Tech Tip #11 - Features in Word You Should Know: Styles

Tech Tips are back. This time, we're taking a look at Microsoft Word and a number of features you probably don't use but should. If you want the shorter version, I'm heavily borrowing thoughts from this page.

First, Styles.

What is a "Style?" A style lets you define a format for a block of text. That format may include font, font size, bold, margins and indentations, line spacing, and nearly any other property you can give a block of text. I think about styles like this. You're typing along and you want to make a single word bold. So, you select that word and then click the "Bold" button in the toolbar. Styles are like having a "make this a hanging indent paragraph with Arial font, double spaced, and italicized" button. You select the text and then pick the style to make it. And, you get to determine what things the style does to the text.

The great advantage of styles is that once you mark a particular block of text as having a particular style, you can change the properties of that style and it makes all the text of that style in your document have those properties. For example, if you have numerous headings in your document and you start out making them bold, but later decide to make them italicized, you have to go back and manually change them all. Unless you use styles. If you use a style, say "Heading 1" for your headings (that is, you make the text of all your headings be of style "Heading 1") you can just change what Heading 1 does to text, one time, and all the headings will change as well. Another advantage is that styles are one source of the strange errors that happen on occasion in Word, where the format of a line or paragraph changes and you can't change it back easily, or see a reason for it. Taking control of your styles from the beginning can quash this issue.

(Aside: personally, I learned to use styles out of necessity when I was writing my doctoral dissertation. I have used it happily since, and add it makes it much easier to write academic papers, since you can adjust the format much more easily.)


Let's do an example with some pre-defined styles. I just pasted some text into Word from one of my favorite novels.



Notice in the top left of the image there is a drop down menu that says "Normal." This indicates that the "Style" of the text at the current cursor location is "Normal." Normal is the basic style for text in your document, and most other styles will "inherit" properties from Normal. That is, other styles will start with Normal's properties and then made modifications rather than be a standalone set of properties. Thus, if you change font size in Normal from 12 to 14, all other styles based on Normal (most of them) will increase by 2 points as well.

For the text here, we would like to make the title, author, and chapter headings stand out. Of course you can simply go through the entire document and change every instance of a header to be what you want. But, considering there are 61 chapters and a lot of text in between, that will take quite some time. Instead, let's use styles.

I've selected the title and clicked the drop down menu to see more styles.



You can see that the text of the style name has that style's properties. I don't really like any of those for the title, so I select "more" from the bottom of the list. When you do this, the following bar appears on the right of your Word window.



This list is actually the same as the one in the drop down menu. I want to see some more pre-defined styles, so from the lower drop-down menu I select "All Styles" instead of "Available Formatting" (the default). All Styles shows you all the pre-defined styles provided by Word's basic template. You can create or download templates with other styles, but that is a subject for another time.

Browse through this list and you will see a style called "Title" (usually the very last one). With the title of your document selected, click on "Title" in this panel.



You will see the text change to match the new style. You will see that the top left item in the toolbar shows the current text's style to be "Title."



Now, let's use "Subtitle" for the author's name. As before, select the author's name and look through the styles for "Subtitle." Let's also change the Chapter title to "Heading 1." The result of all this is here.



Now, if you were really doing this, you would go through and change all the chapter titles to be of the "Heading 1" style.

Now, imagine we want to make the chapter headings (all 61 of them) a blue color and italics rather than bold as they are now. Rather than change them all manually, we can change their style. Move the cursor to be over text that has the style you want to change. Then, move the cursor over the box near the top of the Styles panel where the style of interest is indicated. A drop down menu arrow will appear:



Click this arrow to get the full menu. Select "Modify..." from the list.



In the window that opens up, you can change any of the properties of a style. There are some properties, such as font and line spacing, immediately available. To access other properties, click the "Format" button at the bottom and a menu will appear. Select the type of property you want to change.



We don't need to go through these now, and I leave this as homework - look through these properties! You will find many useful properties to make your text look the way you want. For now, I can change the color, bold, and italics properties of the style from the main Modify window. When you are happy with your changes, click OK. You can see the result:



Though the properties of the style has changed, the chapter header is of the same style - "Heading 1." And so would all the other chapter headings be changed.

If you don't like your new style, the Undo feature in Word works on changes you make to a style. Click it once to undo all the changes you made to the style.

We'll stop there for now - more details on styles in Word next time.