The main text you need to format is what's in the body of your page. This means that the element you use should be body.

body {font-family; tahoma; font-size: 10px; color: black;}

This is the basic setting for text. Basically, the above says that your page will display the font tahoma, all text will be 10px and they'll be all black. For font-family you can have more than one font in there and your text will be displayed as the resultant mixture of those fonts. Eg. You can have font-family: verdana, tahoma, times;. Color can be defined by words or hex color codes, just like HTML. Font-size can only be defined by pixels, so if you tried to put in 1 or 2, the text will be so tiny that only black lines will appear rather than text.

You can also have other things such as:

text-decoration: none/underline/overline/line-through/blink
font-weight: normal/bold
text-align: left/right

but those can be left out if you wish.

This is all good and dandy if you're just using a blank page and pasting text onto it, but what about when you have tables or divs or other things and the text doesn't look like what you've set it to? This can be countered by adding your other elements in such as table, div and p. Once these elements have been factored in, your text inside tables, divs or normal paragraphs should look like what you've set them to.

The end result in your stylesheet should now look like this:

body,table,div,p {font-family; tahoma; font-size: 10px; color: black;}

You might also want to take extra precautions and add in a td in there as well. Despite the fact that the table element should cover the td element, some people complain that the text they view is different to the rest of the page and only adding td solves that.