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About this lesson
Apply background colors or borders to paragraphs.
Exercise files
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Fun and Functional Paragraph Formats - Exercise.docx58.8 KB Fun and Functional Paragraph Formats - Exercise Solution.docx
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Quick reference
Fun and Functional Paragraph Formats
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.
- Click into the paragraph with the mouse
- Click the Shading button
- Make the color selection
The Border button will put a line on any side of the paragraph or around the entire paragraph.
- Click into the paragraph with the mouse
- Click the Border button
- 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.
- Select the entire list with the mouse
- Click the Sort button
- Make the selection whether Ascending (A-Z) or Descending (Z-A)
- Click OK
- 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.
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