Aligning text is a simple enough task. You just select the text and click the appropriate option: Align Text Left, Center, Align Text Right, or Justify. You might not realize that Word can align text vertically as well. It's not a feature most of us would use every day. Perhaps you're creating a brochure or sign or you want to insert just a table on a page by itself. You might use blank lines to position the text or table because you don't know any other way.
To center a page in Word 2003, do the following:
- From anywhere on the page, choose Page Setup from the File menu.
- Click the Layout tab.
- In the Page section, click the Vertical Alignment dropdown and choose Center.
- Click OK. No guesswork, just a centered page!
There are four vertical alignments: Top, Center, Justified, and Bottom. Justified is the only one that requires any explanation; it evenly distributes the content between the top and bottom margins.
To access this feature in Word 2007 and 2010, click the Page Layout tab, and then click the Page Setup launcher (the small arrow in the bottom right corner of the group panel) to launch the Page Setup dialog.
Word's Vertical Alignment is super easy to use—it just isn't an easy find and if you don't know you can do it, you won't even know to go look for it!
Susan Sales Harkins is an IT consultant, specializing in desktop solutions. Previously, she was editor in chief for The Cobb Group, the world's largest publisher of technical journals.