Category Archives for "CTA – Styles"

7 How to clean up your Style Gallery … permanently

The Quick Styles area, a.k.a. Styles Gallery (Word 2016)

Have you ever noticed that long list running across the Home tab? That's called the Style Gallery. It's where all the Quick Styles (the most accessible Styles) are kept. (Those aren't the only Styles Word has. There are actually over 200 of them!)

But you may not necessarily want to use all of them, and some of them are just in the way. (Like, "No Spacing"? When am I going to use that?) That's the situation one reader found herself in.

Jennifer has been working her way through my Styles course and came across a recurring problem:

I've tried removing certain styles from the Style Gallery menu, but
they come back when I open a new document. Is there a trick I'm
missing?
Keep reading →

1 The 1 Styles setting you should avoid

I received an email "distress call" from a reader recently. She's trying to get started with Styles (YAY!), but she's having some difficulties (BOO!):

Thanks to you, I’ve been trying to work with Word Styles. I’ve been building my own for my style of writing and formatting, but I’ve encountered an irritating problem. If I do any direct formatting within a style—say italicize some of the paragraph, or, for one part, indent or don’t indent, when the style calls for the other—it changes the style itself. What am I doing wrong?

As I explained to her, it's not so much a question of her doing something wrong as it is a flaw in the way someone set up the Styles. Whether she did it herself or inherited the problem from someone else's document or template, it's an easy fix.

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7 The 6 Best Reasons to Use Styles

(Note: this post was originally published July 16, 2015.)

I had a good conversation with Sam Glover on the Lawyerist podcast recently about stuff I wish lawyers knew about Microsoft Office. It was a chance to say some things about how well (read: badly) many law offices use Microsoft Office.

One of those items on my ideal law firm training agenda was Styles. Sam and I are pretty much in agreement on why Styles is an essential Word skill. It’s so baked in, you can’t possible NOT use Styles, but very few Word users in my experience really use that feature well.

That part of the conversation was going pretty well. Then, at around the 13:08 mark, Sam asked me, “What’s the number one reason that lawyers ought to use Styles?”

And I froze. Then I mumbled something about getting all your level-three headings to update all at once.

Disaster.

So, because I can do a do-over on my own blog, here are six reasons I think you really ought to up your Styles game sooner than later.

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6 How To Add a Style to Quick Styles

Even those who have used Quick Styles frequently don’t know that there are lots more Styles available in Word. Getting one-click access to a Style, though, really requires that it be listed in the Quick Styles gallery (that list on the right-hand side of the Home tab).

If there’s a particular Style that you always want to be available within the Quick Styles gallery (especially one you just created for a particular purpose), here’s how to designate a Style as a Quick Style. Keep reading →

6 Creating new Styles in Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word Styles are the most basic building blocks in Word. One of the first things you’ll need to learn after you master the interface and basic formatting is using the Quick Styles listed on the Home tab. Often, though, the Quick Styles don’t contain a particular Style your document needs.

If the default Microsoft Word Styles don’t fully meet your needs (for example, you need one for block quotes), you can create a new one. There are a couple of different ways to do this. I’ll start with what I think is the easiest one first. Keep reading →

5 How to create numbered headings using Styles

I seem to make my best discoveries about Microsoft Office when I’m annoyed. (See my last post, for example.) It’s that kind of annoyance that says, “There’s got to be a better way to do this.” For some reason or another, this time it was paragraph numbering. But not the normal kind where you have the paragraph number indented about half an inch on the same line with the start of the paragraph. The document I was working on (a will) had the paragraph number floating centered above the paragraph. While I was drafting the document, I just knew the attorney I was working for would be moving paragraphs all over the place, and I didn’t want to stop to renumber them when he did.

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This post won BlawgWorld’s Pick of the Week Award 3/10/14!
Click the image above for more details.

I remembered one of the paralegals I work with telling me that it was possible to embed numbers in Styles. So I went nosing around in Styles, looking to modify my Heading 1 so that it had an automatically incrementing Arabic numeral and a period, like so:

Keep reading →

63 The case of the shrunken comment balloon

And now for a dispatch from the “Well, I’ve never seen this before” Department … Just when I thought I had seen it all, my boss threw me a curve ball, courtesy of his new-found affection for Microsoft Word’s Track Changes feature.

He’s been using Track Changes a lot lately, and it’s turned out to be a pretty handy feature for him, since he’s been doing a lot of contract work. Marked-up documents have been flying back and forth via e-mail, and the Microsoft Word Track Changes feature has made life a lot easier for him.

Until last week, that is. He was getting ready to send out another reviewed document, when he opened it up from his outgoing e-mail and saw something like this:

Yikes! Who could possibly read that? That comment balloon is way too small!

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7 Using Styles & Formatting

Got a long brief or other document that has lots of headings, subheadings, etc.?  You need Styles, baby.

No, not style -- Styles.

The Styles function in Word is a handy tool for, among other things, setting up headings for different sections of a document.  These styles serve a dual purpose: not only do they help keep document formatting consistent (i.e., all paragraph and subparagraph headings at a particular level, for example, will be consistent through the document), they can help later when you create a Table of Contents, since Word can use these styles to create the levels of your Table of Contents.

There are a couple of different ways to use Styles & Formatting (as the feature is formally known) in your document.

Keep reading →