Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Learn to use the Reveal Formatting pane to look beyond surface formatting.
Quick reference
Reveal Formatting
Digging deeper into document formatting can be done with the Reveal Formatting pane.
When to use
Occasionally, you just need to know “why” something looks different inside a document.
Instructions
View the Reveal Formatting Pane: Shift F1
- Click the links in the pane to open the corresponding dialogue boxes in order to make changes to the format.
- At the bottom of the pane, click the “Distinguish Style Source” so that you can match the format to the corresponding style in the Styles Gallery.
Add the Reveal Formatting button to the Quick Access bar:
- Click the Quick Access drop-down arrow at the end,
and choose More Commands 
- At the top of the next box, instead of Popular Commands, choose All Commands
- Scroll to find "Reveal Formatting..."
and double-click to add to the panel on the right. Click OK.
- 00:04 This lesson is about reveal formatting, which is the way to really
- 00:09 drill down into the specific details about the format of a document.
- 00:14 For years, reveal formatting is the holy grail of digging into details.
- 00:18 So let's go ahead and open it up.
- 00:20 I've got a little tooltip here, Shift+F1.
- 00:23 So I'm going to press Shift on my keyboard, the F1, Function 1 key at
- 00:27 the top of my keyboard and that pops open the Reveal Formatting panel.
- 00:31 on mine, it looks like balloon text.
- 00:33 There's something going on with my display.
- 00:35 Yours will probably look a little more reasonable.
- 00:38 I would like to see more of this.
- 00:40 So just in the mean time, I'm going to collapse my ribbon.
- 00:42 So I'm going to move my mouse on the Home ribbon.
- 00:44 Double-click, it will collapse my ribbon,
- 00:47 gives me more room to see my Reveal Formatting panel.
- 00:50 All of these panels can be pulled off of at that edge.
- 00:53 So when you float your mouse on the name of the panel, you can click and drag and
- 00:57 move it out.
- 00:58 Put it up to the top and stretch it the entire length of your monitor,
- 01:02 whatever works for you to help you get the job done.
- 01:05 All right, and how do we use reveal formatting?
- 01:08 Wherever I click inside the document text,
- 01:11 that word will show up at the very top and it will show the details of
- 01:17 what's happening on that paragraph in that font in that section.
- 01:22 Notice that this looks like a hyperlink.
- 01:24 So when you click it,
- 01:25 it will open up the font dialog box allowing you to change whatever you want.
- 01:29 I can scroll down on this panel and click Language and
- 01:33 change which language is being used.
- 01:35 So as you can see, just scroll down and you can observe what's happening.
- 01:39 Plus click on any of those to change specific details as you need that.
- 01:44 Let's take a look at the top of this list.
- 01:46 I've got Selected Text right now, clicked on Formatting, and
- 01:50 I'd like to compare that.
- 01:51 So I'm going to hit Compare, click into this box, and scroll down and
- 01:56 click on Topic 1.
- 01:57 Now, notice what happened in this box.
- 01:59 It's actually going to compare and show me the differences.
- 02:03 I'll just widen this up real quick so we can see it.
- 02:06 I can see that the first selection, the gray formatting up on top,
- 02:11 is Default Aerial, and is being compared to body type Calibri.
- 02:17 The top one formatting is 18 point being compared to the 11 point.
- 02:23 Font color is background 1, which is gray being compared to font color red.
- 02:29 That's how you read these when you're in here.
- 02:31 You just look at what's being compared to at Level 1 compared to no level,
- 02:36 and so forth.
- 02:37 So yes, you can compare two different sets of words or
- 02:41 paragraphs in order to find point details of what is different here.
- 02:46 You can compare them, it's kind of a cool feature.
- 02:49 Another thing down here at the bottom is Show all formatting marks.
- 02:53 When I activate that button, you can see the paragraph marks come up, the polka
- 02:58 dots between the words of the space bar, the arrows over here, those are tabs.
- 03:04 You've seen these before in this course.
- 03:06 Get up also the field here of the table of contents heading field right here
- 03:11 shows up.
- 03:11 I do have that on my Quick Access Toolbar, so I can turn that off in a jiffy.
- 03:16 And those are also located on the Home ribbon,
- 03:19 the Paragraph mark right here to turn those on and off.
- 03:23 So that's what the reveal formatting does for us.
- 03:25 The problem is, are you going to remember Shift+F1 to find it?
- 03:30 Well, probably not.
- 03:32 So you will remember though if we put that button on your Quick Access Toolbar.
- 03:37 So very quickly, let's jump in there and get that.
- 03:39 Hit the drop-down arrow at the end of your Quick Access Toolbar,
- 03:43 go to the bottom where it says More Commands and activate that.
- 03:47 When this opens, we immediately turn our Popular Commands to all commands.
- 03:53 When that shows up, we're just going to type our way to Reveal Formatting.
- 03:57 Notice, it's a little a with a little eyeball on it.
- 04:00 Double-click and it pops it over to the right-hand side, and now click OK.
- 04:06 When you come back out, you'll never have to remember Shift+F1 again,
- 04:10 you'll just hit the Reveal Formatting button to turn it on or to turn it off.
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