Become a style guru Part 1: The Basics

by Russell Williams

MS Word style menuFew Microsoft Word users scratch below the surface of Word’s formatting styles. But styles are powerful tools that can make creating excellent documents a matter of a few clicks of the mouse.

In later articles we will explore advanced uses of styles and how they can be used to save your business time and money, but you’ve got to walk before you can run. This article gives you the style basics—enough to make formatting and reformatting your documents a whole lot easier while making you look a whole lot better to your clients and maybe your boss as well.

What are styles?

Styles are collections of formatting that give sections of text in a document the same ‘look’. Most Word users have tried out Word’s heading styles or wondered what the difference between “Normal” and “Heading 1” was (and then decided they didn’t like the way it looked). Older versions of Word would even ‘help’ you format your document by applying styles automatically, causing some users a lot of grief.

But styles aren’t hard to understand or use. Styles are sets of formatting instructions. Rather than apply “12 point” and “Times New Roman” to every paragraph in a document you define a set of formatting (font, size, line spacing, indenting) and give it a name: “Normal”, for example. This makes formatting a document very simple, whenever you want to repeat that ‘look’ in the document, you just apply the style.

Why use styles?

In short styles make your documents consistent and they give you control over the document.

Consistency

Consistently formatted documents help readers understand what type of document they’re reading and they help them read the document.

It’s usually easy to distinguish between document types because they look different: letters look different to newspapers which look different to magazines. It may not be so easy in a business where personal computers have given everyone with a PC and a copy of Word the chance to express their personal style—good or evil. It may be hard to tell the difference between a memo and a report, or a plan and a procedure.

Consistent formatting within documents helps readers to read. When something is in big, bold type they know that it means something (the title of a new section, perhaps) and not that Nigel in Purchasing decided that today was Arial Black day and everything was going to be 36 point Arial Black today.

Control

Using styles to make formatting consistent throughout your document gives you much more control over the document. (Like when your boss suddenly decides that he hates the font you used on every page of your 20,000 page proposal and wants it changed now, for instance).

For example, here’s a document I prepared earlier. It is styled consistently so that each paragraph of text and each of the heading levels has the same style throughout the document.

Figure 1: Our example document formatted using Word's default styles

Figure 1: Our example document formatted using Word’s default styles

This means that if my boss insists I use Arial for the paragraphs instead of Times New Roman, the change is easy. Instead of going through every paragraph and reformatting each and every paragraph, I change the font once in the Normal style. Imagine how much time that would have saved you in your 20,000 page proposal.

Figure 2: The example document after changing the ‘Normal’ style's font to Arial

Figure 2: The example document after changing the ‘Normal’ style’s font to Arial

Some people don’t like using styles and find them unpredictable. Again, consistency is the key. When styles aren’t used consistently they can cause strange behaviour (in the document and of the author). As with so many things, setting up a new document well will save a lot of pain and therapy and make Word’s styles seem a whole lot friendlier.

Understanding styles

For this article we’re using the latest Windows version, Word 2003. Microsoft Word’s styles have evolved over the last few versions so if you’re using an older Windows version or a Macintosh version, we’ll point out some of the differences, but the ideas are mostly the same.

Word 2003 has four types of styles: Paragraph styles, Character styles, Table styles and List styles.

Paragraph styles

These are your bread-and-butter styles. As the name suggests, paragraph styles format an entire paragraph of text. This means that you can apply the one style to a whole page of text, but not one sentence within that page. So I wouldn’t use paragraph styles to change this sentence’s formatting.

But I could use a paragraph style to make this sentence stand out (since it’s in a separate paragraph).

Character styles

Character styles can apply to part of a paragraph—a sentence, a particular phrase or just one character. For instance, I can apply Word’s Emphasis character style to emphasise my point or just a part of it.

Table styles

Introduced in Office XP, Table styles are a kind of paragraph style, but extend the paragraph to add control of table cells’ borders and backgrounds.

List styles

New to Office 2003, List styles are another kind of paragraph style with special formatting for bulleted and numbered lists. Lists have always been troubling things for Word users, and List styles are supposed to address longstanding difficulties with lists. Time will tell whether Microsoft have finally cracked this nut.

Applying styles

So how do you use styles when writing a document? The simplest way is to use the drop down list on the Formatting toolbar. In more recent versions of Word, the list even gives you a preview of the style before you apply it.

Figure 3: The formatting toolbar’s drop-down style menu

Figure 3: The formatting toolbar’s drop-down style menu

On the left of the menu is each available style’s name. On the right there is a symbol indicating whether each style is a paragraph, character, table, or list style. In the example above, Emphasis is a character style, indicated by a, while all the other styles are paragraph styles, indicated by ¶.

So simply select the style you want to use and start typing. It’s that simple. If it’s a paragraph style, the whole paragraph will change. If you choose a character style it will only affect the characters you type next.

In Word XP and 2003, some of the styles have no symbol. These are not really styles but formatting you’ve used elsewhere in the document. While that may seem useful, this is not the same as using a style and you won’t be able to use the features we are discussing in this article.

Customising styles

Word has a collection of styles already built in, but if you want your document to look unique, you’ll want to customise your styles. To do this select “Styles and Formatting…” from the Format menu (“Styles…” in older versions).

This brings up the Styles and Formatting sidebar. If you’re using a Word version before XP it brings up a dialog box, but the idea is pretty much the same—it lets you customise the styles presented in the list. You can choose to change just the styles in your document or any available style.

Figure 4: The Styles and Formatting sidebar

Figure 4:  The Styles and Formatting sidebar

Changing existing styles

Even though the standard styles aren’t that amazing, they’re a good place to start for at least two reasons. Firstly it saves a lot of time and effort. Microsoft has kindly done most of the groundwork for you, so you don’t have to start from scratch. This is a real time saver, especially for trickier styles such as headings with outline numbering.

Secondly, Word automatically uses the standard styles for headers and footers, page numbers and for building tables of contents. These will be real work if you don’t use the standard styles.

A third reason is that using the standard styles makes it much easier to repurpose documents. Tools such as Alucida’s Web Spinner use the standard styles to convert Word documents to HTML or XML for the Web, for instance.

Once you’ve brought up the Styles and Formatting sidebar right-click (Ctrl-click on the Mac) on the style you want to edit in the sidebar. Choose “Modify style…” from the drop-down menu. This brings up a dialog box which allows you to change all the style’s formatting.

Most basic options, such as font and paragraph setting are available in this dialog box, but click the “Format” button if you want to access the full range of options. For starters, focus on the Font and Paragraph formatting. As you become more confident you can try other formatting options.

Creating your own styles

Once you get the hang of modifying styles, you’re ready to develop your own styles. But before you start making changes to the style, decide two things.

What type of style do you want? Decide whether this is a paragraph, character, table or list style.

What style should you base the new style on? Styles “inherit” formatting from other styles. For instance, if you change the font of Word’s built-in Heading 1 style all the other Heading styles’ fonts will change (unless you’ve set their fonts separately). Beginners, it’s a good idea to base all your heading styles on the “Heading 1” style, all your ‘body text’ styles, including lists and tables on the “Normal” style and all other styles on “(no style)”.

If you make these two important decisions, there should be fewer surprises down the track. If you ignore these decisions, you’ll find styles don’t behave as you expect and you’ll get very frustrated very quickly.

When you’ve worked   out the type of style and the new style’s base style, click the “New Style…” button in the Styles and Formatting sidebar to create a new style. This opens the formatting dialog box where you give the style a name, choose its type (character, paragraph and so on) and choose a style to base it on.

Style up your new style using whatever formatting you like, click OK and there you are—your very own style.

Putting styles to work on the Web

Word has long been able to produce HTML pages—with varying degrees of success. These are improved in the latest version of Word, including a range of features for creating XML output. Any export to HTML is easier if you’re using styles, it makes the resulting HTML code much cleaner which means that pages will load much quicker. Without styles Word will produce lots more junk code.

Additionally, if you use a third-party product like Alucida Web Spinner to convert your Word document, styles will make it much more likely that your document will make a smooth and reliable transition to the web.

In the example below, a document is written and formatted in Word but it transfers cleanly to the company’s intranet with the intranet’s formatting and still keeps its structure. Because the author used styles, it won’t need any further formatting information.

Figure 5: The document keeps its formatting on the Web

We’ve just scratched the surface of some very big topics here, and we haven’t even mentioned “semantic structure”. But by now you might be starting to realise how powerful styles can be and how much time they can save you. You’re well on the way to becoming a style guru.

In Part 2 we talk templates. We’ll show you how to put your styles together to make your documents look great and perform better for business and pleasure. Read on››