Word 2010 Videos - Alignment Options
The alignment options in Word align your text relative to the left and right margins of the document. These options are found on the home tab, in the Paragraph group. The best way to explain them is to illustrate with an example, so let's select this first paragraph and go through each option.
Aligning Text Left To Right
The first option, which is Align Text Left aligns the text to the left margin, and that's the default option that we've got on this first paragraph now.
The second option, centre, simply centres the text within the two margins, like so.
There are some visual clues on each of the buttons which show how the text will look when you click on the button. So you can probably guess, looking at the Align Text Right button, that's how the text is going to look. And if we do that, we can see that the text is aligned to the right margin.
Justify aligns your text to both left and right margins, and that makes the text look very neat. We'll change the text back to left align.
Aligning Text Top To Bottom
So far we've been looking at aligning text from left to right - horizontally - but you can also align text vertically, from top to bottom. Let's insert a page break, just after the first paragraph by pressing ctrl and Enter on the keyboard and what we'll do is select the heading and the first paragraph. Let's go to the Page Layout tab, and in the Page Setup group click on the dialogue launcher here. Now, we need the Layout tab, so we'll click on that, and half way down we can see Vertical Alignment. At the moment it's set to Top, so that's why everything is top-aligned. But if we change that to Centre and click OK, you can see that now the selected text appears in the centre of the page in the vertical direction, not horizontally like we've seen before.
Aligning your text to the centre like we've just done would be good if you were creating something like a title page. If you were going to do that then you would probably go to the Home tab and centre the text horizontally as well.
Let's go back to the Page Layout tab and open up the Page Setup window again. Now, we chose Vertical Alignment: Centre, but if you look down here, you can see that we've left Apply to as the whole document. So, closing that down, if we look at the second page, the vertical centre alignment has been applied to the second page as well. So, what we'll do is ctrl-z to undo that, and again, so everything is now aligned to the top. And just making sure - yes the text is still selected, but this time, when we go into the Page Setup window, we're going to change the vertical alignment to centre and change the apply to to be just the selected text. So, clicking OK, that's centred the selected text. And just going down to the other text, that remains aligned to the top of the document.