Styles, Formatting, How to and Why It’s Important

Anyone can use a word processing program. They are designed so that, at a basic level, anyone can create and modify a document. But there are limitations to just turning it on and typing away: no customization, no automation, and even limited functionality. Word processors, especially MS Word, have all of these amazing and wonderful features so that you can use them to make your life easier. When you ignore them, nothing bad happens, but you are missing out on a lot of benefits. Any editor can tell you what’s wrong with a document. But you can exponentially increase your productivity, efficiency, and accuracy by consistently using these tools.

The first feature of MS Word I want to talk about are Styles. Styles are a set of formatting preferences-things like paragraph spacing, font sizes and specifications, paragraph alignment, and so much more-that can be saved an applied over and over again to targeted text. Styles can be modified at any time and that change reflects throughout the entire document. With the click of a mouse you can make text do some very different things, things that to do by hand in a large document would take an insane amount of time and keystrokes to complete. Styles can also be created on the fly, either from original preferences defined by you, or you can create new styles from ones that were previously defined.

Now that I’ve provided a simple background on why they’re useful, I want to provide some basic tips for using Styles.

First, to bring up the Styles and Formatting Task Pane, click on
Format >Styles and Formatting, it should bring up menu that looks something like the menu on the right.

From here you can apply, modify, and create Styles. All you need to do is highlight the text you want and click on the appropriate Style and it magically adopts all the properties defined by that Style.
If your menu doesn’t look like the image to the right, do not fear. Sometimes the “Show” drop-down menu is on something other than Available formatting. Just click the drop-down menu and make sure you’re looking at Available formatting.

Now that you can apply Styles, here is how you modify them. Hover over the appropriate Style and an arrow will appear, click on it to reveal a drop-down menu that will give you several options, click on Modify. It will bring a menu up that looks like the figure to the left. This is where the magic happens. Here you can define a Style to do pretty much anything you want.

The trick is knowing what you want in advance. Often the standard Style in place will have properties that are nothing close to your needs. This means that in a lot of cases you will need to address most, if not all, of the options available in the Format drop-down menu at the bottom. In some cases, perhaps just a simple modification might do it, so this main menu is what you need. But in a lot of situations more modifications are need, this is why you have so many options from the format menu.

You’ll also notice there is a Name field, this is useful when you want to define your own set of Styles. But be wary of renaming the preset Styles. It will work, but I’ve know Word to act up on occasion while doing this. It’s best to start from scratch and base your style on one of the presets (notice the “Style based on:” drop-down menu).

So now you have the basics of Style Formatting. Using Styles not only makes your document more visually appealing, it makes it more powerful also. Meaning that if you wanted to make your document generate a table of contents, it can do so completely automatically because it will recognize your Styles and organize the TOC the way it should be and can be automatically updated without having to re-type all those page numbers over again.