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:
- Speed: it will give you a rapid, one-click solution to achieve repetitive formatting, particularly in your longer documents.
- 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.