Being Style-ish
By Kim Murdock,
Pagrovia TechnologyWe here at Pagrovia
Technology are mighty proud of our flagship productivity tools: Appkickers.
Our Templates, Macros and Styles make creating and editing documents quick
and easy. They help you maintain stable documents and resist formatting
mistakes that cost you in time, money and elevated blood pressure.
How do they do this? Well, in large part, by using (and encouraging the
continued use of) Styles.
I know, I know. The very mention of the word causes the uninitiated to
cringe. Styles are reviled… confusing… avoided!
But embracing Styles means opening yourself to serious benefits:
- Styles make formatting easier,
- Styles make formatting consistent,
- Styles make changes happen quickly and easily,
- Styles make documents stable,
- Styles make documents smaller,
- Styles give you much greater control over your work product.
Styles are integral to Word. They are built into the very fabric of the
program. Yes, you can avoid using them as they were designed – there are
plenty of buttons on the toolbars that make that easy. In fact, Word’s
interface has made it much too easy to forego the power of Styles. But take
another look at that list. There is no doubt you will benefit from using
them.
And believe it or not, Styles are just not hard to use.
So What Are Styles?
Simply put, a Style is a named collection of
formatting choices – something like a beach ball:
The beach ball is blue, made of plastic, two feet in
diameter, and has a smooth texture. These are all “attributes” of the beach
ball.
Now consider this paragraph:
The Style used to format this paragraph also has
attributes. They include such things as the font name and size, bold,
italics and underline, indentation, line spacing, alignment, tabs, space
above and below, and more. And here’s the really nifty thing: the
attributes of this Style can be used on other paragraphs.
You Already Use Styles… Oh, Yes You Do!
All paragraphs have a Style associated with them,
whether you did the associating or not. This is very important. It’ll be
on the quiz.
Side note: This refers to “Paragraph” Styles. I’m
stating the obvious because Styles also come in another flavor – called
“Character” Styles. As the labels imply, the former is applied to an entire
paragraph, and the latter to selected text. Character Styles are optional,
but Paragraph Styles are mandatory. They’re also much more useful.
Am I Normal?
Remember the first time you ever opened Word? You
started to type and discovered that the font was 10 point Times New Roman?
You were using your very first Style – called “Normal” – which is the
default paragraph Style. Start typing and the format is determined by
the Normal Style. Press the Enter key to start a new paragraph, and that
new paragraph also uses the Normal Style. If you try to delete the Normal
Style, you’ll find you can’t.
Remember: All paragraphs have a Style associated with
them.
Case Study: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Styles
Fran M. doesn’t pay attention to Styles – she just
starts typing, and adds formatting as she works. She presses the enter key
to add blank lines, selects text to change the font, clicks the numbering
button on the Formatting toolbar, drags margins and tabs around like an
Apache dancer, and so on, until the document looks pretty much the way she
wants it.
She wrestles with uncooperative indents and takes an
hour longer than her boss wanted. There’s a lot of hand wringing and/or bad
language involved. And the formatting really hits the fan when her
co-worker tries to finish up the document while Fran’s at lunch. Still, it
gets done, and that’s the goal… right?
Manual Labor
What I’ve just described is called “manual”
formatting. It still might seem harmless to you. So let’s take a peek at
what Word is doing under the hood. We’ll take the example of the beach ball
a little farther and pretend it’s like a Word document:
My boss came in this morning and said I need to get
that beach ball out to a client today. So I work like a busy, busy bee and
present her with a lovely blue beach ball.
My boss looks it over and says she doesn’t think it’s
appropriate for our client – and gives me a bunch of different attributes
for it. So… I “reformat” the beach ball – cover it with pebbly leather and
color it gold. I fill it with more air so it’s bigger.
While we would never do this to a beach ball, it’s
done all the time to Word documents.
Note the ghost of the blue attributes in the
illustration – I didn’t replace blue with gold, or plastic with
leather – I told Word to ignore the blue and use gold instead. The
ball is still blue and smooth beneath the gold leather. I added manual
formatting on top of the Style’s formatting.
Can Word reconcile this? Sure it can – until it
can’t. This is how documents get bigger, and why indents change
unexpectedly, and why that 40-page brief (or proposal, or contract) just
won’t open today, and why numbering goes haywire. Well, numbering goes
haywire for a couple of reasons – but this is a big one.
And even if nothing ever goes wrong with the
document, it’s still difficult for one person to work on another person’s
document. Manual formatting is rarely applied consistently, and Word hides
formatting codes from you very effectively, so it’s hard to tell what you’ve
done when it’s time to edit.
Manual Labor v. Going In Style
Even though manual formatting seems easier, it
actually causes you to work harder and longer.
Every paragraph comes fully loaded with information
about how it should look and print, courtesy of its Style. When you change
something manually, you’re laying information over the top of the existing
Style formatting.
However… when you change the Style itself, you are
adding not one byte of excess information to your document. You are truly
replacing one attribute with another.
Are there times when you need the flexibility to
change something just once – to underline a word, or center a line? Yes.
But learn to use that flexibility for good and not for evil.
Case Study: May The Styles Be With You
Lisa S. uses Styles. Lisa has Office XP and clicks
Format > Styles and Formatting… to display the Styles and
Formatting Pane down the right side of her program window. This makes using
and editing Styles much easier for her. (When she used Word 2000, Lisa
would click the Styles drop-down at the left end of the Formatting toolbar
to quickly apply Styles, and Format > Styles to edit them.)
She changes a Style by clicking the down arrow and
clicking Modify to open the Modify Styles dialog box. The single change
flows through her entire document, to every single paragraph formatted with
that Style. Efficient, huh? And easy.
In Conclusion
Styles save you time, save your documents, save your
sanity. Next time we’ll take a look at various tricks and shortcuts for
working with Styles in Word. You might also want to visit us at
appkickers.com to see how we’ve added even better tools in Appkickers
5.0 to help you tame Styles.
Pop Quiz
Complete this sentence: Every paragraph has a
_______________.
Answer
If you said “Style,” give yourself a gold star.
©2007 Kim Murdock