Home

Word 2010 Videos - Basic Font Options

The commands that change how your font looks can be found in the Font group on the Home tab. We'll just go over some of the more basic font commands now. Other, less commonly used font commands will be saved for future tutorials.

I think the best way to demonstrate the different commands is to select some text and use a command on it. So, let's select this piece of text here. Now, if we want to change this text's font, we can go up here, click on the down arrow and we get a whole host of different fonts to use. So, let's change this to Agency FB, and you can see that the change has taken place.

Moving along, if we want to change the size of the text to a specific size, we can use this drop down and change it to 18. Or we can change the text incrementally by using the Grow Font command, like so, or the Shrink Font command, like that.

Another thing you might want to do, expecially for headings - so we'll just select this heading - is change the font colour. So, with this heading selected, let's go to the Font Colour button there, and we'll change this one to be green.

If you want to highlight some text, then select it and click on the highlight button here. That will give the text the last highlight colour that was used, which at the moment is yellow. But we can change that. We'll just select the text again, click on the down arrow this time, and this time we'll use red. Now, if we highlight some more text, and click on the main button, it too will be highlighted in red.

In addition to applying these commands to text that you've selected, the current font properties will affect text that you're about to type. For example, let's just start a new paragraph by pressing Enter, and we'll change the font to be Courier New, we'll give it a size of 20, and we'll bold it. So now, when I type, the text has those properties.

Another two font commands that you're very likely to use are (just select this text) italic, and underline.

Keyboard Shortcuts

How about some keyboard shortcuts? Let's select this word here. To apply bold, we can use ctrl-b on the keyboard. Italic is ctrl-i, and underline - you can probably guess - is ctrl-u. You can see that those properties are active because in the ribbon the bold, italic and underline buttons are all highlighted. Now, these properties act like toggles, so if you use ctrl-u again, that will take the underline off, like so. Ctrl-b takes the bold off and ctrl-i removes the italic.

There are many more font properties that are available when you click on the dialogue launcher here, but we'll save looking at those for a later tutorial.

Next: Text Effects