Microsoft Word 2002 provides several ways of dealing with the formatting of text. You can compare formatting of text in one block to another, find all the text with a particular type of formatting, and copy the formatting of one block of text to another.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others When creating a document, you may find that you have inadvertently typed text in various parts of the document in different formats. There’s an easy way to identify these inconsistencies. Click Format and Reveal Formatting to bring up the Reveal Formatting pane. Select one of the two text blocks you want to compare. The font and paragraph characteristics will be shown in the pane, for example, Courier New 10 pt and Plain Text. Click the Compare To Another Selection checkbox. Select the text block you want to compare to the first selection. The differences appear in the pane, sorted by category. For example, differences such as typeface, size, and line spacing will be displayed. The formatting for the first selection is listed first, followed by an arrow, and then the second selection’s formatting is listed.

Click the blue Font or Paragraph hyperlink to open a dialog box that gives a full description of the text characteristics. Now you know exactly which text haracteristics to change to make the text consistent. Quick Fixes Available The Styles And Formatting pane provides another way to quickly apply formatting to achieve the text effects you want. We will look at a few of its functions here. Click Format and Styles And Formatting to open the pane. Click Show and choose Available Formatting. Make sure that the style you are currently using has Automatically Update turned off. Otherwise, changes you make to the text you have selected will change the style and all instances of the style in the text. It’s especially important not to make changes to fundamental styles such as Normal, which is the base for other styles. Right-click the style that corresponds to the text you are going to change, click Modify, and deselect Automatically Update. Select the text you want to reformat. Click Format and Font or Format and Paragraph to make changes such as Font, Font Style, Size, Color, Alignment, Indentation, and Spacing.

Click OK, and Word will automatically add a new style to the Styles And Formatting pane. Apply the new formatting anywhere you wish by selecting the text and clicking the style name in the pane. The Styles And Formatting pane also gives you an easy way to find all instances of text with the same formatting. This comes in handy if you want to change all of the text at once. Select the block of text containing formatting you want to change. The text style for the text appears in a blue box in the Styles And Formatting pane. Place the pointer over the far right of the box, and an arrow will appear. Click it, and you will see the words Select All x Instance(s), where x equals the total number of times the style appears in the document. Click it, and all the instances will be selected. Now you can apply a different style, modify the current style, or delete the style, which will place the text back in Normal style. The Format Painter provides the quickest way to transfer formatting from one block of text to another. Use it if you know a particular block of text has the characteristics you want to use in any0 open document. Select the text with the formats you want to paint elsewhere. Click the Format Painter button on the Standard Toolbar. The pointer changes to an I bar and brush. Select the text you want to change by clicking and dragging (double-clicking doesn’t work). The selected text will change to the new format when you release the mouse button.