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.

Word templates (like the Normal.dot template you use for most new documents) come with a pre-defined set of Styles for you to use.  To take advantage of these Styles, you can use either the handy drop-down menu on the left-hand side of the Formatting toolbar, or you can invoke the Styles & Formatting pane on the right-hand side of your screen to get a fuller view of what’s available.

Here, let me show you:

Using and modifying existing Styles

Adding your own Styles to a document

In some cases, you may want some special formatting that the Word template you’re using doesn’t include.  For example, I tend to want a Style just for indented quotes.  I mean, who wants to go through all that paragraph formatting every single time?  Not me, baby.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to make your own document Style:

Once you get the hang of this feature, you’ll find that it’s easy to put together consistently formatted briefs and other long documents.

And one bonus: using Styles & Formatting helps in putting together an automatic (read: self-updating) Table of Contents if your document needs one.  Click here for that video.)