The formatting bar

The formatting bar stays with you for as long as you are writing, rather than appearing only once you have selected something. That means you can set a style before you type a word, instead of typing first and fixing it afterwards.

It is not the same bar for everything

A screenplay does not have drop caps. It does not have bulleted lists, and it does not need a font picker, because the format decides all of that for you. A poem is not going to want a table.

So the bar shows you the controls your kind of writing actually uses. Open a screenplay and it comes up with eleven controls rather than twenty-five. Open a chapter of a novel and it is all there, because prose really does reach for all of it.

You do not have to set any of this up. It follows the writing type of the piece you are in.

Changing it

If our idea of what you need is not your idea of what you need, the bar is yours.

Open Customize this bar at the right-hand end of it. You will get a list of the groups of controls, and you can switch any of them on or off:

• Undo and redo
• Paragraph style
• Font and size
• Bold, italic, underline
• Highlight and color
• Lists and tables
• Alignment
• Indent and dialogue
• Links
• Notes and footnotes

Take the font picker off if you never touch it. Take the alignment buttons off if your book is justified once and never thought about again.

You can also reorder them. Each group you keep has a pair of arrows next to it: move the controls you reach for most to the front of the bar, where your hand already is. There is no dragging involved, which means it works just as well with a thumb on a phone as with a mouse.

Your choice sticks on every piece and on every machine you sign in from.

Reset to the usual bar for this kind of writing hands you back to the default. It does not freeze today’s default into your account: if we improve the default for screenplays next month, a writer who reset will get the better one.

Keeping more than one bar

The tools you want when you are getting words down are not the tools you want when you are taking them apart.

With a paid Pro plan you can set the bar up how you like it, save it with a name, and keep several. One for drafting, one for revising, and switch between them from the same menu.

Switching controls off is free for everyone. Keeping several named bars is the Pro part. If a Pro plan lapses, your saved bars are not deleted: they sit there until you come back.

On a phone or a tablet

The bar sits at the top of the page, not the bottom.

The bottom of a small screen belongs to the keyboard. It is where the drawer opens, where the word suggestions go, and where the copy and paste bubble lands when you select something. Anything you need while you are actually typing has to live above the page, so that is where it lives.

Select a word, reach up, make it italic.

On a phone the bar keeps the controls you reach for without looking and tucks the rest into a menu, so it never crowds your page out. Anything you have switched off is not in that menu either: it is off, not hidden.

Where the rest of the page settings live

The bar is for the sentence you are writing. The shape of the page (the typeface, the line and paragraph spacing, and the margins) lives under Page & view, and the margins can also be dragged on the ruler above the page. Those settings belong to the piece and travel with it into the reader and into your exports.