Levels of Editing in MS Word
When editing a document in MS Word, there are three levels of changes you can make:
- Character-level changes
- Paragraph-level changes
- Document-level changes
Character-level changes are changes made to individual characters. These include style changes such as font, font size, font-color, bold, italic, underline, character spacing, and much more. These changes do not have to affect anything more than one character at a time (although you can select as many characters as you wish and make changes to all of them at the same time). The tools for making character-level changes are found in the Font area of the Home tab, or in the Font Dialog Box.
Paragraph-level changes are changes made to whole paragraphs. These include formatting changes such as alignment, indent, line spacing, paragraph spacing, tabs, and other less-known effects. These changes do must affect at least one whole paragraph at a time (although you can select as many paragraphs as you wish and make changes to all of them at the same time). The tools for making paragraph-level changes are found in the Paragraph area of the Home tab, or in the Paragraph Dialog Box.
Document-level changes are changes made to the whole document. These include layout changes such as paper size, paper orientation, and headers and footers. These changes will affect every page in the document (unless you create Sections, a slightly more advanced feature we will not cover in this class). The tools for making document-level changes are found in the Page Setup area of the Page Layout tab, or in the Page Setup Dialog Box.
In each of the following chapters, we will look at the types of changes possible at each level. These changes comprise the majority of editing you will do with Microsoft Word.
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Fonts: Character-level changes |
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Paragraphs: Paragraph-level changes |
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Page Setup: Document-level changes |
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