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Fun and Functional Paragraph Formats

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About this lesson

Apply background colors or borders to paragraphs.

Exercise files

Download this lesson’s related exercise files.

Fun and Functional Paragraph Formats - Exercise.docx
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Fun and Functional Paragraph Formats - Exercise Solution.docx
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Quick reference

Fun and Functional Paragraph Formats

Graphical user interface, application, Word

Description automatically generated with medium confidence  

Home Ribbon, Paragraph Group

Instructions:

The Shading button will put a solid block of color behind an entire paragraph. An excellent option for creating a banner above a report or flyer.

  1. Click into the paragraph with the mouse
  2. Click the Shading button
  3. Make the color selection

The Border button will put a line on any side of the paragraph or around the entire paragraph.

  1. Click into the paragraph with the mouse
  2. Click the Border button
  3. Make the selection

The Sort button allows you to quickly alphabetize a list of words to save time rather than manually re-arranging or re-typing the list. 

  1. Select the entire list with the mouse
  2. Click the Sort button
  3. Make the selection whether Ascending (A-Z) or Descending (Z-A)
  4. Click OK
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  • 00:05 We're going to continue inside the paragraph group of the Home ribbon.
  • 00:09 Now, remember, all of these buttons apply to whatever paragraph you're clicked into.
  • 00:14 It's not necessary to select the entire paragraph with a triple click, one,
  • 00:18 two, three,
  • 00:19 actually not necessary to do that when you're working in the Paragraph group.
  • 00:25 Wherever your insertion point is, these buttons know that it's inside a paragraph.
  • 00:32 Let's go ahead and
  • 00:32 start by applying some color to the background of the first paragraph.
  • 00:36 You can just float your mouse around.
  • 00:38 In this particular case, it even inverted the text to white.
  • 00:43 Generally, I want a light background with dark text.
  • 00:46 Go ahead and choose any color you want, and that one is done.
  • 00:50 Now in the last lesson, we introduced the Show/Hide button,
  • 00:53 I'm going to go ahead and turn that on again.
  • 00:56 So you can see that every single paragraph ends with this paragraph symbol,
  • 01:01 also known as a hard return.
  • 01:03 So I'll click into the second paragraph and let's apply some borders.
  • 01:07 Have you ever had an underline underneath a paragraph and
  • 01:09 you have no idea why it won't go away?
  • 01:11 And every time you backspace over it nothing happens.
  • 01:14 It's because it's not technically an underline type with keyboard,
  • 01:18 it might just be a bottom border.
  • 01:20 Here's a Top Border, a left and a right.
  • 01:23 How about no border at all?
  • 01:24 That's how you would turn it off or Outside Borders.
  • 01:28 I'll go ahead and click that one.
  • 01:31 We could have more fun with those borders.
  • 01:34 Click on the drop down arrow way at the bottom we have Borders and Shading, and
  • 01:38 this would apply many more styles.
  • 01:44 In this particular case, I want to arrange these alphabetically.
  • 01:47 Do you know Microsoft Word will sort a list for you?
  • 01:51 Excel does that easily.
  • 01:53 In Word, again, we pre-select the items we want to sort.
  • 01:58 We come up to the Paragraph section, hit the A to Z sort.
  • 02:03 A brand new dialogue box opens up and
  • 02:05 we can tell it to sort by paragraphs, or headings, or fields.
  • 02:11 We can tell it what type of text this is, are they numbers or
  • 02:16 dates, we're going to leave that as text.
  • 02:19 Ascending means A to Z sort order.
  • 02:22 Descending would be Z to A sort order, I'll leave it at ascending.
  • 02:27 On the bottom left corner, we have Options.
  • 02:30 Always click Options.
  • 02:31 Always find out what else is there to work with.
  • 02:34 And here we could separate fields at the Tabs or Commas or any symbol you type.
  • 02:39 Is this a Case sensitive list?
  • 02:41 What's the Sorting language you'd like to use?
  • 02:45 I'm going to Cancel on that one, but I'm definitely going to hit OK on this one.
  • 02:49 When I click OK, go ahead and look at the results.
  • 02:52 There we have, the red apples at the top and the red tomatoes at the bottom.
  • 02:56 I might have planned it that way.
  • 02:58 Okay, let's go ahead and turn off our Show/Hide codes to clean up the rest of
  • 03:03 our document, make it look nice and clean and
  • 03:06 invite you to apply some of those formats yourself on the exercise file.
  • 03:10 Have fun with this one.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.

Basic Paragraph Formats
03m:27s
Bullets and Numbering
03m:38s
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