You create a paragraph by typing text and then pressing the Return key. The paragraph can be a single word, a single sentence, or multiple sentences. You can change the look of a paragraph by changing its alignment, its line spacing, and the space before and after it. You can also put borders around it and shade its background. Collectively, the settings you use to vary the look of a paragraph are called paragraph formatting.
Although the left and right margins are set for a whole document or section, you can vary the position of the text between the margins. The easiest way to do this is by changing the paragraph indent. You can indent paragraphs from the left and right margins, as well as specify where the first line of a paragraph begins and where the second and subsequent lines begin.
You can control the indentation of a paragraph from the Alignment And Spacing panel in the Formatting Palette, or by dragging the indent markers displayed on the horizontal ruler to indent text from the left or right margins as follows:
First Line Indent. This indent setting begins a paragraph’s first line of text at this marker.
Hanging Indent. This indent setting begins a paragraph’s second and subsequent lines of text at this marker. Paragraphs that are part of numbered and bulleted lists use a combination of a hanging indent and a tab stop to outdent the number or bullet character.
Bonus Web Content
For information about lists and tab stops, see "Organize Text in Lists in Word 2008 for Mac" on the book’s companion Web site at www.microsoft.com/mspress/companion/9780735626171.
Left Indent. This indent setting indents the text to this marker.
Right Indent. This indent setting wraps the text when it reaches this marker.
Most standard document text is left-aligned, but you can change the horizontal positioning of text between the left and right margins of a paragraph by changing the paragraph alignment.
From the Alignment And Spacing panel of the Formatting Palette, you can choose from these alignment options:
Align Text Left. This setting aligns each line of the paragraph at the left margin, with a ragged right edge.
Align Text Right. This setting aligns each line of the paragraph at the right margin, with a ragged left edge.
Center. This setting aligns the center of each line in the paragraph between the left and right margins, with ragged left and right edges.
Justify. This setting aligns each line between the margins, creating even left and right edges.
Tip
When creating content in Print Layout view, if you know that you want to create a centered or right-aligned paragraph, you don’t have to enter the text and then format it as centered or right-aligned. You can use the Click and Type feature to create text that already has the alignment you want. Move the pointer to the center or right side of a blank area of the page, and when the pointer’s shape changes to an I-beam with appropriately aligned text attached, double-click to create a pre-aligned paragraph.
To make text easier to read, or to fit more or less text onto a page, you can adjust the space between lines of text within a paragraph by changing the Line Spacing setting. To make it obvious where one paragraph ends and another begins, you can add space between paragraphs by changing the amount of space before or after a paragraph.
You can make changes to the alignment, indentation, and spacing of selected paragraphs all at the same time from the Paragraph dialog box, which you can display by clicking Paragraph on the Format menu.
