How to set paragraph formatting in word

A paragraph in Word is any text that ends with a hard return. You insert a hard return anytime you press the Enter key. Paragraph formatting lets you control the appearance if individual paragraphs. For example, you can change the alignment of text from left to center or the spacing between lines form single to double. You can indent paragraphs, number them, or add borders and shading to them.

Paragraph formatting is applied to an entire paragraph. All formatting for a paragraph is stored in the paragraph mark and carried to the next paragraph when you press the Enter key. You can copy paragraph formats from paragraph to paragraph and view formats through task panes.

Paragraph Alignment

Paragraph alignment determines how the lines in a paragraph appear in relation to the left and right margins. The margin is the blank space between the edge of the paper and where the text.

The easiest way to change paragraph alignment is to use the alignment buttons on the Formatting toolbar.

You can also use keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+L = Left Align; Ctrl+R = Right Align; Ctrl+E = Center; Ctrl+J = Justify.

Line and Paragraph Spacing

Line space is the amount of vertical space between lines of text in a paragraph. Line spacing is typically based on the height of the characters, but you can change it to a specific value. For example, some paragraphs may be single spaced and some double-spaced. Single-spacing is Word’s default setting.

Paragraph space is the amount of space above or below a paragraph. Instead of pressing Enter multiple times to increase space between paragraphs, you can set a specific amount of space before or after paragraphs.

1. With the insertion point in the same paragraph, click the down arrow to the right of the Line Spacing button on the formatting toolbar. Choose 2.0 for double-spacing. Choose 1.0 to restore the single-spacing to the paragraph.
2. Right-click the first paragraph and choose Paragraph from the shortcut menu. (You can also open this menu by selecting Paragraph from the Format menu).
3. Click the down arrow to open the line spacing drop-down list and choose Double . You can see the change in the preview box.
4. With the dialog box still open, select Single from the line spacing drop down menu. Notice the change in the preview pane.
5. Choose Multiple from the Line Spacing drop-down list. In the At box, key 1.25 (highlight the text in the box and type over it). Press Tab to see the change in the preview pane.
6. Click OK . Notice that Word has added an extra quarter-line of space between lines in the paragraph.

Exercise:

Changing Paragraph Spacing

You use the Paragraph dialog box to set the space between paragraphs. Paragraph spacing is set in points. If a document has 12-point text, then one line space equals 12-points, one-half line space equals 6-points, double-spacing equals 24-points.

Paragraph Indents

An indent increases the distance between the side of a paragraph and the left or right margin. Indented paragraphs appear to have different margin settings. Word provides a variety of indents to emphasize paragraphs in a document.

Header Styles

Most of Word’s most commonly used styles are contained in the “Home” ribbon tab. If you ever question where a style could be, the first place to check is the “Home tab. Header styles are also found in the “Home” tab, and you can find a long list shown in the center of the Word user interface.

(Styles section in the Home tab)

The styles section shows a preview of the letters, colors and font sizes that you’ll see if you change a section of text to the style. The default selection is the one on the far left named “Normal.” The Normal paragraph format is what you’ll use for most content. Even if you change a font style, color or size, you can still return to the default normal style by just clicking this selection.

Like other font changes, to change content to one of the styles in the list at the top of the document, highlight the text that you want to edit and then click the style.

There are a few styles that you’ll use the most when you create long documents. For instance, you might want to create a table of contents, and Word has styles that you use that will then tell the table of contents generator which headers are titles to new chapters and which ones are sub-chapters.

Notice the “Title” style has the largest letters of all the styles. When you use this style, Word will consider any pages with these styles as main chapters. The “Header 1” style is considered the sub-chapter of the previous Title section. The next header sections are also considered sub-chapters.

If you used older versions of Word, you’ll notice that there are many new styles in the list of options. They are all based on your current default font.

You can customize the styles shown in the menu by right-clicking one and select “Modify.” This opens a new configuration window where you can change the options for a particular style.

(Style configuration window)

In the image above, the “Normal” style was right clicked and the configuration window shows the current settings. Notice that you can choose a different font, font size, bold, italics or underline formatting.

At the bottom of the configuration window, you can see two options to set the new style to only the current document or to the new document template. When you save style changes to the new document template, it’s applied to all documents that you create. When you choose “Blank document” for a new Word file, any changes to the template will persist until you change them back in the template. If you only apply changes to the current document, the styles are available to the current document but will need to be customized again on a new one.

Below the font settings is the paragraph formatting. We’ll cover more paragraph formatting options in the next section, but styles can also be applied to the way a paragraph is configured in Word. You can set content to align to the left, right or center. By default, Word aligns any text to the left. For instance, though, you might want to create a title page with text centered.

Indents are also a part of style formatting. For instance, if you read a paperback book, the beginning of a paragraph has an indent. Word will set indents on styles if you set them in this configuration window.

Stylizing Paragraphs

Fonts aren’t the only changes you can make in Word to customize the way your documents look. By default, Word sets a small space between lines of text, and it automatically creates a space between paragraphs when you use the “Enter” key. You can test this activity by opening a new Word document and type some text. Type enough text so that you have several lines that word wrap in the paragraph.

Press the “Enter” key and Word creates a new paragraph and simulate double spaces by automatically add extra spacing to indicate that a new paragraph is present.

(Paragraph spacing in Word)

In the image above, notice that text in the first paragraph is spaced differently than the text that is shown in the second paragraph.

The “Paragraph” section in the “Home” ribbon tab can make changes to these settings. You can apply them in your styles, but instead of changing styles it’s usually easier to just make quick changes from the “Paragraph” controls at the top of your document window.

(Paragraph formatting tools)

The first section of the paragraph formatting controls is for lists. The first one creates a bulleted list, and the second creates a numbered list. With a numbered list, Word automatically detects the number of entries and increments accordingly. You can also trigger a numbered list by typing a number in a paragraph (with a period) and then press “Tab.” Each time you press “Enter,” an incremented number is added, and the new line item is aligned with the previous one.

The next set of icons mark the controls that indent text to the left or right. You can use the tab key to indent, but any subsequent lines of text will align to the page margins. Using the indent controls, you can force paragraphs to align to larger margins, and then you can return to normal margin spacing.

In the previous image, you can see that the “Left Align” control is highlighted. This tells you that the current paragraph setting is set to left align. If you recall from the style settings, you can also set paragraphs to center and right align. The fourth alignment option creates paragraphs that align on both the right and left. If you look at a newspaper, text aligns on both sides. This is the same alignment that will be set should you use this fourth option.

(Paragraph spacing options)

In the image above, paragraph spacing settings are displayed. The 1.15″ option is selected in this example, which is the default for new documents. The 1.0″ option is common when you want to manually double space content. When you need to transfer content from Word to an online web form, you might need to set this spacing to manually force a double space between paragraphs. When you need to transfer content between your Word document and an online forum, changing these settings can make it easier to copy and paste content with properly formatted paragraphs.

If you change your mind and don’t want to add a space between paragraphs, you can select “Remove Space After Paragraph.” This selection removes any added space between paragraphs. Should you want to return to paragraphs with automatic spacing, click the “Add Space before Paragraph” and the spacing will be placed prior to each paragraph.

You might recognize the icon with squares and a line at the bottom. This is similar to Excel’s controls that add lines around cells. You can add an underline to your paragraphs as well as lines to the right, left and at the top of the text.

Formatting paragraphs and styles is useful when you want to create long documents with a table of contents, several different sub-headers, and ways to create indented content. As you work with Microsoft Word, you’ll find that customizing these styles and setting them in your templates will make it faster and easier to create your documents.

Represents all the formatting for a paragraph.

Remarks

Use the Format property to return the ParagraphFormat object for a paragraph or paragraphs. The ParagraphFormat property returns the ParagraphFormat object for a selection, range, style, Find object, or Replacement object. The following example centers the third paragraph in the active document.

The following example finds the next double-spaced paragraph after the selection.

You can use Visual Basic’s New keyword to create a new, standalone ParagraphFormat object. The following example creates a ParagraphFormat object, sets some formatting properties for it, and then applies all of its properties to the first paragraph in the active document.

You can also make a standalone copy of an existing ParagraphFormat object by using the Duplicate property. The following example duplicates the paragraph formatting of the first paragraph in the active document and stores the formatting in myDup. The example changes the left indent of myDup to 1 inch, creates a new document, inserts text into the document, and applies the paragraph formatting of myDup to the text.

See also

Support and feedback

Have questions or feedback about Office VBA or this documentation? Please see Office VBA support and feedback for guidance about the ways you can receive support and provide feedback.

You can use styles to quickly apply a set of formatting choices consistently throughout your document. If you want formatting choices that are not available from the built-in styles and themes available in Word, you can modify an existing style and customize it to suit your needs. You can change the formatting (such as font size, color, and text indentation) in styles applied to titles, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on. You can also select formatted text in your document to create a new style in the Styles gallery.

The styles covered in this article are located in the Styles gallery, a visual menu located on the Home tab. To apply a style, simply select the text you want to format, and then click the style you want in the Styles gallery. To learn more, see Apply a style to text in Word.

Modify an existing style

You can modify an existing style in the Styles gallery in two ways:

Modify a style by updating it to match formatting in your document

If you have text in your document that already has a style applied, you can change the formatting of that text and apply it to the style in the Styles gallery.

Select text in your document that has the style applied, such as Heading 1.

When you select text that has a style applied, that style is highlighted in the Styles gallery.

Format the selected text with the new attributes that you want.

For example, you might want to change the point size for the Heading 1 style from 16 points to 14 points.

On the Home tab, in the Styles group, right-click the style that you want to change, and then click Update [Style Name] to Match Selection.

Note: All text with the style that you changed will automatically change to match the new style that you defined.

Modify a style manually in the Modify Style dialog box

You can modify a style directly in the Styles gallery, without using the text in your document.

On the Home tab, right-click any style in the Styles gallery and click Modify.

In the Formatting section, make any formatting changes you want, such as font style, size, or color, alignment, line spacing, or indentation.

Choose whether the style change applies to the current document or to all future documents.

Create a new style based on document formatting

You can select formatted text in your document to create a new style that you add to the Styles gallery.

Right-click the text on which you want to base a new style.

In the mini toolbar that appears, click Styles, and then click Create a Style.

In the Create New Style from Formatting dialog box, give your style a name and click OK.

Your new style will now appear in the Styles gallery.

Note: If you want your new style to appear in all new Word documents, right-click it in the Styles gallery, click Modify, and then select New documents based on this template at the bottom of the dialog box.

Support for Office 2010 ended on October 13, 2020

Upgrade to Microsoft 365 to work anywhere from any device and continue to receive support.

Right-click the text on which you want to base a new style, point to Styles, and then click Save Selection as a New Quick Style.

In the Create New Style from Formatting dialog box, give your style a name and click OK.

Your new style will now appear in the Styles gallery.

Note: If you want your new style to appear in all new Word documents, right-click it in the Styles gallery, click Modify, and then select New documents based on this template at the bottom of the dialog box.

Microsoft Word: Paragraph Formatting – Text alignment / line spacing / paragraph spacing / simple bullets

Need to neaten up your Word documents? Luckily for you, we know just the trick! Follow our guide below on how to carry out simple paragraph formatting tasks in Word, such as text alignment, line spacing, paragraph spacing and bullet pointing.

Text alignment

When creating a professional document (or just one that you want to look really neat)

you will need to think about aligning your text. This basically means positioning it so that it all lines up neatly. You can do this using the text alignment buttons in your toolbar. We have highlighted them in red above.

There are four different alignment options.

1. Align Text Left
2. Centre Text
3. Align Text Right
4. Justify Text

It’s completely up to you which text alignment option you choose, however left alignment tends to be the most popular choice.

Line spacing

Word also allows you to alter your line spacing. As the name suggests, this is the space that goes in between each line you type. You can change the settings by clicking on the line spacing button in your toolbar (see the image above).

If you click on Line Spacing Options, you will find other options to choose from. Remember if you have already created a Word document and want to change the line spacing, you will need to highlight the text before selecting a new line spacing option.

Paragraph spacing

If you want more or less space between your paragraphs, you will need to alter the paragraph spacing options in Word. To do this you can either click on Line Spacing Options or click on Format in your toolbar and then Paragraph.

This will bring up the same box as for Line Spacing Options; however you will need to alter the boxes highlighted in red above to change your paragraph spacing. The higher the value you enter, the more space will appear before and after your paragraphs.

To edit paragraphs you have already created, you will need to highlight them first.

Simple bullets

Often you will need to use bullet points in your documents to break up large chunks of text, provide instructions and create lists. Creating simple bullets in Word is really easy.

Simply click on the bulleted list button in the task bar and a bullet point will appear on your screen. If you want to put existing text into simple bullets, simply highlight the text and click the bulleted list button. Every time you press Enter a new bullet point will appear.

Changing bullet points

You can change the type of bullet point you use by selecting a new one from the bullet library. Simply click on the down arrow next to the bulleted list button to reveal the library and make your selection.

You can also change bullet points and add new ones by clicking on Define New Bullet. This will bring up a pop up box where you can import new bullet pictures and change the position of both your bullet points and text.

Thanks to Words easy-to-use features, paragraph formatting is quick and simple.

Want to learn more tips and tricks on how to create professional documents in Microsoft Word? Attend one of our Microsoft Word training sessions. We cover a wide range of topics and cater for all levels of ability.

• Courses
• Dates & Prices
• About Us
• News & Tips
• Terms & Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• 100% Money Back Guarantee
• Contact

Fleet House, 8-12 New Bridge St, London EC4V 6AL
Tel: 0203 603 0150

Surrey Technology Centre, 40 Occam Road, Guildford, Surrey GU2 7YG
Tel: 01483 688 488

It makes it easier to fix those annoying glitches

If you have ever created a complex Word document, you’ve probably run into those frustrating issues where you just can’t seem to get a bullet point or paragraph of text aligned correctly or some text keeps breaking off onto another page when you need it to be on the same page.

In order to fix these types of problems, you have to sometimes manually edit the formatting of the document. In Word, the text of the document is stored separately from the formatting. This is good because it makes it easier to edit the formatting without losing any text.

In this article, I’m going to tell you how to display formatting marks in Word documents. These formatting marks include tabs, hyphens, spaces, paragraph marks, hidden text, page breaks, etc. I’ll also talk about another feature in Word called Reveal Formatting, which lets you see all of the formatting applied to any selected text.

Show Formatting Marks

There are two ways to go about showing formatting or paragraph marks in Word: either using the button on the Paragraph ribbon or by going to Word – Options. The latter method will display the formatting marks all the time for all documents. Using the button, you can toggle the display of the marks and it only affects currently opened documents.

To view paragraph marks in Word, click on the Home tab in the ribbon and then click on the paragraph mark in the Paragraph section.

As an example, here I have some text in Word with basic formatting:

Now if I click on the button above, I’ll instantly see all the formatting marks in the document.

The lines with the arrow pointing to the right are tabs and the single dots are spaces. The hidden text is underlined with a dotted line and the page break shows up at the bottom. If you want to display any particular formatting mark all the time, you can do that by clicking on File and then Options.

Now click on Display in the left-hand menu and you’ll see a section called Always show these formatting marks on the screen.

At the bottom of the list, you can also choose to show all formatting marks too if you like. Now let’s talk about the reveal formatting option in Word.

Reveal Formatting

In addition to viewing paragraph and formatting marks in a Word document, sometimes it’s useful to see what kind of formatting has been applied to text. This is kind of similar to HTML and CSS, if you are familiar with those web protocols.

In order to reveal formatting in Word, just press SHIFT + F1 and a dialog window will appear docked to the right side of the screen.

Now just click anywhere in your document or select some text and you can see all the formatting applied including the font, language, effects, etc. It will also tell you the formatting applied to the paragraph and the section. This is really useful if you need to see exactly what formatting was used to produce a certain look for some text.

It’s also worth noting that the blue links in the dialog are clickable. So let’s say you want to change the font, just click on FONT and it’ll bring up the Font dialog.

Same goes for Effects, Alignment, Indentation, Spacing, Margins, etc. This is another great way to edit the formatting on a select piece of text that may be causing you trouble. These are pretty much all the ways you can edit formatting or view formatting in a Word document. If you have any questions, feel free to comment. Enjoy!

Founder of Online Tech Tips and managing editor. He began blogging in 2007 and quit his job in 2010 to blog full-time. He has over 15 years of industry experience in IT and holds several technical certifications. Read Aseem’s Full Bio

Typing a document is the easy part. Formatting a document for easy reading and printing takes a little more effort. This paper will look at the left, center, right, and full justify. Also, automatic hyphenation and using a non-breaking space.

Let’s use the random function in Microsoft Word to generate a paragraph to demonstrate with. Type =rand(1,6) on a blank line. This will generate one paragraph of six sentences of random text.

Starting Paragraph

Left Justified Ctrl+L

Most of what we write in this country is left justified. This means that the left margins of paragraphs are even and the right side of each paragraph is jagged. That is, the words don’t line up evenly as they do on the left.

Center Justified Ctrl+E

Center alignment is used for titles at times but mainly for creating flyers and posters and not for paragraphs of information. Centered material is more difficult to read.

Right Justified Ctrl+R

Right justification is seldom used in our English language and is very difficult to read.

Full Justified Ctrl+J

Full justified paragraphs are evenly lined up in both margins. Documents that are set up in newspaper column format are usually full justified. Normal documents that are full justified may not look as good. When a paragraph is set to full justify additional spaces are placed between words and this may make the lines difficult to read.

Hyphenate

Hyphenation is usually used with a left-justified paragraph or document to separate words at the end of the lines into two parts automatically to correctly split words. Words like paragraph could be split into para-graph, document into docu-ment, separate into sep-arate, etc. This allows the right margin to be less jagged.

Layout > Page Setup > Hyphenation > Hyphenation Options

Notice the word “elements” is automatically hyphenated as would any other word that could be in the selected text to fit more words on a line.

Non-Breaking Space

Notice also that Mr. Jones is on two lines but should be together. Use a non-breaking space between Mr and Jones by pressing Shift+Ctrl+Space instead of Space between Mr and Jones and they will be treated as one word and will wrap to the next line. This creates a non-printing character that looks like a space on your display and on paper.

I hope these tips are useful to you. I use them in all my writing.

If you’re writing a long document, you’ll need to use paragraphs to avoid walls of text. There are different schools of thought on how best to approach your paragraph layouts. By default, Microsoft Word inserts a space after each paragraph but doesn’t use any indentation.

Some people prefer to indent the first line of each paragraph. You may also want to indent whole sections of your documents, especially if you’re wrapping text around an image. If you want to indent text in Word, here’s what you’ll need to do.

Indenting the First Line of a Paragraph

The most common form of indentation used in documents is to indent the first line of each paragraph—this is, thankfully, a very simple process.

To start, open your Microsoft Word document and type your first paragraph. Once the paragraph is in place, place your blinking cursor at the start of the paragraph, then press the Tab key on your keyboard.

This first line will now become indented.

If you hit the Enter key to start a new paragraph, the first line of your new paragraph will also become indented.

This will apply to every new paragraph you create.

Setting First Line Indentation as the Default in Word

If you want to use the same first line indentation for every document, you can set this as the default formatting option for your Microsoft Word documents.

To do this, place the blinking cursor anywhere in a paragraph that has the formatting you want in place (e.g. a paragraph with an indent applied).

In the Home tab of the ribbon bar, right-click on the Normal style.

You may need to click on the Styles button to find this if you can’t see it already.

After right-clicking Normal, click on the Modify option.

Select Format > Paragraph.

Paragraph” width=”238″ height=”166″ />

In the Indentation section, select the First line option from the Special drop-down menu.

Click OK to confirm, then press the New documents based on this template option.

Click OK to save the option. With this saved, every new document you create will use the first-line indentation by default.

Indenting a Whole Paragraph

If you want to indent the whole paragraph, this is also possible in Word. To do so, select the paragraph you want to indent.

In the Layout tab on the ribbon bar, click the Indent Left upwards arrow, within the Paragraph section.

Continue to click the up arrow to increase the depth of the indent on. You can also type a value (in centimeters) in the Left box itself until you achieve the size you desire.

If you wish to indent the right-hand side of the paragraph as well, repeat the process with the Indent Right box.

Changing Indentation for an Entire Document

You can change the indentation for existing documents using a similar process to the above methods, although there are some variations, depending on the type of indentation you’re looking to use.

There are two types of text indentation available. As we’ve seen above, a first-line indentation will indent the first line of each paragraph. Hanging indentation, in contrast, will indent everything except the first line.

You can apply both using these steps. If you want to apply either type of indent to your entire document, you’ll need to make sure that all text is selected first. You can do this manually, or press Ctrl + A on your keyboard.

With your text selected, right-click your text and press the Paragraph option.

In the Indentation section, select either the First line or Hanging options under the Special drop-down menu.

Press OK to save your chosen text indentation and apply it to your document.

Formatting Word Documents

Text indentation is a useful option for certain document types, including academic documents. If you want to know how to indent text in Word, you may wish to improve your formatting further and create more professional documents.

Academic writers, in particular, may wish to learn how to insert footnotes and endnotes into their documents. If you’re working with others, you should know how to annotate documents in Word to help point out areas for improvements.

• Excel Tips
• Excel Functions
• Excel Formulas
• Word Tips
• Outlook Tips

How to show or hide paragraph marks in Word?

Paragraph mark is the symbol to indicate the end of a paragraph and the beginning of a new paragraph. And here this article will introduce several methods to show or hide the paragraph marks in a Word document easily:

• Method 1: by Show/Hide feature or shortcuts
• Method 2: by configuring Word Options
• Method 3: by using Kutools for Word

In actual, you can quickly show or hide all paragraph marks in current Word document by Home > Show/Hide button which can show or hide all paragraph marks and hidden formatting symbols. See screenshot:

After turn on the Show/Hide toggle button, you will see the paragraph marks and all hidden formatting symbols as below screenshot shown:

Apart from the Show/Hide button, you can also press Ctrl + Shift + 8 keys together to show or hide all paragraph marks and hidden formatting symbols at ease.

Tremendously easy to delete all empty paragraphs (marks) from whole Word document with only one click!

For example, you copied text content from webpage to a Word document, however, hundreds of empty paragraphs are showing in the document, how could you quickly to remove them? Comparing to removing them one by one manually, Kutools for Word’s Remove Empty Paragraph Marks feature provides an tremendously easy way to delete all empty paragraphs from selection or the whole document with only one click! Click for 60-day free trial!

This method will guide you to open Word Option dialog box, and then configure word option to show or hide paragraph marks in Word. Please do as follows:

1. Click File > Options to open the Word Options dialog box.

2. In the Word Options dialog box, please click Display in left bar, and then check Paragraph marks option in the Always show these formatting marks on the screen section. See screenshot:

3. Click the OK button to save the configuring.

From now on, all paragraph marks are displaying in the Word document all the time.

Notes:
(1) After checking the Paragraph marks option in the Word Options dialog box, the Home > Show/Hide button will not be able to hide paragraph marks.
(2) To hide paragraph marks in this condition, please uncheck the Paragraph marks option in the Word Options dialog box.

Kutools for Word’s Display Settings feature provides users with an easy way to show or hide paragraph marks, some other formatting marks, and document content in Word document quickly. Please do as follows:

Kutools for Word is a handy add-in to ease your work and enhance your ability of processing word document. Free Trial for 60 days! Get It Now!

1. Please apply the feature by clicking Kutools Plus > Display Setting. See screenshot:

2. In the check the Paragraph Marks option in the popping out Display Settings dialog box.

And now only the paragraph marks are displaying in the current Word documents as below screenshot shown:

Notes:
(1) After checking the Paragraph marks option in the Word Options dialog box, the Home > Show/Hide button will not be able to hide paragraph marks.
(2) To hide paragraph marks in this condition, please uncheck the Paragraph marks option in the Display Settings dialog box.

Tabbed browsing & editing multiple Word documents as Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explore 10!

You may be familiar to view multiple webpages in Firefox/Chrome/IE, and switch between them by clicking corresponding tabs easily. Here, Office Tab supports similar processing, which allow you to browse multiple Word documents in one Word window, and easily switch between them by clicking their tabs. Click for full features free trial!