In Facebook there are no options for formatting the text you use when typing a new status update to your timeline, or wall, or whatever it's called. And depending on your message, that sucks. For years now I've been posting lessons on my Chip's English Help facebook profile in just plain boring text. I don't like converting all those lessons to graphics which people then have to download. At least with my text lessons the person can simply copy/paste the entire lesson into a file on their computer. That's much easier for saving the lessons. And gives them the ability to edit them if they want to.

But there is a way to do some formatting to your Facebook text. I found a couple websites that have some formatting tools. The formatting options are extensive but they are a far cry better than none at all.

The first site I will tell you about is "https://www.gschoppe.com/projects/fbformat/?status=#.XBH1aosza02". Yeah, it's an ugly url, oh well. The site appears to be set up for mobile use only, and has only five formatting options and a long list of icons. The one good thing is you can paste your entire message into the box and select the words you want formatted, then apply the formatting to only those selected words. I use this for the basic adding of bold, italics, and bullets to my lessons. I paste the entire lesson into the box and can then select all the headings and make them all bold, then the same for bits in italics and set up bulleted lists easily. In Facebook it's not possible to do bulleted lists, but with this tool it is. This site is the easier, but more limited, of the two sites.

This next site is "https://yaytext.com/". It has many more options including different fonts, but is much more finicky to use. You paste your text into the box, select a format, then it applies that format to all the text in the box. So you can't use this for an entire posting unless you want to only change the font. If you want to add bold, italics, underlines, etc you have to paste only the words you want formatted, select and apply the format, they copy/paste that formatted text into your message. So, if you want to do many formatted words it can be quite time consuming. But, you do have many more available formatting options.

In the yaytext site there are numerous styles of underlines and strikethroughs. There are comical fonts and useless effects, like upside down text. And quite a few fonts to choose from. I have done a demonstration post on my Facebook page.

I suppose some people reading are well aware of these sites, but I have yet to see anyone actually using any of these formatting options on Facebook. They do work, you can see them on my profile and in my Chip's English Help lessons.

Next time you post a message on Facebook go ahead and check out your formatting options, you might find it adds some fun to your posts.