Quickly Displaying Formatting Specs

There may be times when you want to quickly determine what the formatting is that is applied to either a character or a paragraph. Word allows you to quickly view this information by following these steps if you are using Word 97 or Word 2000:

1. Press Shift+F1 or choose What's This? from the Help menu. This causes the mouse pointer to change to an arrow with a question mark beside it.
2. Point to the character or paragraph in question and click the mouse button.

Word displays a "balloon" that looks like the dialog balloons used in some cartoons. The balloon contains detailed information about the formatting of the character you pointed to, as well as the paragraph in which the character appears. You now have two options:

• Click on a different character to see more formatting information.
• Press Esc to make the balloons go away and return the mouse pointer to normal.

If you are using Word 2002 or Word 2003, simply select some text or place the insertion point within a word. Press Shift+F1 and the Reveal Formatting pane appears at the right side of the screen. This pane shows the formatting applied to the text you select in the main portion of the screen. When you are done reviewing the information in the Reveal Formatting pane, you can close it just as you would any other pane.