Microsoft Office Word 2003 Inside Out (Bpg-Inside Out)

After you apply paragraph alignment settings (as well as font and section formatting settings), you can view your settings in the Reveal Formatting task pane. To display the Reveal Formatting task pane, choose Format, Reveal Formatting, or select Reveal Formatting from the task pane's menu. Figure 8-8 shows the Reveal Formatting task pane in action.

Figure 8-8: The Reveal Formatting task pane provides quick access to font, paragraph, and section formatting settings. Click a link to display the appropriate formatting dialog box.

As you can see, the Reveal Formatting task pane is a wellspring of formatting information, but its usefulness doesn't stop there. The Reveal Formatting task pane also provides links to the appropriate dialog boxes if you need to modify any format settings. Notice that the task pane is divided into Font, Paragraph, and Section sections (representing the three levels of formatting used in Word documents). Within each section, you can see links to formatting attributes set within the current selection or active area. You can click any link to display the dialog box associated with the selected settings. For example, if you click the Tabs link, the Tabs dialog box appears so that you can easily configure tab settings for the current paragraph. Table 8-3 lists more examples of which dialog box appears when you click a formatting link.

After you click a link in the task pane and modify settings in a particular dialog box, click OK to return to the task pane and document window. You'll be able to see your new format settings implemented in the document.