Have you ever found yourself struggling to figure out the formatting in a Microsoft Word document? Those of us who are former WordPerfect users remember the Reveal Codes feature that allowed us to view the codes that control the formatting in a document. Perhaps you think Word doesn't provide this feature.

We have found a tip that may help you figure out just exactly how text is formatted in your Word documents and it may save you some time as well.

To find out what formatting (fonts, paragraph style, alignment, and so on) is applied to text in a Word document simply follow these steps:

1. Press Shift+F1, or on the Help menu, click What's This?. The mouse pointer will appear as an arrow with a question mark attached.

2. When the mouse pointer becomes a question mark, click the text you want to check. A message will appear describing the formatting in that section. Click on as many areas of text as you like.

3. When you have finished checking the text, press ESC and the mouse pointer will return to its normal appearance.

Hope this tip helps!