Why Use Styles In Word?
If you’ve ever looked at the upper left hand corner of the Word
application window and wondered why it usually says “Normal” up there, you
haven’t ever explored Word styles.
Normal is one of many predefined styles in Microsoft Word. Styles are
typically thought of as a Font and a Size: the default being 12 point Times
New Roman as shown below.
A style is actually much more than that. A
style also includes alignment, line spacing, tabs, widow/orphan control,
language (for spelling and grammar), bullets vs. numbering and other things
like text effects in case you need something to be highlighted with Las Vegas
style lights (please don’t… or at least don’t tell anyone that
we told
you how…)
The main thing is to think about the types of
overall
formatting you do a regular basis. The most common example is a quote block.
As you may remember, if someone is quoted and the quote takes up several
lines, you don’t put it in quotation marks. You are supposed to use a
particular style. The font is a point or two smaller than normal, the text is
indented on the left and on the right (fixed margins), and it is typically
justified on the left
and right. If you used block quotes
frequently, you would store all of this information in a style and instead of
doing all of the formatting above manually. Other example of styles might be
lists of product names that require a particular tab setting,
Courier New
Font, double spacing of the lines and Las Vegas lights. No, really, don’t
use that…
The really nice thing from a maintenance standpoint is that when the style
changes, you don’t have to go back and change every instance of the style.
Suppose the product listing above changes to a different font. All that you
need to do is modify the ProductListing style and all instances using the
style change at once!
One final feature of using styles is that the Table of Contents generator
in Word uses styles. All lines formatted in Heading1 style go as top level TOC
lines. Heading2 lines are indented below and so forth. If you haven’t
defined Headings and Body style, you have to build your own TOC!
To use a style, all you have to do is highlight the text to be formatted
and choose from the list of styles in the dropdown box shown above. There are
a number of pre-defined styles already in Word. If you’d like to create your
own, go to Format > Style > New… You’ll get a menu of options to
define your new style. You can also change existing styles by clicking on the
Modify… button instead of New…
See
the video on the Tips And Tricks page for an example.
As a shortcut, if you highlight text that has an unusual format and then
choose a style from the style box above, Word will ask you if you are trying
to change the
text (to the already defined style) or change the
style
(to the highlighted text). Use this method when updating styles—it’s a
great shortcut.
And for more on Styles and why to use them, see our
October 2007 article on Styles from
guest author Kim Murdoch of
Pagrovia
Technology.