The Big Picture
Word has four levels of formatting: character/font, paragraph, section, and document. Things such as bold, italic, points, and superscript are called character or font formatting and can be applied to as little as a single character. I’ll talk about the other levels of formatting in later chapters.
Personally, I don’t like the adjective “font” formatting, because most people—including me—think of fonts as things like Times New Roman, Arial, and Tahoma. For me, character formatting is a lot clearer and less confusing, but because Word has a Ribbon with this chunk (or group) called Font, as shown in Figure 5-1, we’re kind of stuck with that terminology. We’re all stuck with another term, too: text-level formatting, which really means the same thing as font and character formatting. It helps, however, to think in terms of character formatting, as a character is the smallest thing you can format in Word.
Figure 5-1. Much, but not all, character (or font) formatting is accessible from the Home tab’s Font group.
Note
Okay. I lied. Technically, the smallest thing you can “format” is a point between two characters, but the word “format” is debatable. To split hairs, you can insert a bookmark at a point so that no characters are enclosed. Is that formatting? I don’t think so, but somebody else might.
Note also that the Font group on the Home tab does not contain access to all character-level formatting. Language, which can be applied down to a single character, is not shown there. Moreover, the Font group contains case (upper, lower, title, etc.), which isn’t formatting at all. This should be distinguished from small caps and all caps, both of which are considered character formatting.