Google Docs Tutorial - Part 9 - Formatting Your Google Doc
Google Docs Tutorial - Part 9. Learn how to format your Google Doc.
Right now our sample document is looking somewhat plain. Let’s start adding some text formatting to give the document a better look. You can access the formatting tools in a variety of ways: you can go to the Format menu and then click on Styles or Align; or you can use the toolbar and use the styles tab, the font tab, the font-size tab, or other formatting options available.
To begin formatting, you should always begin by selecting the text you want to format. Go ahead and add some formatting to the title. With the title selected (see below), click on Styles in the toolbar. Since this is the title, you generally want it to be bigger than the rest of the text. You can use the Heading styles for this; “Heading 1” will use the largest font size and “Heading 6” will use the smallest. Click on “Heading 1” and notice that the title is much bigger than the rest of the text, and a little easier to read.
You may also have subheadings or subtitles in a document, as in our sampledocument. To add some formatting to these subheadings, select the first one (i.e., “The Banana Plant”), click on Styles again in the toolbar, and this time choose “Heading 3.” The subheading is now a little bigger than the rest of the text but smaller than the title, so it does not take away from the importance of the title. There is another subheading in the sample document, so you should highlight the heading and change the style to “Heading 3.” (You might have noticed that when your mouse hovers over the heading styles, Google Docs will show the available keyboard shortcuts, for example Ctrl+3.)
Now you have some formatting in the document, as seen below:
There are many other formatting options that you can utilize in Google Docs. Because of the importance of the title in any document, you may want to have it centered across the screen/page. To center the title, you must first select the title, and then click the Center alignment button.
Now the title is in the center of the page and can easily be distinguished from the rest of the document. You can also access the alignment tools in the Format menu, within the Align option. The align options are: Left, Center, Right, and Justified. In Google Docs, the documents defaults to a left alignment.
If you want to clear any of the formatting that you have added, select the formatted text (i.e., the second subheading), then click on the Styles menu and choose Clear formatting. Now the second subheading has gone back to the default document formatting.
