Styles for Consistent and Easy Formatting

You needn't bother learning how styles work or how to apply styles if you never create documents longer than one or two pages. But if you create complex documents with headings and paragraphs that are formatted in different ways, learning how to create and apply styles is well worth the effort. A style is a collection of fonts or paragraph formats to which a name has been given. Instead of going to the work of choosing fonts, line spacing options, indention settings, and what-all for each paragraph in a document, you can bundle the different formatting commands in a style and simply apply the style to each paragraph that is to be formatted the same way. Applying a style takes but a second. Formatting paragraphs and headings one at a time is a tedious activity and is strictly for the birds.

This important chapter delves into the details of how styles work. It starts by explaining what a style is, the difference between paragraph and character styles, and what a template is. It shows how to create, apply, and redefine a style. This chapter also tells how to copy styles between documents, delete and rename styles, and collect styles into a template so that you can use styles in more than one document.

How Styles Work

Styles are a bit confusing, even intimidating, at first. There are two kinds of styles: paragraph styles and character styles. And each Word document comes with a set of styles, but which styles it comes with depends on the template with which it was created. A template is a blueprint for a new document. Among other things, a template contains a collection of styles you can choose from to format documents. Word offers numerous templates, and you can create your own templates, too. The following pages explain everything you need to know to create and apply styles wisely.

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(s)Why Styles Are Essential

By working with styles, you free yourself from having to visit and revisit numerous dialog boxes each time you want to format a paragraph or change the font and font size of text. After you create a style, you can simply choose it from the Style menu instead of giving formatting commands.

With styles, moreover, you can rest assured that headings and paragraphs throughout a document are consistent. All headings given the Heading 1 style look the same. Paragraphs given the Intro Para style also look alike. And if you decide, for example, that the Intro Para style doesn't look quite right, you can change it and thereby instantaneously change every single paragraph to which the Intro Para style has been assigned. Styles, besides making it easy to format paragraphs and headings, are a sort of insurance policy. If you change your mind about the look of a heading, all you have to do is redefine the style which you've assigned to it—and all headings that were given the same style are redefined as well.

In a business setting, styles are especially important. A company makes a good impression when the memos, faxes, and invoices that it sends to clients and customers have a similar look. You can give them a similar look by creating styles for faxes, memos, and invoices and saving them in a template. Creating styles for company correspondence also saves time. Instead of wrestling with Word's formatting commands, employees can simply choose styles from a menu as they create documents.

Some Word commands don't work unless the headings in the document have been assigned a style. For example, you can't create a table of contents unless each heading in the document was assigned a heading style. Nor can you take advantage of Outline view and the commands on the Outline toolbar. And you can't cross-reference headings or number the headings in a document. To create a table of figures or illustrations, you must have tagged their captions with the Caption style. The advantages of using styles are many. Do yourself a big favor by learning how styles work and how to apply styles.

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What Is a Style, Anyway?

A style is a collection of formatting commands that have been assembled under one name. To create a style, you tell Word that you are creating it, give several formatting commands, and then name the style. Later, when you apply the style by choosing it from the Style list, you really choose several formatting commands at once. In effect, you choose all the formatting commands that you chose when you or someone else created and named the style.

Figure 9-1 shows a style called Salutation being chosen from the Style list. After the user clicks Salutation, all the commands that are bundled into that style are applied to the text that is highlighted in the document—in Figure 9-1, a salutation. The Salutation style calls for 11 points of empty space to appear above and below the paragraph; and for the text to be set in 10-point Times New Roman.

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TIP: To see the formatting applied to text, choose Help | What’s This?, and right-click the text.

Imagine how much trouble formatting a salutation would be if you had to format it anew each time you wrote a letter, rather than just applying the Salutation style. You would have to do the following:

·        Choose Format | Paragraph; under Spacing, enter 11 in the Before box and 11 in the After box; and click OK.

·        Select the text in the salutation, choose Times New Roman from the Font menu, and choose 10 from the Font Size menu.