Indent and Justify Command

WordPerfect has a command, F4, which would indent a paragraph from the left margin and center it. Some folks would like to see such a command in Word, but there is no single command that will perform this operation. You can indent a paragraph by pressing Ctrl+M (indents the left margin to the next tab stop) and you can justify it by pressing Ctrl+J (makes sure the text extends all the way from the left to the right margin). This two-step approach to the desired formatting is the best one can do, without creating a macro to combine the two steps.

There is one advantage to doing this formatting in Word over doing it in WordPerfect, however. In WordPerfect you need to select the entire paragraph before pressing F4, but in Word you only need to make sure that the insertion point is within the paragraph you want to format.

An even better approach in Word is to create a style that defines how you want the formatted paragraph to appear. Simply follow the steps for creating a style (as described in other issues of WordTips) and make sure that the style has the desired indents, justification, line spacing, font size, etc. Then, you can apply all these attributes in one simple step by applying the style to the paragraph.