Font Effects like Bold, Italics, Underlined, and Strikeout are used to draw your reader's attention to particular words or phrases in your document, or to denote that some words or phrases are going to be removed, or inserted into a document. All of these effects can be applied in Word 2010 with just one or two clicks. All of the commands for Font Effects are shown in the Font group of the Home tab of the ribbon. In order to apply formatting, I'll first need to select the text that I want to format.

If the text doesn't exist already, for example, if I want to type at the top of my document some text that isn't here already, I can simply click Bold and with Bold on, I can Type New Information, and then turn Bold back off. Or if this text had already been entered, I can select it, and then click Bold to bold the text. For text that exists already, you can select using any of the methods we've talked about previously. You can select lines or paragraphs, or the entire document.

I'm going to select this heading, and I'm also going to select the other headings I can see, holding Ctrl in between, and I want to bold these. Bold, which is what's called a font weight, a bulkiness, or a weight to the letters on the page. It has another name when we talk about Web publishing, and that name is Strong. So Bold or Strong text is used to emphasize a word or words. It bulks it up a little bit. It makes it stand off the page. It makes it seem denser, yet we don't really lose readability when we bold a font.

Italics are also used for emphasis, for occasions where we previously might have used underline. In this text, we're seeing in quotes the words "EMPLOYEES" DEFINED. And I'm actually going to italicize the word EMPLOYEES, and get rid of the quotes. And I can do the same thing here. So the quote says -- I mean "employees", but by replacing the quotes with italics the intent is clear.

Employee is the term that's been defined. And rather than have the quotes which are in a way hard to read around, it trips the reader's eye and you wonder, why is employees in quotes? Is it kind of employees, or sort of employees? By removing the quotes, and italicizing these three terms, it's very clear what we mean here. We're talking about the definition of the word "employee," and we're going to show that word several times in this paragraph where it's defined in italics each time, in keeping with our original use of the italics.

Years ago, the way we underlined documents was after someone had typed them they took out a ruler and a pen and drew a line under the words that were to be underlined, because typewriters didn't always handle underlines. Then we had typewriters that actually had the ability to underscore, and you would back up an underscore underneath the text that you had typed. In that world, italics were a whole other imagining, and so was Bold, because there was no way to lean the letters over after you are done, or emphasize the more after you were finished.

So, italics have come to replace most uses of underline as well as, as you saw, a use of something in quotes, it could be a song title in quotes, or a book title in quotes, or simply a word in quotes that we can use italics to represent instead. And yet there is a use for underline. One of the uses of an underline is to be able to show text that we might want to insert into a document. This is the way this is done in legal documents. This is the way potential insertions are shown.

When groups or committees are discussing a document, showing potential insertions or proposed insertions with an underline is a well-accepted way to do that. So, text doesn't exist yet. I'm going to simply click Underline and say we're going to add some text here that says that we're going to propose that they are exempt from over time pay requirements and benefit calculations, a simple addition. Now by underlining that, other people who review the documents can see oh, that's something that we're going to add.

On the other hand, we have the ability to show how we would propose to remove text from a document. Next to the Underline button, you see a button for Strikeout. So, we're going to get rid of whose positions do not meet FLSA criteria and, and simply strike that out. So here's our proposed insertion and our proposed deletion. And we're showing both of those using Font Effects. One of my favorite tools is a Highlighter. The Highlighter in Word 2010 is better than the highlighter that you're going to buy at office supply store, because in one pen you have 15 different colors, although some of them are relatively useless.

For example, when I highlight something in black, the odds are good that it will be pretty hard for me to read it after that. So, some useful colors and some less useful colors, but if I want to highlight some words, I can simply choose to Highlight, turn my Highlighter on, and my highlighter will remain on until I turn it back off, which is a nice improvement over needing to turn it on each time I want to use it. When I'm done, I simply say Stop Highlighting.

If I'd like to remove the highlighting, I can select the highlighted area and say No Color. This doesn't mean to remove any other color. It simply means to remove the color applied using a Highlighter. If you're applying Font Sizes and effects like Bold, or Highlighting, Underline, Italics, Strikeout, and other effects to create titles and headings in your document, or as a way of organizing your document, don't simply stay here in the Font group, but make sure you check out Chapter 6, Using Styles for Effective Formatting.

But for a routine use of effects to highlight just a few words, a few phrases, or to note additions and deletions that are proposed for a document, feel free to do all of your formatting right here in the Font group of the Home tab on the Ribbon.