- [Instructor] Every piece of text in your document
is considered to be part of a paragraph.
Even if it's only one or two words on a single line,
that's still identified as a paragraph.
And I mentioned this
because there are important options
for formatting paragraphs,
which are separate from text formatting.
So just like the normal text formatting options,
you need to select something first.
So I'm going to select this paragraph
and then I need to go to the home ribbon
and I'm looking for the paragraph section here.
Now one common option is to change the alignment.
I can see that the text here is aligned
to the left side of the page,
but I could click here to align it
to the right side of the page,
or maybe I want that text centered on the page.
So I can change his paragraph options here.
I'm just going to reset that to aligned on the left.
Now here's a curious thing,
to format a paragraph,
usually you don't have to actually select
all of the text in that paragraph.
In most cases, you can just click to place your cursor
somewhere in that paragraph.
I can see my blinking cursor here,
and then I can go to this paragraph formatting options.
And you'll see if I set this to center alignment now
it does align that entire paragraph
just because my cursor is somewhere in that paragraph.
I'll reset that to the left alignment again.
So that just makes it a little easier.
But what defines a paragraph?
Well, basically anywhere the writer hit the return key
to manually start a new line
they're actually making a new paragraph.
So technically this is not the first paragraph.
Technically this title line up at the top of my document
is the first paragraph in the document.
Somebody typed in that line,
then they hit the Return key to start a new paragraph
and so on.
So maybe if I wanted my title up at the top to be centered,
I could just click to place my cursor
somewhere on that line.
And then I could choose the center alignment option,
and you can see it applies to that line.
Now, another thing you might want to change
is the indent spacing of a paragraph.
So once again, I'll click somewhere here on this paragraph,
and then in the paragraph section of the home ribbon,
I'll click this Indent button
and you can see it indents that entire paragraph.
And you can click that multiple times to indent it further,
or you can click this other button to decrease the indent,
and I can even reset that to how it was before I started.
Or you might want to set a different background color
for a paragraph.
Once again, my cursor is somewhere here in this paragraph.
I can go to this Shading menu.
I can choose a color here,
and it's applied that background shading
to that entire paragraph.
And finally, you can format several paragraphs
at the same time,
but in that case, you do have to actually drag to select
everything you want to format.
So I'm going to drag to select several paragraphs
here on this page.
And now with all of that selected,
if I apply one of my formatting options,
like if I center it,
you can see it centers, everything that I have selected.
And once again, I'll reset that to be left aligned.
But also you could select something in your document
and once it's selected, you can right click on it,
and go to Paragraph.
And that will give you even more
paragraph formatting options.
So formatting a paragraph is very similar
to formatting text,
but a paragraph is technically a different thing.
It's a wrapper that contains text or other objects
and can have its own special properties.