Pretty much everyone who uses Microsoft Word knows how to create a bullet. You put your cursor in the line of text that you want bulleted and press the Bullets button on the Formatting toolbar. Voila, your line has a bullet in front of it.
But what if you don’t like the plain old boring round dot? A lot of people don’t realize that Word gives you a lot more options than just the dot. With your cursor in the bulleted line, choose Format, Bullets and Numbering. In the dialog box that appears the plain ole black dot is the one that is selected. You can click one of the bullet styles in the other boxes to select a different style.
If you want to get creative, click the Customize button. In Word XP, you’ll see three buttons: Font, Character, and Picture. (In Word 2000 and earlier, you see these options in other areas of the Bullets and Numbering dialog box.)
If you click the Font button, you enter a standard Font dialog box. You change the font attributes for your bullet the same way you’d change text anywhere else in Word. In this dialog box, you can change the size of your bullet character and even make it bold or change the color of your bullet.
If you click the Character button, you can see all of the characters available to you in the Symbol font. You’ll notice that this dialog box looks a lot like Windows’ Character Map utility program. It works the same way; you can choose any character just by double clicking it. Or you can choose another font from the drop-down box to check out the characters in other symbol-type fonts such as Wingdings or Webdings.
If you click the Picture button, Word presents you with a whole slew of clip art bullets in all sizes, shapes, and colors.
After you have the bullet formatted the way you like, click OK and you’ll see your new, more creative bullet in your text. If you plan to use your special bullet a lot, you even may want to include it as part of a style.
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