There are at least six ways of directly applying various kinds of character formatting:

• Using the Font group on the Home tab
• The Font dialog box (Ctrl+D or Ctrl+Shift+F, or click the Font group Dialog Box Launcher)
• The Mini Toolbar (hover the mouse over selected text)
• Using shortcut keys
• With the Font group or components placed on the QAT
• Using the Language tool on the status bar

In this section, I’ll describe these methods and try to give you a sense of which ones to use. A lot depends on your working style, but it can also depend on what you happen to be doing. On any given day, I’ll probably use at least five of the six methods.

Formatting techniques
To apply character formatting, you have three basic options:

• Stream method—Apply formatting before you start typing a word or passage, and then turn it off when you’re done. For example, click the Bold tool, type a word, and then click the Bold tool again.
• Selection method—Select the text you want formatted by dragging over it or using a keyboard shortcut and/or the mouse, and then apply the formatting.
• Whole-word method—Click anywhere in a word and then choose the desired formatting.

Repeat formatting (F4)
A tremendous time saver in Word is the Repeat Formatting command, invoked by pressing F4. Actually, F4 will repeat typing and many other actions too, but I find it most useful for repeating formatting.

Suppose, for example that you’re scanning a newsletter looking for people’s names, which need to be made bold. There’s John Smith, so you select his name and press Ctrl+B. Thereafter, however, it might be faster to position one hand on the mouse and the other at the F4 key. Click on Jane; press F4. Click on Doe; press F4. Or, click to select Jane Doe as a phrase, and then press F4. The F4 key enables you to temporarily forget about pressing Ctrl+B, right-clicking, or traveling to the top of the Word menu in search of a formatting tool.

Now, let’s try something else. Click on a word and press Ctrl+B to make it bold. Now press Ctrl+I. Now the text is bold and italic. Click on another word and press F4. It’s only italic! That’s because F4 repeats only the
most recent formatting (or other action).

Note that F4 and Ctrl+Y both do the same thing. Which you use is your choice. Many prefer F4 because it can be pressed with one finger. Others prefer Ctrl+Y because it doesn’t involve as much of a stretch as F4.

Copy formatting
Sometimes, the moment for using F4 has passed, yet you’re still left needing to reapply compound formatting. I’m assuming that for whatever reason you’re not using a character style. Be that as it may, there are two common methods for copying formatting: the Format Painter and the Copy Formatting keystroke.

Note that these techniques aren’t limited to character formatting. They’ll work with many other kinds of formatting as well.

Format Painter
To use the Format Painter, click or select the item whose formatting you want to copy. If you want to clone that formatting just once, click the Format Painter in the Clipboard group on the Home Ribbon, shown in Figure 5-3. If you want to apply that formatting multiple times, then double-click the Format Painter.

Note that the mouse pointer turns into a paintbrush. Honestly! That’s what it’s supposed to be! Next, if you’re copying formatting to a whole word, click the word you want formatted. Presto! If you’re copying to any other group of characters, then use the mouse pointer to select the destination text. If you double-clicked the Format Painter, continue this until you’re done. Press Esc or click the Format Painter again to exit format painting mode.

Keyboard method
If you don’t care for the Format Painter, that’s perfectly okay. You’ll need to know about two keystrokes:

• Ctrl+Shift+C—Copy Format
• Ctrl+Shift+V—Paste Format

You might have noticed Ctrl+Shift+C in the Format Painter’s tooltip in Figure 5-3. This works very similarly to the Format Painter. Click in or select the text whose formatting you want to copy, and press Ctrl+Shift+C.

Observe the mouse pointer. It’s the Format Painter pointer! Now, move to or select the text where you want the formatting copied and press Ctrl+Shift+V. Note that there is no keyboard equivalent for the multi-copy
method (double-clicking on the Format Painter), but you can combine the two methods, initiating the process by double-clicking the Format Painter and then following through using Ctrl+Shift+V.

Clear formatting
There are several degrees of clearing formatting. Here, I’ll talk about two of them:

• Clear direct character formatting (ResetChar)
• Clear all formatting (ClearAllFormatting)

The first is the venerable Ctrl+Spacebar command known and loved by many in every version of Word they can remember. It’s also a widely misunderstood command. This command does not remove all character formatting.

It removes all direct character formatting. So, if the selected text’s formatting all comes from styles applied to the text—regardless of how bizarre or compound the formatting might be—Ctrl+Spacebar will have no effect whatsoever.

For example, when you apply Heading 1 to a section of text, it becomes bold. Ctrl+Spacebar can’t touch that bold formatting since it was applied though the style rather than by pressing Ctrl+B or clicking the bold tool. If you use direct formatting to italicize a word in an otherwise non-italicized heading, however, now Ctrl+spacebar can remove it.

New feature alert!
The second type of format removal is completely new to Word 2007. It is accessible using the Clear Formatting tool on the Home Ribbon, shown in Figure 5-4. This command is quite different from Ctrl+spacebar.

This new command is the moral equivalent of copying a selection to the Clipboard and then using Paste Special?Unformatted Text to paste it back into the document. It strips out all formatting.

The Font group
The Font group (or chunk as it’s more affectionately called) on the Home tab is shown in Figure 5-5. The Font group is compressed or expanded depending on the width of the current Word window. In its full glory, the Font group can display up to 14 separate controls.

Four of the Font tools feature Live Preview:

• Font (e.g., typeface name, such as Calibri)
• Size
• Highlight color
• Text color

As shown in Figure 5-6, Live Preview shows you the results of the selected (but not yet applied) formatting. Two of the Live Preview controls—font and size—can be rolled up and out of the way, as shown in Figure 5-6. The other two cannot.

As shown in Figure 5-7, there’s also a fifteenth control—the Font Dialog Box Launcher. The Font dialog box is nearly identical to its counterpart from Word 2003, with most of the differences owing to the removal of the Text Effects tab.

Some of the icons in the Font group might seem a bit obscure and indistinct. Hover the mouse pointer over each of the controls to see what they do. Notice that for many of the controls, if shortcut keys exist, they are indicated in the Enhanced ScreenTip. However, this is not the end of the story. Some tools, for whatever reason, might not show the shortcuts. Jump ahead to the section “Character formatting shortcut keys” later in this chapter if you’re just dying to know what’s assigned to what.

Typeface or font
Some call it font, some call it typeface. Some skirt the nomenclature issue simply by saying what typeface or font they want (Times New Roman, Arial, etc.). Whatever you call it, it’s key to a document’s appearance.

Point size
Size controls the height of the font, generally measured in points. A point is 1/72 of an inch, so 12 points would be 12/72 of an inch. For Word, a font set’s point size is the vertical distance from the top of the highest ascending character to the bottom of the lowest descending character.

You aren’t limited to the range of sizes you see in the Home tab of the Ribbon. Word can go as low as 1 point and as large as 1,638 points. Plus, you can set the height in increments of .5. Hence, a point size of 1637.5 is perfectly valid.

As with typeface, Word 2007 will no longer let you make a key assignment that takes you directly to the exposed size control. While Ctrl+Shift+P did that in Word 2003 and earlier, Ctrl+Shift+P now simply takes you to the Font dialog box, where size is highlighted.

Grow/Shrink tools and keyboard shortcuts
Text size can also be controlled using the Grow Font and Shrink Font tools (refer to Figure 5-5). If you hover the mouse pointer over each, you’ll also learn that they both have shortcuts, Ctrl+Shift+> and Ctrl+Shift+<, respectively.

If you click the drop-down arrow next to the Point Size tool, you’ll notice that the fonts listed are not all even increments of 2. Instead, they go from 8 to 28 in steps of 2, but then they leap to 32, 48, and 72. The Grow and Shrink font tools follow the listed increments. If you want a finer degree of control (for example, when you’re trying to make text as large as possible without spilling onto an additional page), you should know about two additional default shortcut keys: Ctrl+[ and Ctrl+]. These two commands shrink or grow the selected characters by 1 point. The extra granularity
often is just what you need to find the largest possible font you can fit inside a given space, such as a page, table, or text box.

Color
Word has three color settings that can be applied at the character level:

• Text color—The color of the characters themselves
• Shading—The color of the background immediately behind text
• Highlighting—The electronic equivalent to those neon-colored felt markers you use to annoy people who ask you to read things you don’t want to read

Text color
Text color is pretty self-explanatory, except when it’s not. Most of us know what red, black, and blue are, but what is Automatic? Automatic can be Black or White and is based on the shading. If the shading is so dark that black text can’t be read without difficulty, Word automatically switches the display color to white.

Shading
We’ll talk about design considerations in a later chapter. For now, note a few things about shading that sometimes escape notice. Looking at the Home tab and the placement of Shading (second from the right under Paragraph), you might be tempted to believe that shading is paragraph-level formatting. Indeed, it sure acts that way. With nothing selected, Shading acts on the entire current paragraph. (You’ll learn more about this later.)

However, if you select a single word or character, Shading suddenly acts like a character formatting attribute. Well, that’s what it is. Because people seldom vary the shading within any given paragraph, it is treated as a paragraph attribute by Word’s interface. Yet, just like font, point size, bold, and italic, shading is a character attribute.

As shown in Figure 5-8, shading also affects the display of text color. In this case, the shading color is maroonish, which you can’t tell in the printed version of this book. Keep the character aspect of shading in mind when we look at the Font dialog box, coming up shortly.

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