1. Paragraph and Page Formatting in Word
This is a segment of the draft version of a large syllabus. I need your feedback to improve it. There is a voice recorder capture your suggestions during the presentation.
The nature of my objectives for this presentation differs somewhat from other segments. This talk is rather analytical. I describe how Microsoft put Microsoft Word together. What are the elements within Word.
Graham Seibert
Copyright 2006
This is a segment of the draft version of a large syllabus. I need your feedback to improve it. There is a voice recorder capture your suggestions during the presentation.
There is a full script, slide by slide, in these notes. I recommend that you open each presentation in which you are interested and do give the commands File →Print →Notes Pages. This is a dynamic presentation, designed for computer delivery rather than reading in a print copy. The printed slides themselves serve only to show your place in the presentation. The printed copy will be garbled, with text and images overlaying each other, but you can used the printed notes to walk through the presentation itself, clicking where indicated.
Because the notes were captured using voice recognition software, they are in a conversational style. I may not have caught all of the recognition software’s oversights. Please be tolerant of small errors such as and for an or on for in.

2. Objectives Provide some insight into the elements of a Word document
Body text
Headings and Footers
Inclusions
Describe the sources of defaults and their rough hierarchy
Styles
Normal Style
Templates
Overview of bullets and numbering
Provide a few practical examples
Among the elements that you see in Microsoft Word are body text, which makes up the bulk of the document, page headings and footings, and various types of inclusions such as pictures, charts, tables, and text boxes.
Hand in hand with power goes complexity. Microsoft deals with the vast number of settings that you can potentially make by providing defaults for most of them. You are probably unaware of most of the defaults that are operative as you create a document. You become extremely aware, however, when one of them works against you. Your document seems to do crazy things and you have no clue as to why it is happening.
I want to arm you with an understanding of how Word applies its defaults, and where to look to change them if they are not to your liking.
Along the way I'll provide a few practical examples, links to real documents that you can use to work out some of the concepts I describe. That's part of the philosophy of this series of talks. I leave the PowerPoint presentations in your hands, with their hyperlinks to examples, so we can work through them together in a seminar, or you can work them on your own by reading through the oral portion of this presentation in the notes, and working on the examples yourself.

3. Rough Hierarchy of formatting sources
Word-level: fonts, colors, italics, etc.
Paragraph level, just discussed
Style, standard settings for the paragraph
“Normal” style is usually the default
Section (of a document) can have its own
Headers and footers
Page setup: orientation, margins, etc.
Column formatting
Template, referenced explicitly or by default when creating a new document
Let's start by talking about how Word sees a page being composed. Contrast it with a typewriter. With the typewriter you basically have one given, which is the sheet of paper the text has to fit . After that the formatting is entirely up to you. Microsoft Word is of course a program, a huge program, and it includes a lot of programmed logic to handle the formatting for you. I'm going to go over this top-down and bottom-up.
From the bottom up, at the word level you can specify fonts, colors, italics and all the aspects of appearance of a particular word.
Next is the paragraph level. There are a lot of characteristics of paragraphs such as line spacing indentations tabs and so on. The paragraph is a very important concept in Word and I'll spend some time on this.
The next level is a style, something that you may or may not have paid attention to. A style defines all of the paragraph attributes, and then some, but it usually is something that is provided for you and you don't have to pay attention to it.
There’s another logical break that should probably be haven't had to deal with explicitly. That's a section. You can break a document into different sections to handle different orientations, such as landscape for some hand portrait style for others, or different numbers of columns. You may want to have, for instance, a paper written in a two column style, but put the bibliography in a standard academic format with one column. Again as something you usually don't need to get into, but you should know that the concept of a section exists.
Last thing cover is templates. When you start a new document you usually get a template called normal.doc. That brings up all of the defaults are used to when you open a Word document. You can have your own templates and come up with other defaults and this may be especially useful for you teachers, if you want your students to, for instance, submit their papers doublespaced, so you have some white space where you can insert comments.

4. How a page is formatted Printer and paper Page setup: margins
Page header and footer
Paragraphs within what’s left
Now I'm been taken from the bottom up., with a somewhat more physical perspective.
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Start with the printer and paper. These are very physical concepts. You usually use 8.5 x 11 paper in portrait orientation. However of course sometimes you use legal paper, and sometimes you be feeding special sizes of paper through your printer. The printer itself has physical limitations. My laser printer will only go within a quarter-inch of the side margins of a letter-size piece of paper.
The printing area on a physical page is a logical concept. It's like setting the margins on a manual typewriter for those you to remember what those are. You establish the printing area by setting margins to define the boundaries within which the text is to be kept. The defaults in the normal.dot template you get if you don't specify anything else is to have inch and a quarter margins on the sides in one-inch margins top and bottom on a document. I'm kind of cheap. I hate to waste that much paper. I usually change the side margins to one-inch, which is perfectly acceptable visibly.
While we’re defining the print area we can have headers and footers headers and footers sneak in between the limits of the printable area and the margins that we defined for the body text. I'm going to spend some time on headers and footers, because it's an immense help to you the teacher if papers are identified with the student's name in the page number on every page. You'll probably find it worthwhile to provide your students with some guidance on how to do this, or maybe even a template that pretty much does it for them.
And now that we've made a bed for the text it's time to get some text into it. I borrowed some from one of my favorite writers, Patrick Welsh, who teaches at TC Williams, and often contributes to the Washington Post. Here we see some paragraph text. I want you to notice the things that are characteristic of a paragraph. At the beginning we see there is a first-line indent. We also see that there is a paragraph indent, applying to all the lines in the paragraph. This is the distance between the printable area that we set through the margins, in this particular paragraph. You notice that this is done at space and a half.
You may or may not be able to notice that the space between one paragraph and the next is a full double space. That is another paragraph attribute. Also the text format is associated with a paragraph, that is to say that there is a default for the paragraph unless you override it. And this paragraph it looks like it's got 18 point Times new Roman font.

5. A template provides first-level defaults
Text format: Times New Roman, 12 point, no indentation, single space
Here we’re looking at the default text layout through the normal.doc template. It's like I described to you.. The left margin is an inch and a quarter, right margin also an inch and a quarter, top and margin margins are one-inch. There are no-header and no footer. Paragraphs are single space with no indentation. There's also no spacing specified between paragraphs. That looks a little funny. Take a look at this last paragraph here. What you usually do is simply hit the return key twice. This is a very easy template or style to use, which is why it's the default. But it may not be what you always want.

6. Page setup: Margins
Teachers may want smaller margins but double spacing to write corrections
Working our way then from bottom to top this is the menu for page set up. Notice that the page setup is under the file menu, the place for functions that have to do with physical stuff. You get this menu and to specify both the right and left margins and top and the bottom margins. This outlines the printable area of the page.

7. Pages are physical, defined by
Paper
Size
Orientation
Margins (how wide they have to be depends on the type of printer)
Paper Source (which tray. Manual feed?)
And stuff you usually don’t use:
Background color
Background patterns
The page definition menu we just saw is where you define page orientation, whether landscape or portrait. Most printers to give you the option of automatic or manual feed. They may have a couple trays, one with legal and one with letter-size paper. Also there are some paper set-up options that you don’t usually use but should know are available. Word can apply a background color and background patterns to the pages as they are printed. These aren’t strictly physical processes, but it's as if you had some sort of stock paper or letterhead if you were putting in the printer.

8. Page Setup: Headers and Footers
We saw where the headers and footers go on a page. Now here's how to get them there. You go to the view menu and say you want to view headers and footers. This little bar comes up and remains up until you press close. You can use the buttons over to the right to flip between header and footer.
You notice when you're looking at headers and footers that there is a ruler at the top that has three tabs. There is a left tab on the left, a center tab in the center and a right tab on the right. The expectation is that your header and footer will probably consist of up to three parts, one of them against the right margin, one on the left margin and one centered on the page. Defaults for these tab positions default are the same as the normal.dot defaults. That is to say, left margin and right margin at one a quarter inches. If you're using smaller margins you have to move them.
You usually you want your students to put a title on the paper, and you'd like to see that title on every page along with a the student’s name and a page number in case a paper clip falls off or a page rips away from the staple. You can have the date and the page number automatically inserted in either the header or the footer. In this example I put it in the header to save space, but normally you'd want to put the name in the page number in the footer.
Identify the student and assignment, number the pages

9. Headers and Footers
Fit within the margins you define for the page; leave room for them.
Entries for
Date
Page number / Maximum pages
Place to put watermarks such as “do not copy”
Accommodates separate first and subsequent pages
Headings and footings can be separate for each section of a document.
So here's kind of a recap on working with that menu we just saw. First of all headers and footers fit into the margins you defined, that is, between the physical limits and the logical boundaries. If you make your header or footer larger than will fit, it pushes the top and the bottom margins up or down accordingly. There are entries for the date, the page number, and the total number of pages. The header and footer is where you put watermarks. Students aren't normally going to want to do this, but you as a teacher may sometimes want to make something confidential or say “do not copy.” Or you may have some copyrighted material you want to remind everyone is to put a watermark in there that says copyright. Watermarks work just as you'd hope. They are semi transparent, which means that while the body type and graphics overlay them, the watermark underneath remains legible.
The first page of the document is often a title page. If you pay attention to my PowerPoint presentations that's how they work as well. Looking at this PowerPoint slide you'll see I have my own footer which includes the page number, a copyright notice and the title of the presentation. I've requested that this footer not show up on the title page, because the title page says it all in bold type.
I mention sections a moment ago one of the reasons for dividing a document into sections is so that you can have separate headings and footings. You split a book into chapters. In academic papers you usually want to do this to give separate headers and footers to your bibliography, for instance. It may not be as widely used in high school but again you ought to know the facility is there.

10. Document Sections are Logical units
Insert → Break → Section
Respecify page layout: margins & orientation
Redefine headers, footers and numbering
(Re)define columns
Multiple logical pages per printable page, like a newspaper or magazine
Columns usually establish the placement of tables and pictures
Here's how you get a new section. You do insert—break-- section from the top of the Word menu. Again, within a section you can change the page layout, the margins and page orientation. You can respecify page headers and footers and restart page numbering.
Another thing you can do that we haven't previously covered is to define or redefine columns. In doing something like the newsletter you often want to put it in magazine or newsletter format with multiple columns per page. A column in Word works like a logical page. That is to say, Word formats each column as if it were its own page, but then puts columns side by side to make up a single larger physical page. In composing a page you can tell Word to place tables and graphics relative to the physical page, the page margins or to the column margins. You usually want to use the columns.

11. Paragraph Formatting The Menu Indents Line spacing
Whole paragraph
First line
Hanging
Line spacing
Before and after paragraph
A minute ago I showed you the stuff that goes into paragraph formatting. Now I'd like to show you the menu structure for setting it up.
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Here it is under format, paragraph.
You see all of the things that you need to set. You can do the alignment left. That's what we normally do. An alternative would be right, in which case there would be a ragged margin on the left. Other options are centered which would make it ragged on both sides, and fully justified, which would make it line up neatly on both the left and the right margins by varying the space between words and letters within each line.
The example we looked at before showed an entire paragraph indented. You'd want to do this if you were, for instance, including a citation from somebody else's work. So the left and the right indentation circled here specify how to indent an entire paragraph.
The most common form of indentation of course applies to the first-line, to indicate the start of a paragraph. That's especially important in a case like this, in which the line spacing doesn't provide a visual indication of the break between paragraphs.
A hanging indent is the inverse of first-line indentation. It means that the first-line is on the left margin and the remaining lines in the paragraph are further indented.
Line spacing is single by default. For school work you usually want space and a half or double. If you as a teacher give an assignment length in terms of pages, it's usually pretty important to specify the spacing, margins, and font size you want to see. The alternative, specifying a word count, favors word processors. They will count words for the student.
The spacing before and after paragraphs is something that you usually don't need to work with. I'll say that it does make for a better looking document, if you have enough space to visibly indicate a paragraph break, without using a full two lines. I often use six points after a paragraph which has the effect of giving me a line and a half if I'm in a 12 point font.

12. Lines vs. Paragraphs With typewriters we thought about lines
Line indentation
Line tabs
In Word, a line has no meaning except in formatting a document for printing
Lines adjust themselves automatically depending on margins, font size, insertions and deletions
Instead, think about paragraphs
It is worth discussing the difference between lines and paragraphs. With typewriters we only thought about lines. We would visibly set to tabs in the tabs on the typewriter applied to every line that you typed. A typewriter doesn't know a thing about paragraphs.
In Word the opposite is true. A line is the thing that doesn't have any meaning. It's a paragraph that you want to think about. The lines within a paragraph adjust themselves automatically as you insert and delete text, change the margins, change the font size, or make whatever other formatting changes you may want.

13. Paragraphs carry formatting:
Indentation
Line spacing
Spacing before and after
Text block control
Keep together
Keep with next
Tab settings
Alignment
Example
Is what you get when you hit the Enter key, sometimes labeled return on Apple keyboards. You can ask Word to show you the paragraph marks on your screen, even though they never print. I find it very useful and I'll show you how to do it in a minute.
In any case paragraphs carry all of the formatting that I've mentioned before and I've outlined here. I'm going to duck out here to take a moment to show you an example working in Word itself instead of PowerPoint.
Enter Key

14. Paragraphs in Word (cont’d)
Paragraphs “survive” cuts, pastes, and other formatting changes.
Paragraphs exist within
Pages
Columns
Text Boxes
Cells in Tables
Computers do weird things. Paragraph formatting is a common culprit if
Text disappears or moves unexpectedly
Single letters string down the page
The sense of the paragraph survives cut and paste, insertions and other formatting changes you may make. What this means is that you can move paragraphs around without messing up their formatting. If you merge text from one paragraph into another, the merged text usually assumes the characteristics of a paragraph into which you put it.
Of course you know that paragraphs exist within body text. That's what we're looking at in all of these examples. Paragraphs also exist within columns, text boxes, and cells in tables. The columns make good intuitive sense: a column is just a small logical page on a bigger physical page.
A text box is a block of text set apart from the body text and separately formatted. It is only common sense that the text in a text box should have its own paragraph formatting.
Microsoft Word tables are a huge topic, one to which I've dedicated another PowerPoint presentation. A table is an arrangement of rectangular boxes into which you can put text or numbers. The important thing to know is that each cell is formatted as a paragraph. You usually don't want to change the paragraph settings, but sometimes the defaults that applied to a cell can be very confusing. In the worst-case you may copy something into a table and see it disappear altogether because there is no room for the text within the indentations specified for that cell of the table. Another common thing is for you to change the formatting and see your text spewed in single letters streaming down the page. In that case again the culprit is usually the indentation specified for paragraph formatting within a table.

15. Paragraph format is “carried” by paragraph mark
The Enter key mean “new paragraph” though it is often taken as merely “new line”.
There is a “new line” character. Use Shift → Enter to get it
A “new line” has no meaning in formatting for anything other than printing. Think instead of one-line paragraphs when you use the Enter key to create a series of lines.
Choose Tools → Options → View → Formatting Marks → All to see these formatting characters
New Line
As I just mentioned, the enter key means “new paragraph” though it's often mistaken to mean simply “new line.” There is in fact a “new line” character. Use shift and entered to get it. It looks like a bent arrow, what you see here on the slide, the same graphic as is on the enter key itself.
So just to repeat myself, you should be thinking of a series of one line paragraphs when you keep hitting the enter key to space out your text, rather than thinking of them simply as a series of lines.
I recommend that you choose tools, options, view, formatting marks, all. This will cause things like the paragraph mark the new line indicator and tab indicators to show up on the screen and help you format your document. Whether or not they appear on the screen, they will never show up on printed documents. Seeing these things on the screen can give you a lot of information about why Word might be putting things where it is.

16. Tables Organized into rectangular cells
Each column has its own indentation and tabs
Tabs and tables merit their own presentation.
I mentioned that paragraph formatting applies to tables. While it can be applied to individual cells, it is usually done at the column level. This makes sense, as a column generally consists of repeated instances of the same type of information.
In this example the first few columns are left justified text. The second column has first-line indentation to visually identify paragraphs within the column. The numeric data on the right is right-justified.
That’s just a taste of what tables are like in Word. I have a complete PowerPoint presentation dedicated to tabs and tables.

17. Styles
There are always defaults as you type for:
Font, font size, font style
Line and paragraph spacing, indentation
Unless overridden, they come from a Word “style”
Unless you chose otherwise, that style is “normal”
You can define styles for your own use. If this were a Word style it would be:
24-point Ariel font, not bold, not italic, white on blue
Single spaced, no indents
Margins at 0 and 8.8, tabs at .4, .5 and .9
If I saved it in Word, I wouldn’t have to go through all the definition steps every time I wanted it; just call it up.
There are always defaults as you type were things like the font the font size to font style that is whether its regular or italics or bold and so on. There are also defaults for the paragraph characteristics such as spacing and indentation that we just looked at.
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Unless you have overridden them these come from a Word style.
And unless you choose otherwise, that style is normal. Normal is the name that Microsoft Word gives to the lowest level of defaults. That means 12 point Times new Roman was single spacing and so on.
You can define styles for your own use. I would recommend that you as teachers set up styles, or have somebody like me set up styles, that your students can use for their papers. You'll notice that most of my PowerPoint slides follow a particular style. If this were a style within a Word style it would be 24 point, Arial font, not bold and not Italic with a white foreground on a blue background. It would be single spaced with no indents. The margins would be at zero and 8.8 inches, and the tabs would be the ones used by the two levels of bullets, at .4, .5, and .9 inches.
If I were doing this in Word instead of PowerPoint, and I had saved this style, I wouldn't have to bother with setting it up every time I wanted it. It would have a name, and I would just select the style by that when I needed it.
This is “information-only”, to help you understand Microsoft Word’s messages

18. Templates
A template is stored as a separate file. It includes all of the default settings for a specific type of document such as invoice or business letter
Page setup
Fonts
Paragraph format
Styles
Macros
The standard template is “normal.dot”. Microsoft changes it without your knowledge, then bothers you with all sorts of questions about saving its changes. Just say “no”
As a teacher, you may want to provide a standard template for student assignments via the school web site
A template provides the most elemental level of defaults, those in force as you begin a new document. Templates are stored as separate files, with a .dot suffix. Microsoft normally keeps its templates on the C: drive in a directory called Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates.
In any case a template includes the set of styles that will be available to you in composing your document. That includes the normal style, the outline styles I will talk about in a minute, and all of the fonts and whatever macros you may have defined, and the defaults for page setup.
As I mentioned before the default template is normal.dot, but you can make your own. If you create a new file by going to the menu “File” “new,” word gives you a choice of templates to use to create the new document. On the other hand if you create a new document by hitting the new document icon on the standard toolbar, it gives you normal.dot by default.
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When you make changes to the template Word remembers that you have done so, and it asks you if you want to save them. Unless you have very consciously made a set of changes that you want to reuse, you usually want to say no. You don't usually want to mess up your normal template.
However, just to repeat, as a teacher you may want to provide a standard template for student assignments. My suggestion would be to make these templates available through the school website so you have some standardization, maybe across the entire school or at least within a department or class.
This is more “information-only”, to understand Microsoft Word’s messages

19. Bullets, Numbering & Outline style
Highlight your text and use the number and bullet icons at the top of the page, or
Menu→Format→Bullets and Numbering to change
Bullet characters, such as: ➢ ➣ ✿ ✪
Starting number for the list
Numbering style (1 2 3, A B C, i ii iii, etc.)
Adjust tabs and margins with the mouse
You often want to use bullets or numbers to demark a list in your text. Recall that these apply to paragraphs, not to lines. You usually get them by highlighting the paragraphs, which look like lines, and then pressing either the bullets or the number icon on the standard formatting menu at the top of the screen.
You can also do this through the menu structure as you see in this slide, “menu, format, bullets and numbering.” This gives you more flexibility. You can choose the format of the bullet characters, you can choose the starting number for a list, and you can choose a numbering style. You can also choose a multi-level outline numbering style. A characteristic outline scheme would use Roman numerals for the top level, capital alphabetic characters for the second, and Arabic numerals for the third.
Bullets and numbering automatically set up tabs, so that if a bulleted or numbered text wraps, it will line up with the first line. You sometimes need to move those tabs. Word's defaults may not provide enough room for bigger numbers in Roman numerals.

20. Conclusion Reiterate the objective Next steps
Provide some insight into how Word is structured
Provide a bit of practical knowledge you may not have had
Give an idea of the power of the package
Next steps
General interest topics that need more depth
Individual help with specific issues
I'd like to wrap up by reiterating my objectives. I wanted to give you some insight into how Word is structured and provide a smattering of practical knowledge on topics that you may not have seen before. Also I wanted to give you an inkling of the power of the package.
I'd propose that our next steps be to determine which topics are of general interest and ought to be covered in seminars. I have at least three suggestions within Word itself: using tabs and tables in Word, using insertions such as graphics in Word, and working in foreign-languages using Word. Beyond that I’d like to work with some of you individually with Word oriented problems that you find of particular interest.
That's the end of this presentation. Just a recap on how I put it together. I outlined it in Microsoft Word's outliner, imported that outline into PowerPoint, generated graphics for the PowerPoint preparation in Corel Draw, Corel Photo-Paint and Excel, and dictated these notes using Nuance’s Naturally Speaking 9.0.
Note to myself: I’ll have the hyperlink go to the Word files on my hard drive. What about the audience? Best bet will be to have them download a self-extracting zipped file with all the class materials. Have it put itself on their C: drive, with hyperlinks. This approach will work only in Windows. For the Mac, go with a version with hyperlinks to my web site. To avoid confusion, ask them to download examples in advance.