width text boxes.

 -  Space between columns: Enter a measurement in the Spacing text boxes to determine how much space appears between columns.

 -  Start New Column: This check box is for putting empty space in a column, perhaps to insert a text box or picture. Place the cursor where you want the empty space to begin, open the Columns dialog box, select this check box, and choose This Point Forward from the Apply To dropdown list. Text below the cursor moves to the next column. To break a column in the middle and move text to the next column, click where you want the column to break and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter or choose Insert -> Break and select the Column Break radio button.

Numbering the Pages

Word numbers the pages of a document automatically, which is great, but if your document has a title page and table of contents and you want to start numbering pages on the fifth page, or if your document has more than one section, page numbers can turn into a sticky business. The first thing to ask yourself is whether you’ve included headers or footers in your document. If you have, go to “Putting Headers and Footers on Pages,” also in this article. It explains how to put page numbers in a header or footer. Use the Insert -> Page Numbers command to put plain old page numbers on the pages of a document. You see the Page Numbers dialog box. This dialog box actually inserts a {Page} field inside a frame in the header or footer. In the Position and Alignment drop-down lists, choose where you want the page number to appear. Deselect the Show Number on First Page check box if you’re working on a letter or other type of document that usually doesn’t have a number on page 1.