It might seem shallow, but how a document looks can be almost as important as what it says! This is partly because you want to make a good first impression on your reader, but untidy formatting can even make a document more difficult to read in some cases.
As such, it’s important to understand how text alignment works in Microsoft Word.
What Is Text Alignment?
The text alignment options in Microsoft Word help control where text appears on the page. Specifically, they control the text’s position (and how it is spread out) in relation to the margins.
To control this, you can use the ‘Paragraph’ section of the ‘Home’ tab on the main ribbon.
Your options here are as follows (from left to right as displayed in the menu):
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- Align Left – Aligns the text with the left margin of the page
- Center – Positions text centrally on the page
- Align Right – Aligns text with the right margin (text still reads from left to right)
- Justify – Aligns text so that the first word on a line begins at the left margin and the last word on a line ends at the right margin (this is also known as ‘full justification’)
Which Alignment Should I Use?
In most cases, Justify and Align Left are your best options for larger blocks of text. Many universities require you to use full justification in essays, for example, as it looks neater on the page. However, publishers often prefer left alignment because it prevents ‘rivers’ (i.e. vertical spaces between words).
Center is most useful for titles, subtitles and short passages that have been set apart from the main text. If you want to have a larger block of text in the middle of the page, though, you are better off indenting the passage from the margins and using Align Left or Justify.
Align Right is significantly less common that the other options. Nevertheless, it can be useful for some short passages of text (e.g. if you want to line up a caption with the right-hand side of an image).
Do you need to make text appear halfway between the top and bottom of a page in Microsoft Word? Then you need to adjust the vertical alignment. Check out our guide below to see how this works.
Basic Alignment Options in Word
If you think about text alignment at all, you probably think of the position of text between the left and right margins of a page. The basic alignment options in Microsoft Word reflect this:
- Align Left – Aligns text with the left margin of the page.
- Center – Centres text on the page.
- Align Right – Aligns text with the right margin.
- Justify – Each line begins at the left margin and ends at the right margin.
These options are all available in the ‘Paragraph’ section of the ‘Home’ tab in Word. And to apply them, all you need to do is select the relevant text and click the desired alignment. But how do you control the position of text between the top and bottom margins? To do this automatically, you will need to access the vertical alignment options instead.
Adjusting Vertical Alignment in Microsoft Word
Vertical alignment refers to the position of text between the top and bottom margins of a page. Often, when people want text to appear halfway down a page, they will just hit ‘Enter’ repeatedly. But while this will work, it can be hard to align things perfectly, which can make formatting messy.
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Instead, you can access the vertical alignment options in Word as follows:
- Go to Layout > Page Setup on the main ribbon.
- Click the arrow in the bottom right to open the full layout options.
- Click the Layout tab and go down to the Page section.
- Select the alignment you need from the Vertical alignment menu.
The options here are:
- Top – Puts the first line at the top of the page.
- Center – Positions text halfway between top and bottom margins.
- Bottom – Starts the first line of each page at the bottom margin.
- Justified – Spreads the text on the page so that the first line starts at the top margin and the final line is aligned with the bottom margin.
This setting is very useful when you only need a little text in the middle of a page (e.g. when creating a cover page for an essay or business report). However, vertical alignment affects all text on the page, so you cannot use it to align single passages like you can with the left/right alignment options.