Word 2010 makes it easier than ever for you to add content to your file and save it in such a way that it can be accessed by others on your team. You can also create building blocks that can be used in a virtually unlimited number of documents, and save the material you create in ways that can be seamlessly pulled into other formats as you need them. This is what we mean by reusing—being able to use content you create in multiple ways and for multiple purposes.

For example, suppose that you are working on a training manual for new sales associates that includes general information—perhaps the history of your company and the biographies of key staff members—as well as specific procedures related to your company’s sales protocol. First, you might be able to use existing documents to give you some basic content to work with:

When you work with content your organization has already created and edited, you are cutting back on the amount of time it takes to prepare the information and have it approved. If an editor on staff has already corrected your punctuation, for example, or a department manager has signed off on the way you describe the newest product, you know that the content is ready to share. Now it’s just up to you to put it in the right form—such as a brochure, newsletter, annual report, or blog post—and share it with your constituents.

Word 2010 is designed to help you create, share, and repurpose your content easily, no matter which type of output you want to produce. Here are a few of the features that help you reuse content you create:

In addition to all these ways of using content, you can also produce multiple documents and share them by e-mail, in shared server space, face-to-face via printouts, and as downloads on your Web site. If you can envision it, chances are that you can create it and share it using tools already available to you in Word 2010.

If you’ve been using a Tablet PC or have a drawing tablet (like the Wacom Bamboo), you might enjoy going back and forth between keyboard and tablet. Word 2010 includes improvements in the ink department; now you can choose from a greater number of pens and enjoy more support for a variety of ink functions.

But will you want to use ink to add content to your Word documents? Absolutely! If you think better with a pen in your hand, you can write out your ideas in long-hand, and Word 2010 will translate them into text you can use on your page (see Figure 7-1). You can then copy, paste, format, and edit as normal.

One easy way to add volumes of content to your new document is to use the Text From File command in Word 2010. You’ll find it in the Text group on the Insert tab. The process goes like this:

Figure 7-1. You can use the inking capability in Word 2010 to write your documents out in long-hand if that’s the way you compose best.

Figure 7-2. You can insert entire files into your Word document to cut down on the amount of text you need to type.

Although this chapter focuses predominantly on ways to add text content to your document (pictures, diagrams, and screenshots are covered in Chapter 16 through Chapter 18), there’s no denying that the pictures, tables, diagrams, and objects you add to your pages add a lot. Depending on the type of content object you want to add, you will use one of the following procedures to add content to your document:

Another smart way to add content to your Word document is to create and insert building blocks. A bulding block is a segment of ready-made content that you can add to your file at any point you choose. Word 2010 includes a number of predesigned building blocks, but the beauty of this tool is that you can create your own and build an extensive custom library of content. You might, for example, create a building block of content that tells the story of your company’s founding, shares your mission statement, or introduces a program or service.

You’ll learn more about building blocks in, Creating and Using Building Blocks.

Font, fonts, font, fonts. Just a decade ago, this word was used mainly by eggheads like me and people who worked with type for a living. But the increasing flexibility and growing feature set of Word has enabled us over the years to choose the type and style we like from a continually growing list of typefaces.

Now in Word 2010, you not only have the ability to choose from a huge slate of font options, but you can easily add your favorite fonts and take advantage of high-end typography features that are available with some OpenType fonts. You’ll learn more about OpenType and find out how to use ligatures, stylistic sets, and more, in the section, High-End Typography in Word 2010.

When you’re entering or importing content, the quickest way to apply a font is to click at the point you want the font to begin, choose the font, and then type your text. If you’ve already typed or pasted the text into the document, select the text to which you want to apply the font and then click the Font arrow in the Font group on the Home tab. The list of fonts available on your system appears, as you can see in Figure 7-7.

Figure 7-7. The Font list displays the various fonts available on your system.

At the top of the font list, you see the fonts used for headings and body text, according to the theme you’ve chosen for your document. Below the Theme Fonts, you see the names of Recently Used Fonts you’ve applied.

The Font list contains all the currently available fonts. You can temporarily increase or decrease the height of the font list using the sizing handle found at the bottom of the dialog box. You can also press Ctrl+D to open the Font dialog box.

After you choose the font for your text, you might want to select a size. The quickest way to choose a size for your text is to use the Font Size list, located just to the right of the Font list in the Font group on the Home tab. The size of the text is measured in points; but be aware that the point unit used to define a font size is not the same as the unit of measure used in the graphics and printing industries. For example, with the unit of measure, 72 points equals one inch; however, a 72-point letter is not 1 inch tall (depending on the font, it’s actually a little under three quarters of an inch tall). When you click the Size arrow, you see a list of all sizes available for the selected font. Simply click the size you want to apply to the selected text or at the cursor position.

You can also increase or decrease the size of text in increments by using the Grow Font and Shrink Font commands, which are in the Font group on the Home tab. Or, you can use the keyboard shortcuts listed in Table 7-2. When you use the Grow Font or Shrink Font commands on text that contains mixed font sizes, the font size will grow or shrink relative to its original size.

In addition to selecting fonts and resizing text, you can apply formatting attributes, including boldfacing, italics, and underlining. You can also set various underline styles and underline colors, which are made available by clicking the arrow next to the Underline button, as shown in Figure 7-8. Table 7-3 shows you the tools you will use to apply basic text attributes and effects.

Figure 7-8. Word 2010 provides a variety of underline styles and colors that you can now easily access from the Underline button on the Home tab.

Table 7-3. Text Attributes and Effects Commands

Format	Home Tab Command	Keyboard Shortcut
Bold		Ctrl+B
Italic		Ctrl+I
Underline		Ctrl+U Underline Words Only: Ctrl+Shift+W Double Underline: Ctrl+Shift+D
Strikethrough		(No built-in keyboard shortcut)
Subscript		Ctrl+=
Superscript		Ctrl+Shift+=

Depending on the nature of the documents you create and the audience who reads them, working with the specific characteristics of the fonts you choose can be an important part of what you do. In Word 2010, you now have the ability to take advantage of specific font qualities available with some OpenType fonts—things like ligatures, stylistic sets, number styles, and more.

OpenType fonts were originally a shared venture between Microsoft and Adobe. Today, they are an open format font specification that supports a wide range of fonts in numerous languages around the globe. OpenType fonts often support additional typography features that other fonts do not—such as ligatures, which treat two characters as a single serif (the letters fi are one example of a ligature that is commonly used), and stylistic sets, which offer a range of styles based on a single font choice.

In Word 2010, Gabriola is an example of an OpenType font that you can use to experiment with the typography features. And you can search the Web, buy, and download other OpenType fonts that fit your projects. To take advantage of these OpenType features in your document, follow these steps:

Figure 7-9. Choose an OpenType font and use the Advanced tab to set special typography features for your text.

Now in Word 2010 you can also apply real text effects—glows, reflections, shadows, and more—to your document. In previous versions of Word, the phrase text effect referred to some pretty ho-hum effects: strikethrough, superscript, and subscript. You can still apply all those effects by selecting your text and clicking the tool you want to use in the Font group on the Home tab, but now you can add to the wow factor by clicking the Text Effects tool and choosing the look you want from the list that appears (see Figure 7-10).

Figure 7-10. New text effects in Word 2010 enable you to add graphical touches to the text in your document.

Here’s how to apply text effects to your document:

In addition to basic formatting, Word provides a number of other text formats that can be found in the Font dialog box. To access the Font dialog box, click the dialog launcher in the Font group or press Ctrl+D. Here is a list of additional text effects you’ll find in the dialog box:

Occasionally, you might want to change lowercase text to all caps; all caps to lowercase; mixed-case text to title case; and so forth. Fortunately, you can perform these potentially tedious maneuvers without retyping text. In fact, all you need to do is use the Change Case command on the Home tab. The Change Case command provides the following options:

You can also use Shift+F3 to change the case of text. This keyboard shortcut will cycle through the Change Case options; the outcome depends on what you have selected in your document. If you select a paragraph or sentence, provided the period is selected, Shift+F3 will cycle through UPPERCASE, lowercase, and Sentence case, as opposed to UPPERCASE, lowercase, and Capitalize Each Word.

The main idea behind highlighting is to call attention to selected text in documents. When reviewing documents, highlight colors can be used to indicate a particular issue (for example, turquoise highlight might specify that a page reference needs to be completed, bright green highlight could be used to draw attention to repeated information, and so forth). Highlighting parts of a document works best when the document is viewed on the screen, although you can use highlighting in printed documents if necessary.

To apply a single instance of highlight, select the text or object and then click the Text Highlight Color command in the Font group on the Home tab. For multiple highlights, click the Text Highlight Color command without selecting any text or objects. The mouse pointer will display as a Highlighter with an I-beam, which you can then drag through text you wish to highlight. To quickly turn off highlighting, click the Text Highlight Color button again, or press Esc.

To change the Highlight color, click the arrow next to the Text Highlight Color command to display the Highlight color palette. To turn off the Highlight feature, click the No Color option.

Applying color gives you another way to customize the look of your text. For example, you might choose the font color for your document headings so that they match a specific color in your company logo. Or you might add color to text when you’re creating a brochure, a newsletter, or any other document in which you want a specific headline or product name to stand out. Here’s the quickest way to apply color to your document text:

After you’ve applied color to some text, the Font Color button retains that color setting for the rest of your current session (or until you select another color in the color palette). The color under the A on the Font Color button reflects the most recently selected color. You can select other text and simply click the Font Color button to apply the same color to the text; you don’t have to repeatedly select the same color in the color palette each time you want to apply the color. By default, the Font Color button is set to Automatic (which generally equates to black).

Up to now, we’ve been looking at adding font formatting attributes, but at times you might want to remove all formatting attributes in a paragraph or selected text. To do so, Word provides the Clear Formatting command on the Home tab (Alt+H+E). To clear all formatting from a selected text or a paragraph, select the text or click in the paragraph and then click the Clear Formatting tool in the Font group on the Home tab. Note that the Clear Formatting command does not remove any highlighting you added using the Text Highlight Color.

The Symbol list and the Symbol dialog box, both found in the Symbols group on the Insert tab, work together to take care of your symbol and special character needs. The dynamic Symbol list updates as you use symbols in the list or from the Symbol dialog box; the last symbol you insert is first in the list. That way, symbols you use frequently are available to you in the Symbols list.

When you want to add a symbol to your document, follow these steps:

When you’re inserting symbols from within the Symbol dialog box, keep in mind that you can insert multiple symbols at one time. Unlike most dialog boxes, the Symbol dialog box is modeless, which means you can leave the dialog box open and click back into the document to reposition your cursor for the next insertion.

Inserting Symbols Automatically

In addition to inserting symbols manually and using keyboard shortcuts, Word enables you to automatically create symbols as you’re typing, without the need to display the Symbol dialog box. The magic behind this trick is the AutoCorrect feature. When the AutoCorrect feature is turned on, Word will automatically insert symbols that are included in the built-in list of AutoCorrect entries when you type their corresponding letters. Table 7-5 lists some of the symbols you can create using the AutoCorrect feature.

When symbols are inserted automatically, Word 2010 displays the AutoCorrect Options button beneath the symbol. (If the button doesn’t appear immediately, position the pointer over the symbol until it appears.) Figure 7-13 shows the AutoCorrect Options available after you type ==> to insert a bold right arrow symbol.

Figure 7-13. The AutoCorrect Options enable you to control whether automatically generated symbols should replace typed text.

Table 7-5. AutoCorrect Symbols

Symbol	Typed Characters
©	(c)
®	(r)
™	(tm)
...	...
	:) or :-)
	:| or :-|
	:( or :-(
	-->
	<--
	= =>
	<= =
	<=>

If an AutoCorrect symbol is inserted but you would prefer to display the text that typed, simply press the Backspace key once after you type the text. For example, if you want to display (c) instead of ©, type an opening parenthesis, c, and then a closing parenthesis. The text changes to the copyright symbol automatically. To revert back to the originally typed text, press the Backspace key, which will remove the copyright symbol and redisplay the (c).

Tip

If you find yourself repeatedly undoing a symbol Word 2010 inserts automatically, you can turn off the feature. Click the File tab, click Options to display the Word Options dialog box, then click AutoCorrect Options in the Proofing category and choose Stop Automatically Correcting.

Inserting special characters is similar to inserting symbols. You’ll find the characters you want to insert on the Special Characters tab in the Symbol dialog box, as shown in Figure 7-14. Most of the special characters are typesetting characters that you use when refining document text. For example, when you want to prevent a first and last name from separating and wrapping to the next line, you might insert a nonbreaking space between them, or if you want to keep a telephone number together, you can use a nonbreaking hyphen.

Figure 7-14. The Special Characters tab in the Symbol dialog box provides quick access to special characters.

You can insert special characters by using the Special Characters tab in the Symbol dialog box or pressing keyboard shortcuts. Note that special characters are not added to the Symbol list after you add them to your document.

You can insert a building block in a document simply by opening a gallery (for example, Text Box on the Insert tab) and clicking the gallery entry you like (see Figure 7-17). The building block is inserted at the cursor position. You can then update the building block and save it back to the gallery to create your own new building block.

Figure 7-17. Insert a building block by clicking the item you like in the displayed gallery.

Some building block galleries, such as the Cover Page, Table of Contents, and Quick Table galleries, give you additional choices. For example, if you right-click a building block in the Cover Pages gallery, you’ll find the following selections:

If you right-click an entry in the Quick Tables gallery (displayed when you click Tables on the Insert tab and then point to Quick Tables), you’ll also find Insert At Page Header (beginning of the current page) and Insert At Page Footer (end of the current page), as shown in Figure 7-18.

Figure 7-18. Right-click a building block entry to obtain additional options.

After you insert a building block, you can freely customize the building block’s formatting and properties without affecting the building block stored in the template.

You can easily turn content you regularly use—for example, a paragraph (or several) of data, logos, graphics, specifically formatted headers or footers, standard tables, or equations—into building blocks. It doesn’t matter whether the content is new or old (even from previous Word versions); you can create your own building block by following these steps:

The Create New Building Block dialog box appears in which you can enter the various specifications for the new block (see Figure 7-19).

Figure 7-19. Use the Create New Building Block dialog box to enter the settings for your new addition.

The Create New Building Block dialog box contains the following options:

You can modify the properties of a building block—including changing the Save In template setting—by changing the information in the Modify Building Block dialog box (which looks very similar to the Create New Building Block dialog box, as shown in Figure 7-19). To modify building block properties, access the Modify Building Block dialog box by taking either of the following actions:

After you open the Modify Building Block dialog box, make any desired changes and click OK to close the dialog box. A message box displays asking whether you want to redefine the Building Block entry as shown in Figure 7-20. If you click Yes, the changes are effective immediately.

Figure 7-20. When you modify a building block entry, you are asked to confirm your modifications.

You can also redefine a building block, such as changing the content or formatting by simply making your modifications and selecting the content. To do so, on the Insert tab, click Quick Parts, and then click Save Selection To Quick Parts Gallery, or press Alt+F3. In the Create New Building Block dialog box, type the same name as the building block that you want to redefine and make any other necessary changes, such as changing the gallery or category. After you click OK, click Yes when you are asked to confirm the change.

To remove the content created when you insert a building block, simply delete it as you would any other content. To delete a building block entry from the gallery in which it appears, select the building block in the Building Blocks Organizer and then click Delete.

A message box appears, asking you to confirm the deletion. If you are sure, click Yes. As with new building blocks and modifications, you are prompted to save changes to the template accordingly; this gives you one last chance to change your mind before permanently deleting a building block from a template.