Help, tips, tricks and tutorials for Microsoft Office 2007 - The New Paperclip
11th June
2007
written by The New Paperclip




When you are writing a document, you need to make it easy to read.  Professional writers sometimes talk about things called “Entry Points”…  points where a reader can quickly and easily start reading your document and pick up what you are trying to say.

Bullet points do exactly that!

Bullet points allow you to quickly structure information so your audience can easily interpret exactly what you are going on about!

So how do you use bullets in Word 2007?

  1. Select the text you want to apply bullets to (you can do this by clicking and dragging across the text you want)
  2. On the “Home” tab of the ribbon, look for the “Paragraph” group
  3. In the top left hand corner of the paragraph group, you will find a button that looks like three lines with bullets.  Click on it

    bullets

That’s the easy way to use bullets in your document.  But what if you don’t want to use the standard black dot bullet?  Maybe you want to use something with a little more flair?

How to use custom bullets in Word 2007…

  1. Again, select the test you want to apply bullets to, then find the bullets button in the “Paragraph” group on the “Home” tab of the ribbon
  2. Instead of clicking on the bullets button, click on the little down arrow beside it.  This will display a library of different bullets you can use.  Feel free to use any of those, or….
  3. Click on “Define New Bullet…”.  This will allow you to create any bullet you like, whether it be based on a letter, a number,any character out of any font you have installed on your computer, or even any picture that you have on your computer!!!
  4. Select the style of bullet that you want… then click ok.

There you have it… the quick and easy way to include bullets in your Word 2007 document!

’till next time,
TNP ;)

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Related posts:

  1. Change the look of your Bullets in Word 2007
  2. Select similarly formatted text in Word 2007
  3. Change spacing between paragraphs in Word 2007
  4. Word 2007: Page Layout Deep Dive Tutorial
  5. Insert a new blank page in Word 2007

6 Comments

  1. Pete
    01/10/2007

    I don’t see“Define New Bullet…”. in word 2007, is it still there???

  2. 17/10/2008

    I can find the bullet points but since upgrading to Ofice 2007 all the documents we created prior in 2003 are missing all the bullet points! I have installed all the conversion packs! can anyone please help?? tx

  3. Brandon
    25/06/2009

    Forgive my ignorance please, but I can’t seem to add one more than one bullet to my document? I have no idea why. Whenever I click the bullet icon, it adds a bullet to my first sentence/paragraph, but it will not allow me to add one to the rest of my document. If you think you may be able to help me with this problem, you are welcome to email me at TheJCAddict@gmail.com. Thanks!

  4. Daniel Baker
    31/07/2009

    This is a frustration and a question.
    Frustration is that I used to be able to control bullet indents the way I wanted with bullet paragraph style. It was 80% effective. Now, in 2007, every time I have any back and/or forth from the normal.dotm, Word takes the bullets in the docs back to flush left. This is NOT productive, and this is NOT allowing my choice.

    Question is how can I keep Word from overriding my choice and screwing up already inserted bulleted lists?

    You would think that they would have this fixed to have respect for users/differing preferences after all these years instead of deciding for us.

  5. Daniel Baker
    31/07/2009

    OOPS. Meant to add my email. Response is requested. danielbaker25@gmail.com

  6. Daniel Baker
    01/09/2009

    Well, I haven’t received a response to my earlier post. I am having trouble with this issue at the very moment. I have defined list bullet 1 style to have .25 indent, .25 hang, tab at .5, but every time I turn around, the first item in the list pops back to .0 indent. So we can no longer control bullets by our publishing standard with Paragraph style. If we can, please tell me how. But first please check it all the way through.

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