Finding Your Style

By Gail Van Landingham

A style is a collection of formats that you can apply to characters and paragraphs. Technical writers already know the advantages of using styles over applying manual formatting.

Consistency. Consistent look, even with multiple authors.
Time. Saves significant time in initial formatting and when you need to make a change. You can change a single style, instead of hundreds of manual formats.

Advantages Specific to Word

Outlining. Use heading styles to organize and structure a document. Word makes it easy to promote or demote headings. In Outline view, you can change a Heading 2 to a Heading 3 by clicking the Demote arrow key.
Table of Contents. Word can automatically create and update a TOC based on styles.

Creating Styles and Editing Styles

In this article, I won't describe the step-by-step procedures for creating and editing styles. Check Microsoft Word Help and many excellent third-party books if you need help on this.

Tip: Try this if you want to apply manual formatting to a paragraph and then decide you want to update the style to match: In the Styles and Formatting pane, scroll down to the style you want to update. Right-click, and select Update to Match Selection.

Types of styles

Word allows you to create character and paragraph formats:

Character. You can create a character style using all the tools in the Font dialog box. This includes font type, style (bold and italic), size, embossing, and many other tools.
Paragraph. Paragraph tools are in the - you guessed it - the Paragraph dialog box. They include line spacing, indents, alignment, pagination, automatic bullets, and automatic numbering.

Getting Back to the Original

If someone adds manual formatting to a style and you want to revert to the original style, you can click the Clear Formatting button on the Styles and Formatting pane. Sometimes this doesn't work, so here are a couple of keyboard shortcuts that always work well:

Ctrl + spacebar: Clears character formatting.
Ctrl + Q: Clears paragraph formatting.

Using the Formatting Toolbar

You can use the Formatting toolbar to select and apply styles. You can also use the Styles and Formatting pane.

Using the Styles and Formatting pane

To open the Styles and Formatting pane, click on the Styles and Formatting from the Format menu. Initially, it shows up within your document window, but you can drag it off to the side to be in a floating window if you prefer.

Take a look at the Show field at the bottom of the Styles and Formatting pane.

Available formatting and Formatting in use. I like to avoid these selections - I don't want to see a list of all the manual formatting in the document.
Available styles. This is my pick. It's the cleanest; it provides a list of only the styles designed in the template.
All styles. Shows you all of Word's built-in styles that you can use or modify. This is useful when you're creating templates.

Shortcuts for common styles

You can save a lot of time by using a keyboard shortcut when you're applying styles. Word has a few built-in keyboard shortcuts for common styles:

Normal: Ctrl + Shift + N
List Bullet: Ctrl + Shift + L
Heading 1: Alt + Ctrl + 1
Heading 2: Alt + Ctrl + 2
Heading 3: Alt + Ctrl + 3

If you have some favorite styles that you apply often, you can create your own keyboard shortcuts by recording macros.

A technical writer friend told me recently that you can do a lot with Word if you have well-designed styles, a good template, and a useful set of macros. Music to my ears.

Want more information on Word styles?

Here's a link to an article by Shauna Kelly, a Microsoft Word MVP: www.shaunakelly.com.