Make text bold in word

When working in Microsoft Word, you should always balance the content and look of your document equally. You might have a really convincing essay or the best business proposal in your company, but if it’s a block of text without formatting, the effect might be undesirable when you start to display your work.

Something you can do to avoid this is utilizing text styles. In order to put more emphasis on specific words or sentences, you need to make them stand out from the rest of your body text. In this article, we will teach you how you can make your text bold, italic or underline in Microsoft Word.

Things you’ll need

• A device with Microsoft Word installed and activated.

How to make text Bold Italic or Underlined in Word

Now, onto the step-by-step guide.

1. Launch Word, then either open an existing document or create a new one from the welcome screen.
2. If you only want to change the size and font of a portion of your text, you need to select it. Hold down the left mouse key and make your selection. Now, only the selected text will be affected by any changes. If you want to change your entire document, you need to select everything by pressing the Ctrl + A keys on your keyboard.
   
3. Go to the Home tab in your Ribbon. This is where you can find most of the basic text formatting tools in Word.
   
4. Locate the Font section.
   
5. To make text bold, click on the B icon in the formatting ribbon. This is located under the current font used in your document.
   
6. To make text italic, click on the I icon in the formatting ribbon. This is located under the current font used in your document.
   
7. To underline text, click on the U icon in the formatting ribbon. This is located under the current font used in your document.
   
8. Pro tip: use keyboard shortcuts! You can achieve the same text effects simply by pressing down a couple of keys on your keyboard. Here’s what you need to know about formatting text with shortcuts in Word:
1. To make your selected text bold or start writing text in bold, press the Crtl + B keys on your keyboard.
2. To make your selected text italic or start writing text in italic, press the Ctrl + I keys on your keyboard.
3. To make your selected text underlined or start writing underlined text, press the Ctrl + U keys on your keyboard.
9. You can combine these formatting styles with one another. Any combination is possible, meaning that you can make your text bold-italic or even underlined while bold.

We hope that this article was able to help you learn how to apply simple formatting to your text in Microsoft Word. Do you know someone who’s starting out with Word and other Microsoft Office products?

Don’t forget to share this article with them! Your friends, classmates, colleagues or employees can all get help in getting started with Word. If you want to learn more about Word or other Microsoft Office suite applications, feel free to browse our section of guides.

If you’re looking for a software company you can trust for its integrity and honest business practices, look no further than SoftwareKeep. We are a Microsoft Certified Partner and a BBB Accredited Business that cares about bringing our customers a reliable, satisfying experience on the software products they need. We will be with you before, during, and after all the sales.

Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Making Text Bold.

You probably already know that there are a number of ways you can make text bold in Word. One common way is to press Ctrl+B when you want to «turn on» the bold character attribute, type your word (or words), and then press Ctrl+B to turn it off.

Word provides another quick way to make text bold—using asterisks. This may sound strange, but is actually quite common in the on-line world. In plain text e-mail messages, people often use asterisks to *emphasize* words. If you type asterisks in this manner (directly next to a word or group of words, with no intervening spaces) in Word, the asterisks are automatically removed and the word(s) are shown in bold type.

You can try this yourself by typing *this is bold* (exactly as shown here, including spacing) within Word. When you type the second asterisk, both asterisks should disappear and the words «this is bold» are shown in bold type.

If this formatting shortcut doesn’t work for you, it is because of a setting in Word’s AutoFormat feature. Follow these steps:

1. Choose AutoCorrect Options from the Tools menu. Word displays the AutoCorrect dialog box.
2. Make sure the AutoFormat As You Type tab is displayed. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The AutoFormat As You Type tab of the AutoCorrect dialog box.

3. Make sure the *Bold* and _Italic_ with Real Formatting check box is selected.
4. Click OK.

The shortcut should now work just fine.

Author Bio

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen…

How can a Digital Champion approach help your organisation?

Take our online assessment to find out. 

It takes 10 minutes. There are no strings attached. At the end, you get a tailored report with recommendations and a free, practical guide to running a Digital Champions project.    

Get started with our interactive planner.
 

Помогла ли Вам статья?

You can use the Bold button on the Mini toolbar in Word, use the Bold button on the Home tab, or use the keyboard shortcut.

Make text bold

• Move your pointer to the Mini toolbar above your selection and click Bold  .
• Click Bold 

   in the Font group on the Home tab.

• Type the keyboard shortcut: CTRL+B.

Note: Click Bold  or type the keyboard shortcut again to unbold the text that you selected.

As most people would know, you can apply bold formatting in Word using Ctrl+b or the Bold icon on the Home table on the Ribbon.

But what if you want more? What if you have some specific text scattered throughout your document that you want to make bold in one action? This was the issue Colin faced. In a comment on one of my other blog posts, Colin asked if there was a way to apply bold a set of characters that all started with the same code, but had different numbers after that code (e.g. like product codes). In his example, he had a lot of instances of VA-001, VA-002, etc. with the last three digits being different each time. He’d tried the method I’d documented in my earlier post, but he could only bold part of the code, not all of it.

As with any find and replace, once you identify the pattern, it’s easy enough to test various ways of finding a match and then applying the change to it. I figured out two methods—both using wildcards. The first method assumes there are only ever three characters (not, 1, 2, 4, etc.) after the VA- part, while the second applies to any length of the ‘word’ after VA-.

For both methods, open the Find and Replace window (Ctrl+h), click More, then check the option for Use wildcards.

Method 1: Only three characters

1. In the Find field, type: (VA-)(???)
2. In the Replace with field, type: 12
3. With your cursor still in the Replace with field, click Format, then Font, then select Bold. You should see Font: Bold directly below the Replace with field (see screenshot).
4. Click Replace a few times to make sure the find/replace is doing what you expect it to. Once you are satisfied, you can click Replace All.

Notes:

• In the Find, the code is separated into two parts, both surrounded by parentheses—the VA- part, which is a constant in what Colin had, and three question marks (???). A single question mark represents any single character, so by typing three question marks, you’re asking Word to look for ANY three characters (letters and/or numbers) after the VA- part. If you only had two characters, then you’d type two question marks; if you had 4, then you’d type four, etc.
• In the Replace, you’re replacing what was found in both parts with itself. In other words, you’re not changing anything. What you are doing in the Replace, though, is specifying that what you find and replace with itself is now bold (step 3).

Method 2: Any number of characters

1. In the Find field, type: (VA-)(*>)
2. In the Replace with field, type: 12
3. With your cursor still in the Replace with field, click Format, then Font, then select Bold. You should see Font: Bold directly below the Replace with field (see screenshot).
4. Click Replace a few times to make sure the find/replace is doing what you expect it to. Once you are satisfied, you can click Replace All.

Notes:

• In the Find, the code is separated into two parts, both surrounded by parentheses—the VA- part, which is a constant in what Colin had, and an asterisk followed by a right chevron arrow. The asterisk represents any number of characters from one to infinity. Because a ‘character’ in Word could be a space, you don’t want it to find EVERY character after the VA- part—you’d get the whole document! So you add the > to tell Word to stop at the end of the ‘word’ it finds. In other words, it will stop at any character that typically follows a set of adjacent characters (a ‘word’), such as a space, period, comma, colon, semicolon, etc.
• In the Replace, you’re replacing what was found in both parts with itself. In other words, you’re not changing anything. What you are doing in the Replace, though, is specifying that what you find and replace with itself is now bold (step 3).

[Links lat checked September 2018]