Text formatting text like a pro in Microsoft Word

Hi there, in this video we're going to make this letter, we're going to look at the text formatting that makes it happen, especially looking at the things like ‘space after’, the gaps that appear between these lines, so ‘space after’, and ‘line spacing’, also, we'll cover basics like graph, fonts, and font sizes. All right, let's get into it.

So first up, let's bring in our text, so let's go to 'File', 'Open', and I've given you some text, obviously you can just type in your stuff, or copy and paste it from an email, but I've got some stuff for us. So, click 'Open', and what we're going to do is, click 'Browse', and you've got to find out wherever you've downloaded the exercise files, the files that you can download from the site.

I've put mine on the desktop, you might be in 'Documents', and you can see it's called 'Word Exercise Files', try find him, and in here there's the letterhead text. So open that up, I'm going to select all of this, I'm going to copy it. You can hit 'Control C', or you can hit 'Copy' there. Now I'm going to go to closing this one here, by hitting that little cross 'x' in the corner, and now I'm back to my original letter that I’ve set up. And I'm just going to go to 'Paste', and you can see there's a big 'Paste' option here, or you can use 'Control V', it's up to you.

So let's go through my text, it's not formatted yet, so that's what we're going to do next. First things first, I want to play around with the top margin. My letter's kind of sitting too high on the page, so I'll play with margins. We're going to go to 'Layout', 'Margins', and you can play around with just the pre-made ones, or you can go down to-- you can see, just the margins that are spaced from the top, and the left and right. There's a 'Narrow' option, you can see gets it closer, and there are few different ones. We're going to go to 'Custom Margins'.

So, back to normal, and now I'm going to go to 'Custom Margins'. And what I want to do is, I want a nice big top margin of '2.5', it just suits this letter, you can change yours. Let's click 'Okay'. Just going to give it a nice space from the top. You can adjust yours, if you got a really long letter, it's probably going to need to be a little bit higher to fit in all of the copy. 

Now in this video we're not going to cover things like-- If I had a text here, and I go to the word 'Home', this is where you will find all the basic parts, so you can see 'Bold', and 'Italics', and 'Underline'. I'm hoping you can keep smashing away at these, and work those out for yourself. We'll go through some of the more difficult ones together now. Probably the biggest one in terms of laying out your text is something called 'space after'. It gets confused with 'line spacing'. 

So the space between these lines here-- I'd like these to be all grouped together, so we need to play with something called 'space after'. Now, people confuse it with 'line spacing', that's the space between these lines here, it's actually quite a nice space between these lines, but it's this gap that's after a 'return', so there's a 'return' there, and it gets down to the next paragraph. And there's a space there, and I call that the 'space after'. So let's look to change our 'space after'. So let's highlight all of this text here, and click on 'Home', and in the ribbon here there's an option, it's this one here, it's got that little icon, 'Line and Paragraph Spacing'. Drop that down. 

You can see, I can play around with the line spacing, make it big and wide. That's not what I want to do. The 'line spacing' is set to '0', but there's still space between them, and it's called 'Line Spacing'. And if I click on that, you can see it's got a default of 8 points between it. So there's 8 points after each of these paragraph returns, so you could type in '0' here, and it will all be gone. Nice! This actually needs to be away, so we're going to undo. Up the top here, see this kind of reversing arrow here, this is 'Undo'. It means, I've done something wrong, and I can go back one step. You can go forwards again, back, forward, back and forth. So that's 'undo', and 'redo'. I want to remove that. So the same place, there’s an option that says 'Remove Space After Paragraph'. That just sets it back to '0' like we did a second ago. Nice!

Now, that is a space, a bigger space between here, and that’s just because I've got a 'return' in. I've gone through and put a manual 'return' in, and you could do that. If nobody's looking, you could just put 'return's in and you've got a nice big gap in there, and that is fine, but that doesn't make you a Microsoft Word pro, so we're going to turn you into a pro, so we're going to get rid of these 'return's, good bye. It's generally next to it, but we can just add our ‘space after’, so after 'Cayman Islands', have the cursor flashing anywhere in here, I'm going to say, there's my 'Line', I can go to 'Line Spacing Options', and I'm going to set this up to 'space after'. You deal with points instead of inches when we're dealing with 'space before' and 'after', it's the same as the fonts, you have a 8 point font, 12 point font to deal with this spacing and the same sizings. So I'm going to set in '20' here, I'm going to click 'OK'. It just puts a bigger space between these two. 

Now the spacing after these guys, I want all of these, just to make sure they're set to something that I like, so I'm going to select all of these guys, and I'm going to say, "I like you to be line spacing of--" It's set to '8', I'm going to bump it up to '12' just to open it up a little bit, makes it more professional in my opinion. Now in terms of this space after here, so I'm going to click 'Sincerely'. You can highlight it, or you could just have your cursor flashing in there, it's up to you. We go back up here, and we're going to put in a big chunk, so instead of '12', we're going to put in '15'. Nice! Just gets the place for the signature, even though most of the people leave the signature out these days.

Now you can see here, there's a gap between these two, and it's the default of 8 points that's left over, so I'm going to select that for these guys, come up to here, and then I'm going to set 'Remove Space After'. Awesome! 

So, the 'space after' is used to kind of separate out paragraphs, the 'line spacing' however, is this space between these lines, you can see these guys are a lot tighter than these guys, so do the 'line spacing', if I want to grab all of this and just open that out, the lines between here, is I can go up to here, 'Line Spacing', and you can see, as I get bigger they separate out, but most of the time you'll keep it tight, 'line spacing' of '1' or '1.5', and play with this 'space after' to separate out paragraphs.

The last little things, super basics, select it all, make sure you're on 'Home', you can pick a font, and you can pick a size. By default most people are using '12', I find 12 quite large, and I end up at '10'. '10' is what-- If you buy any magazine in the world ever, they're all set to 10 points, so they can fit enough copy in there, it's big enough, the majority of people can read it, but you might be setting yours to '12' or '11', somewhere within that range. 8's getting too small, 8's what business cards are often done in, some people that might be visually impaired, just have poor vision will find '8' typically hard to read, so you can't send bulk letters in '8'. '10' is the minimum, '12' is the maximum, just print it off at the office and see which you prefer. So we're going to set ours to '12' to default, you can pick the fonts from this list here, we'll look at fonts a little bit more detailed later on, and that's going to be us for formatting text in Word, let's get on to the next video.