The Home tab in Word 7 includes Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, Styles and Editing. This article addresses the Font section. In the top row there are two drop down menus, one for the font face and the other for size. When you click on the small blue arrow in the font drop box, all the fonts installed on your computer are listed and each font is shown as its actual typeface. This is a great feature as you can see how the font looks before using it.

The next two buttons, one with the large letter A and the other with the small letter A will increase or decrease the size of the font. So you could highlight a title and just click the large A to increase the size. If you increase too much, then click the small A and the text will reduce in size. The last button on the top row has both a capital and small a (Aa) and a little white eraser. This is the Clear Formatting button. Highlight text and clicking on that button removes all formatting leaving just plain text.

The second row of buttons starts with B for boldface, I for italics and U for underline. Clicking on the arrow next to the U opens a drop down menu offering different styles of lines including underlining only words or changing the color or the look of the underline. The next button is the Strikethrough button which will put a line through text as if crossing it out.

Subscript and superscript are the next two buttons respectively. Subscript puts smaller letters or numbers below the text baseline and superscript puts them above the line of text, as illustrated on the buttons. Next in this group is the Change Case button. Clicking on the button gives five different options for changing case including UPPERCASE and lowercase.

The first of the last two buttons allows you to highlight text as if you were using a highlighter and the drop box offers 15 colors to choose from. Last button is to change the color of your text by choosing colors from the Theme Colors, Standard Colors or from color charts.

The Font section also includes the Font dialogue box that can be opened by clicking on the arrow in the lower right hand corner of the Font box. Under the Font tab you can select font, font style, size, font color, underline style and underline color. There is also an Effects section that gives you more options for changing your font, such as drop shadow, embossing, outlining and small caps. The best part, however, is the Preview window, which shows what your font is going to look like with the different font and effects you apply, as you apply them.

Clicking on the next tab, Character Spacing brings up several options for spacing your characters. You can scale the text, expand or condense the space between characters, positioning by raising or lowering letters, and kerning, which adjusts the space between individual letters. There is also a Preview window as under Font, and any changes you made under Font will carry through to the Character Spacing window showing all changes you made to the text.

The last button in the Font dialogue box is the Default button. Clicking on Default will not only change the document you are currently working on, it will also change the default for all new documents that are created using the Normal template, also known as, Blank document when creating a new document.

The Font dialogue box can be used one of two ways: first by selecting text that you want to make changes to, then opening the Font dialogue box and you will see that your text is in the Preview window. The second way is to open the Font dialogue box first, make your selections, click on Okay and when start typing you will see the changes you made to the text.