You don’t need me to tell you what a paragraph is — it’s a block of text that ends with a “hard return” you insert by pressing the Enter key. In Microsoft Word, paragraph formatting covers such attributes as justification, indentation, line spacing, and what WordPerfect calls “block protect” (called something else by Word, but we’ll get to that in a moment). Some of these instructions will be familiar to anyone who’s worked with a Windows word processor before, but here’s how you can set each of these attributes in Microsoft Word:
Paragraph
If you’ve ever been working in a document (particularly one that’s been constructed with a lot of “cut and paste” from other documents) and wanted to make this paragraph (or this line or this heading) look just like that other one, here’s a simple trick.
Got a long brief or other document that has lots of headings, subheadings, etc.? You need Styles, baby.
No, not style — Styles.
The Styles function in Word is a handy tool for, among other things, setting up headings for different sections of a document. These styles serve a dual purpose: not only do they help keep document formatting consistent (i.e., all paragraph and subparagraph headings at a particular level, for example, will be consistent through the document), they can help later when you create a Table of Contents, since Word can use these styles to create the levels of your Table of Contents.
There are a couple of different ways to use Styles & Formatting (as the feature is formally known) in your document.
If you’re anything like me, one of the things you really hate is having to move paragraphs around in a long pleading (like a set of discovery requests). Fortunately, if you know your way around Microsoft Word’s Bullets & Numbers feature, at least you won’t have to renumber every paragraph by hand.
Using Bullets & Numbers’ pre-defined formats is very easy. The easiest way is to use the buttons on the Formatting Toolbar in Word 2002-2003 or the top row of the Paragraph section of the Home tab in Word 2007-2010:
2002-2003
2007-2010
This gives you the basic, standard format. But what if you want some other format?
Here’s the video tutorial I promised showing exactly why Block Protect can mess up your pagination seemingly beyond repair:
Click to continue…
While Word does some default paragraph formatting for you, you may want to change the formatting to suit a particular need. For example, you may need to double-indent a section of text to quote case law for a brief.
First, let’s talk about basic indentation (which can be done from the Formatting toolbar), then we’ll go over more advanced indentation (like double-indents for quotes).
Click to continue…
Often in legal documents, you need to insert special characters not found on the keyboard, like paragraph symbols (¶) or section symbols (§). Here’s how to do that:
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