February 12, 2019

Revisiting Google Docs - THE FORMAT MENU

The Format Menu is also pretty straight forward, but there are a few things you may not know about!

Text - You'll know how to use most of these, but there are a couple of neat, helpful tabs here. Instead of using the top toolbar, try selecting your text and increasing size or decreasing size. You can also take a section that is all lower case and make it UPPER CASE, or vise versa. Title case is also an option. VIDEO
Paragraph Styles - This drop-down lets you choose the types of formatting for paragraphs you'd like. You can even add boxes around your paragraphs if you want. For a more in-depth explanation of what you can do with these, see THIS ARTICLE. And, by the way, if you have a paragraph set up (the formatting) and you really like it, you can also use the paint roller tool. VIDEO
Align & Indent - These alignment and indentation options are the same as on the formatting toolbar at the top of your doc. However, you do have the option on the drop-down to set you indentations if you want to customize them.
Line Spacing - You can change your line spacing from 1, 1.15, 1.5, and 2. You can also add a space before or after a paragraph and custom spacing!
Columns - Now you can have one, two, or three columns on your page with options to size the columns by inches and even add a line between columns.
Bullets & Numbering - Add bullets and numbering. You can even change the bullet icon and choose the type of numbering you want. VIDEO
Headers & Footers - We inserted headers and footers with the insert menu, but with this tab, you can change the size of those headers and footers.
Table - Once you insert a table, you have some options with this tab. You can add rows or columns, delete them, distribute rows or columns, merge and un-merge cells, and get to the table properties. VIDEO on merging cells.
Image - If you click on the image and then hit the FORMAT - IMAGE button, you will be able to crop, get to the image options, replace the image, or reset the image. VIDEO
Clear Formatting - Clear formatting does just what it says. You can take all the text in your document and clear the formatting back to the default. This may be helpful to students if they've got many different fonts and sizes and it's distracting. When selecting the text you want (or the entire document using CTRL - A) and then clear the formatting. VIDEO
Borders & Lines - This is a little deceiving. You can't really get to this (it's grayed out) unless you have an image, drawing, or a chart. Even a table doesn't work with this. The table properties is where you change the table. However, you can add a border around an image or a chart. VIDEO

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