Writing With Style(s) Take Advantage of Word's Greatest Timesavers Helen Bradley
Wed 8/7/02 -- As you read these words, in offices in every city across this great country of ours, Microsoft Word users are applying unnecessary formatting to their documents. It's a monumental time-waster -- and it could be eliminated if everyone would just use Styles.
Styles -- which let you save simple or complex combinations of formatting options under a name and reapply them to other text -- aren't the newest or glitziest feature in Word, and they're not what you might call fun. But it's no fun manually formatting every heading in a large document, either.
Styles not only make it ridiculously easy to apply formats, they make it easy to change your mind about them -- simply alter the Style, and the change will be automatically applied everywhere you've used it. If you're not saving time with Styles, do yourself and America a favor and start today!
Set your own Style. I hate Word's built-in heading Styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on); I think they're just plain ugly. However, I use heading Styles all the time -- because I've reconfigured them to look the way I want.
To alter a style, open a document which uses the Normal template (or whichever template you use most often). Choose Format/Styles and Formatting to open the task pane (or click the button with two A's on it at the far left of the Formatting toolbar). Right-click Heading 1 and choose Modify. Alter its settings using the options in this dialog; you can click Format for more advanced options. When you're done, click the "Add to template" checkbox and click OK. Repeat for any other headings you frequently use.
Apply Styles with speed. The slow way to apply heading Styles is to use the drop-down list on Word's Formatting toolbar or the Styles and Formatting task pane. The quick way is to use keyboard shortcuts: Select (highlight) text, then press Control-Alt-1 for Heading 1 and Control-Alt-2 for Heading 2. You can switch text back to the Normal style by pressing Control-Shift-N.
Tables of Contents. A Word Table of Contents is a clickable list of the main headings in a document and their relevant page numbers. This provides both onscreen and on-paper benefits to the person working with the document. If you use Word's heading Styles, you can create a Table of Contents in seconds: Click where the table should go, choose Insert/Reference/Index and Tables and the Table of Contents tab, and click OK (after pausing to fine-tune the settings if you like).
Styles' beauty is more than skin-deep. If Styles did nothing but help you format text quickly, they'd still be my number-one "must have" Word skill, but they do much more. Choose View/Document Map, and voila -- the heading Styles you've used in your document become clickable hyperlinks to the headings themselves. Better than a Table of Contents (when you're editing the document), the Document Map doesn't move -- it's always visible on your screen.
Similarly, you can travel in Style -- using heading Styles to navigate your document, moving from one heading to the next. Click the Select Browse Object button at the bottom right of the Word screen and choose Browse by Heading. Now click the small up- and down-pointing arrows to move up and down the document from one heading to another.
Understated Style. Some people don't need Styles for fancy formatting, but they could use some of the benefits that Styles offer. If this sounds like you, just modify Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3 so they look like Word's Normal style, or as near to it as you want them to. Now you can use the Styles to "format" your text, even if it doesn't look any different -- you'll be able to browse from heading to heading, create a Table of Contents, and use the Document Map.
DIY Styles. When there's a paragraph format that you want to be able to reuse in the future, save it as a Style. Format a paragraph with the attributes you like, select it, and open the Styles and Formatting task pane. The Style will appear with a name based on its formatting attributes. Right-click it, choose Modify, and give it a new, mnemonic name; then select the "Add to template" option and click OK. Now you can use the Style in any new document based on the current template.
What if you have a document that contains Styles you'd like to use in another document? Open the first file and choose Tools/Templates and Add-ins/Organizer and the Style tab. Open the second document in the right window of this dialog, and you can copy Styles from one document to the other.
