 APA stands for American Psychological Association. You may know APA for its guidelines for citing documents. However, APA also has guidelines on how to format a paper. In this knowledge clip, we will explain some basic APA guidelines regarding the formatting of your text, tables and figures. Please note that we have used the seventh edition of the APA guidelines for this knowledge clip. Regarding the formatting of your text, APA provides instructions on basic settings, headings, paragraphing, title page and running head. The basic APA settings include instructions on font and font size, line spacing, margins and the use of page numbers. Here you can see the basic settings you should use for your paper. There are five levels of headings in APA. A level one heading is the most general whereas a level five heading is the most specific. We will explain the first and second level. If you need to use more levels, please refer to the official APA manual. A level one heading is centered, bold and uses title case heading. The first level one heading is the title of the paper. Put the title of your paper on top of your text and make sure it is bold and centered and capitalise the first letter of major words. Because the first paragraphs of a paper are understood to be introductory, the heading introduction is not needed. Here you see an example of the start of a paper. A level two heading is flush left, bold and also uses title case heading. Here you see an example of a level two heading. When you start writing your text, make sure you indent half an inch when starting a new paragraph and do not use white space between paragraphs. Here you can see a wrong and a correct example of what your text should look like. So the basic formatting according to APA includes the basic settings and proper use of headings and paragraphs. Additionally, you may want to add a running head to your paper as well as a title page. A running head is a short title of your paper. It appears in uppercase letters at the top left of each page of your manuscript. Here you see an example of a running head. The first page of an essay or paper is called the title page. An APA formatted title page contains full paper title in title case, author name or names without titles and degrees. As you can see in the example, on the title page of your manuscript, the label running head precedes the running head itself. Now let's have a look at tables and figures. The goal of any table or figure is to help readers better understand your work. Both for tables and figures, you use a number in bold above the text as well as a brief title in italics and title case below the table number. Please note that the table does not use vertical lines and that relevant notes are put below the table. Figures can also have notes. You have now come to the end of this knowledge clip. Please note there is a separate knowledge clip on how to properly cite according to APA guidelines.