Chas' Word World
~~Charles Kyle Kenyon, J.D.

Styles in Microsoft Word 

For a while this column will shift its emphasis to Word fundamentals. Those who want to read ahead are welcome to look at the Intermediate Users Guide to Microsoft Word on my site. If you do read ahead, and you have questions, please send them to me so that I might be able to answer your questions in this column.

As usual, you can skip to Chas' keyboard shortcuts of the month by clicking here.

Styles Overview

Styles are arguably the most important feature in Microsoft Word. Why? Because everything that you do in Word has a style attached. The definition of a style is two-fold. First, you can think of a style as a set of pre-defined formatting instructions that you can use repeatedly throughout the document. Let's say each heading in a document must be centered, uppercase, bold, and a slightly larger font size. Each time you need to apply formatting to the heading, you have to go through the entire process to get the text the way you want it. If you store the formatting commands in a style, you can apply that style any time you need it without having to do all of the reformatting.

Possibly more important however is that styles are used to "tag" or identify parts of a document. An example of this is whether text is part of a heading, a footnote, a hyperlink, or body text. These are all examples of styles in Word.

If you're concerned about whether or not you need to learn styles, we can put it rather simply: you do. Styles are the architecture upon which Word is based. Just about everything in Word is style-driven. In fact, many people in the industry refer to Word as a "style-driven" program.

Styles allow for quick formatting modifications throughout the document and can be tied into numbering to make working with outline numbered lists easier.

	Tip  Microsoft recommends that you use numbering linked to styles to get the best result.
	Note: This should be worded much more strongly! As in: Do not use automatic numbering in Word unless you are doing it through styles linked to numbering. See Word's Numbering Explained by John McGhie.

There are several reasons for using styles in a document:

• Consistency — When you use styles to format your document, each section is formatted the same and therefore, provides a professional, clean-looking document.
• Easier to Modify — If you use styles in your document consistently, you only need to update a given style once if you want to change the characteristics of all text formatted in that style.
• Efficiency — You can create a style once, and then apply it to any section in the document without having to format each section individually.
• Table of Contents — Styles can be used to generate a table of contents quickly.
• Faster Navigation — Using styles lets you quickly move to different sections in a document using the Document Map feature.
• Working in Outline View — Styles allow you to outline and organize your document's main topics with ease.
• Outline Numbering – Numbering, when linked to styles, allows you to generate and update consistent outline numbering in your documents, even ones with complicated numbering schemes.
• Efficiency of Word — Files which are predominantly manually formatted are less efficient than those which have formatting that has been imposed by styles: manually formatted files, such a converted documents which have been File, Opened, are bloated in file size (bytes) and do not render to the screen efficiently when you scroll through them. This is because Word is a styles-based application: it first reads the attributes of the underlying style, then has to broadcast anything contrary (e.g. manually formatted on top of that). As such, a lengthy document that has been predominantly manually formatted, will behave sluggishly because Word has to work harder at managing it. Additionally, the print formatting processes are equally labored as opposed to using styles.
• HTML AND XML — What lies ahead? A fully structured, styled document will move into HTML and XML incredibly well.

Styles are an essential part of Microsoft Word. In fact, everything you type into a document has a style attached to it, whether you design the style or not.

When you start Microsoft Word, the new blank document is based on the Normal template, and text that you type uses the Normal style unless you have changed this setting in that template. This means that when you start typing, Word uses the font name, font size, line spacing, indentation, text alignment, and other formats currently defined for the Normal style. The Normal style is the base style for the Normal template, meaning that it's a building block for other styles in the template. Whenever you start typing in a new document, unless you specify otherwise, you are typing in the Normal style.

Paragraph vs. Character Styles

There are two types of styles in Microsoft Word; character and paragraph. (In Word 2002, there is also a hybrid "character and paragraph" style that I won't be discussing in this article.) Paragraph styles are used more frequently than character styles, and they are easier to create. It's important to understand both, however, since understanding styles is so important.

Character styles can be applied to individual words — even (you guessed it) single characters. Character formatting is built from the formatting options available from the Format menu, by selecting Font; settings from the Tools menu, by selecting Language, and then selecting Set Language; and in certain cases from the Format menu by selecting Borders and Shading, and looking on the Borders and Shading tabs of the Borders and Shading dialog box. The following table shows the formatting that can be in a style.

A paragraph style contains both font and paragraph formatting which makes it more flexible than a character style. When you apply a paragraph style the formatting affects the entire paragraph. For example, when you center text, you cannot center a single word. Instead, the entire paragraph is centered. Other types of paragraph-level formats that styles control are line spacing (single-space, double-space, etc.), text alignment, bullets, numbers, indents, tabs and borders.

Viewing Styles

Styles are listed in two places: the Style drop-down box on the Formatting toolbar and from the Format menu by choosing Style. They are also available in the styles panel when you are in normal view.

View Styles with the Style Box

The Style box is at the far-left side of the Formatting toolbar. It can be activated by clicking the drop-down arrow to the right of the words in the box, or by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+S on the keyboard.

 

Tip  Keyboard users can press CTRL+SHIFT+S and then click the up or down arrow keys on the keyboard to move through the list of available styles. Pressing F4 on the keyboard once inside the Style box activates the drop-down list, which you can then traverse with arrow keys.

 

Note  If you're using Word 2000, the default is for the Standard and Formatting toolbars to share one row. For this chapter, you may find it helpful to turn off this feature. From the Tools menu, choose Customize and select the Options tab. Uncheck Standard and Formatting toolbars share one row and click OK.

 

View Styles Using the Format Menu

You can not only view but also modify styles using the Format Styles dialog box under the Format menu. We will discuss this dialog box more in the next column.

View Paragraph Styles Using Normal View and the Styles Pane

One of the simplest ways to track styles in use is to view your document in "Normal" view. The "normal" view can be selected under the View menu or by clicking on the left-most icon among the views icons on the bottom left corner of your Word screen. You can set normal view to display the styles pane using Tools => Options => View tab:

Here is an example of a document in "Normal" view with the styles pane set for a width of 1":

Note that the styles pane only displays paragraph styles while the styles window on the formatting toolbar displays both paragraph and character styles.  The paragraph marks shown at the end of each paragraph are there because I chose that option. (In the illustration the blue markings have been added, they are not something that is usually on the screen.)

Next month: Changing the Default Font in Word

* This article is based largely on the tutorial "Understanding Styles" which, itself is based on the Legal Users Guide to Microsoft Word. The original Legal Users Guide was not written by me but rather by a team of experts gathered by Microsoft. This article uses screen shots from Word 2000 but the methods and distinctions discussed hold true for versions of Word from Word 95 through Word 2002.

Keyboard Shortcuts of the Month for Word

Formatting and Styles

Headings

Headings are a special kind of style and are built into Word at the foundation level. Here are some of the shortcut keys for them:

** Alt-Ctrl-4 is used for the Euro symbol in certain language settings.

Chas Kenyon is a trial lawyer concentrating in criminal defense with a long interest (obsession?) with making word processing work well in the law office.  Visit his home page