Tag: styles

Creating a Table of Contents in MS Word

by admin, posted in MS Office

Using styles, as described here, as a standard policy in your longer, more elaborate Word documents really opens up your horizons, and facilitates the simple creation of many additional features. One of the easiest and most impressive of these is a table of contents.  If you have the foresight to use styles as a standard formatting feature (i.e. Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 etc.), you can then simply insert the Table of Contents field on your chosen page at the beginning of the document and have it automatically compile a table of contents, using the headings and subheadings already present in your document.  This would provide you with an enormous saving of time and effort, compared with the tedious task of having to manually type up your own table of contents in neatly aligned columns.

You will find the Table of Contents command on the far left of the ribbon attached to the References tab:

If you select either of the Automatic Table options (1 or 2) on the attached menu, the Table of Contents field will then go to work to automatically create the table of contents as you watch. 

One of the principal virtues of this feature is the ability to easily update and regenerate the table, in the event that you modify your document after creating the table. If you add new content with new headings or move the location of your document’s content around in a way that impacts the page numbering, you don’t need to create your contents table anew. You can instead simply update the Table of Contents field, and have it automatically regenerate itself to incorporate and take account of any recent document alterations.

You can perform such an update via the right mouse menu, Simply right click somewhere over your Table of Contents and select Update Field. You will then be asked whether you wish to re-create the entire table or only the page numbering. (You can access this action even faster via the equivalent keyboard shortcut, the F9 key):

You can also customise the built-in automatic tables of content if you wish; choose a different style for its appearance and, if need be, specify precisely which Heading styles you wish to include in or exclude from your table.  You can simply select the Custom Table of Contents option from the Table of Contents menu to access a dialog box that presents you with these choices.  You can modify your Heading Style selection via the Options button in the lower right-hand corner.

Like many other fields that are available in Word, the Table of Contents gives you a great method of automating, and then flexibly updating, a key feature of your longer, more involved, elaborate Word documents.

Unlock the Power of MS Word with Styles

by admin, posted in MS Office

One crucial but rather underused feature in MS Word is styles.  Styles can provide you a powerful and streamlined method of creating and managing the formatting and presentation of your Word documents.  And the longer and more elaborate your documents become, the more beneficial and powerful styles can become for you.s

A style is simply a saved set of formatting attributes that you can assign with one click to a variety of different elements within your documents such as paragraphs, individual characters, graphics, tables and bulleted lists.  You will find yourself using styles in Word whether you want to or not; the default template that Word employs for each new blank document already has a default style called “Normal”. {Don’t they just love the word ‘Normal’ at Microsoft?)  This style dictates the initial appearance of the text you type in a new document- what font, size, colour, alignment et al it has right from the start. 

The Normal template also already has a number of different styles readily available to the user.  All you need to do is position the cursor in the paragraph you wish to format, and then click on one of the styles that are attached to the panels in the Quick Styles gallery found on the right of the Home tab.  The default styles you will see include Normal, Heading 1, Heading 2, Title and many more besides.  For a bigger choice, you can use the pull-down menu on the right of the Quick Style gallery to access a more comprehensive gallery of default styles.

You will see that using styles as your chief formatting method gives you two crucial benefits:

  1. Speed: it will give you a rapid, one-click solution to achieve repetitive formatting, particularly in your longer documents.
  2. Standardisation:  elements  in your document such as headings, paragraphs, tables and lists that employ the same style are guaranteed to look exactly the same.  In this way you can effectively create and maintain a professional uniformity throughout your documents, regardless of the ‘whims’ or erroneous formatting choices of other users.

And, furthermore, if you use styles as a foundational concept in your document design, it opens up many other automation features in Word.  For example. styles lend themselves to the simple creation of Tables of Contents, the easy enhancement and layout of graphic elements such as diagrams or pictures, and the clever creation of “phone book headers”, to mention but a few.  (More on these features in upcoming posts…)

In summary, the use of styles in Word to their full potential is perhaps the best way to differentiate the true “power” Word user from the wanna-be.