What are Styles ?

A style is a collection of formatting instructions that can be applied to text, avoiding the need for manual formatting using the Format menu or Formatting toolbar.

Styles are used in everything that you do in Word, without you even realising. There are several reasons why it is important to understand how they work:

• Consistency – ensures that your document contains the same formatting throughout, providing a professional, clean-looking document.
• Easier to Modify – using styles means that you only need to modify the style and not every single paragraph in your document in that style.
• Efficiency – you only need to create the style once, then it can be applied anywhere else in that document (and other documents too)
• Tables of Contents – a table of contents can be generated automatically using the styles in your document.
• Faster Navigation – allows you to move to different sections, quickly, using the Document Map
• Working in Outline – enables you to easily outline and organise your document.
• Legal Outline Numbering – Numbering, when linked to styles, allows you to generate and update consistent outline numbering in legal documents, even ones with complicated numbering schemes like municipal law, tax law, and mergers and acquisitions documents.

 Style Types

• Paragraph – These are the most common type of style. They apply formatting to the entire paragraph and include both font formatting and paragraph formatting.
• Character – These styles apply only font formatting to selected text.
• Table – These styles allow you to apply formatting to tables.
• List – These styles allow you to specify the way lists are numbered depending on the level of the numbering e.g. the list style “1 / 1.1 / 1.1.1” will apply number formatting as follows:

1. Sarah

1.1. Fred

1.1.1.   John

How Styles Cascade

A style can be based on another style or on no style. Basing a style on another creates a hierarchy of styles that allow you to make changes to multiple styles in a single step.

For example, if you create a style called “Level 1 heading” which is Arial, 16pt and Bold, then a “Level 2 heading” which is based on the first, it will inherit level 1’s attributes. All you then need to do is to adjust that style, say to 14pt but leave the other formatting the same. If you then decide that you want all of your headings to be Verdana rather than Arial, you change the level 1 heading to Verdana and, because it is the ‘parent’ of the level 2 heading, it will change that to Verdana also.

You can create up to 9 levels of styles. Basing your headings on the built in ‘Heading 1” through to ‘Heading 9’ also allows you to use the Document Map feature:

View > Document Map

Styles & Templates

A new style can either be created and saved in that document only or added to the template that is currently in use. If you set up a new style but did not click on the ‘New Documents Based on this template’ check box, that style would only be available in that particular document, otherwise it would be added to the template which that document is attached to. Consequently, that style would then be available to all other documents using that template.

Do not use the ‘Automatically update’ feature unless you really know what you are doing! Any changes you make directly to your document will update anything else in that document with the same style, and you can end up overwriting your styles.

Modifying an existing Style

Changing a style will affect any text in that document that is linked to that particular style, and also any styles that may be dependent on that style. If you click on the ‘New Documents Based on this template’ check box, it will also modify that style within the template itself. For these reasons, it is important to decide whether you want to modify that style, create a new one or just apply manual formatting to some text.

• From the Quick Styles, hover over the style to be modified
• Right mouse click
• Select Modify from the list
• Change the formatting as necessary

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