The WordPress visual editor provides you with most of the basic writing and formatting tools you are used to seeing in a word processor program. The basic toolbar presents a row of buttons and I’ll discuss their functionality in this post. You can also take a look at some sample formatting in this post on the Crane Factory demo site.

The Bold button formats text as bold. Here is an example of some bold text.

The Italic button formats text with italics. Here is an example of some italicized text.

The Strikethrough button formats text with a strikethrough. Here is an example of a strikethrough.

The Unordered List button formats a list with bullets. Here is an example of an unordered list.

• List item 1
• List item 2
• List item 3

The Ordered List button formats a list with numbers. Here is an example of an ordered list.

1. List item 1
2. List item 2
3. List item 3

The Blockquote button formats text as a quote. Here is an example of a blockquote.

Cranefactory.com is a website about web development, WordPress, and blogging. Cranefactory.com is built with WordPress, a powerful blogging and content management system with a large community of users and developers.

The Align Left button aligns text and images with the left side of the page.

The Align Center button centers text and images on the page.

Here is an example of centered text.

The Align Right button aligns text and images with the right side of the page.

Here is an example of right aligned text.

The Insert Link button allows you add a hyperlink to selected text or images.

The Unlink button will remove the link from selected test or images.

The Insert/Edit Image button lets you insert an image by URL, or edit an existing image in the post.

The Insert More button inserts a split or break into the post, which can be used to limit the amount of a post that is shown on the front page of your blog and encourage users to click through to read the rest of the post.  You can see an example in this on the Crane Factory demo site.

The Spellchecker is a multi-lingual spellcheck for your posts.

The Full Screen button will expand the writing area to the full size of your web browser, which can be handy when writing long posts.

The Kitchen Sink button is used to hide or reveal even more editing functions.