Fonts

Learning Outcomes

  • Change the size, font, and color of text.

Changing the font and adding color can make your document much more attractive—and more likely to attract people to your message. The font options can all be found in the Home tab on the left.

The ribbon menu on a Microsoft Word document is zoomed in on. There is a green box that is highlighting the different formatting options for fonts.

Older versions of Word may have font options in the top-left corner or in the Format menu. If you have an older version of Word, search the internet for where to find the font options in your specific version.

Font Size

The font size is a number that indicates how many points are in the height of the text, or high tall the text is in points. A point is 1/72 of an inch, so a 12-point font would be 12/72 of an inch. Most people are comfortable reading 10-point fonts or higher, so a 10- or 12-point font is a good choice for writing a paragraph of text. However, many situations call for larger or smaller text.

Practice Question

To change the font size in Word, go to the Home tab and click on the dropdown menu for the number in the font ribbon. You can pick a number and then start typing in that size. For a preview, select the text you want to change, then open the font size dropdown menu and hover your cursor over each number to see the text change. Finalize that size change by clicking the size number.

There is a Microsoft Word document open with two lines of text on it. A green arrow is pointing to the font formatting section which is found in the home tab on the ribbon menu. This arrow is pointing to the option to change the size of the font on the document. A dropdown menu has been opened up displaying numbers from 8 through 72.

You can also choose a custom size by typing a number and hitting enter.

The font formatting section on the ribbon menu is zoomed in on. A green arrow is pointing to the option to change the size of the font on the document. A dropdown menu has been opened up displaying numbers from 8 through 72. The font size has been set to 72.

You can also increase or decrease the font size by clicking the Increase Font Size and Decrease Font Size buttons.

The font formatting section on the ribbon menu is zoomed in on. A green arrow is pointing to the option to change the font size.

Practice Question

Font

The font changes the styling of letters in your text. The menu for changing the font is in the Home tab near the top-left corner. Like the font size menu, hovering your mouse over each font option will change selected text so you can see a preview of what each font looks like.

There is a Microsoft Word document open with two lines of text on it. A green arrow is pointing to the font formatting section which is found in the home tab on the ribbon menu. This arrow is pointing to the option to change the font style on the document.

There is a Microsoft Word document open with two lines of text on it.

If you already know what font you want, you can start typing the name to skip to it in the menu.

There is a Microsoft Word document open with two lines of text on it. A green arrow is pointing to the font formatting section which is found in the home tab on the ribbon menu. This arrow is pointing to the option to change the font style. The font style has been manually entered to "Freestyle Script".

Font Color

What’s life without a little color? Select the text you want to change, then click the font color dropdown menu, which will give you a wide array of colors to choose from.

There is a Microsoft Word document open with two lines of text on it. A green arrow is pointing to the font formatting section which is found in the home tab on the ribbon menu. This arrow is pointing to the option to change the color of the font on the document.

If you want a different color, you can choose More Colors… (below Standard Colors in the dropdown menu) to bring up a dialog box with even more options.

Color dialog box. Color dialog box with options to select the exact color you wish to have on the documents font.

There is a Microsoft Word document open with two lines of text on it. The top line of text has orange font and the text below it is blue.

Case

Case controls how much of your text is capitalized, or whether your text is uppercase or lowercase. This is a useful feature if you want to change the case of your text without having to type it again.

There is a Microsoft Word document open with two lines of text on it. A green arrow is pointing to the font formatting section which is found in the home tab on the ribbon menu. This arrow is pointing to the option to change the case control feature. A dropdown menu has opened up showing options to make the document upper case, lower case and a few other choices.

Case Definitions

  • sentence case: text starts with a capital letter, like a sentence
  • lowercase: text is all lowercase, with no capital letters
  • uppercase: text is all uppercase, with all capital letters
  • capitalize each word: each word is capitalized
  • toggle case: reverses the case of whatever is selected (uppercase letters become lowercase and vice versa)
Blue text with sentence case applied.

Sentence case.
Blue text with lowercase text applied.

lowercase
Blue text with upper case text applied.

UPPERCASE
Blue text with the option to capitalize each word being applied.

Capitalize Each Word