John Borwick's blog

One of my goals for 2010 is to blog about things I take for granted when I use the computer.  If you’ve used MS Word styles before, this article may be old hat to you.  However, if you haven’t used MS Word styles, I hope to introduce you to a whole new way to format your documents–so you will never have to use the “Font” menu again.

MS Word 2007 made it a little easier to find styles: there’s a “Styles” menu in the ribbon under the “Home” tab.  You may have already been tempted to click in this menu.  When you click on a style, it applies to the current paragraph. So if you click on “Heading 1″ while in a paragraph, all of the sudden everything in the paragraph gets gigantic and blue.

So, there’s a styles menu.  Why would you want to use the styles menu?  For me, the easiest way to understand styles is to see all the options for a given style.  To do this, you can click on the little styles arrow in the corner to show the Styles menu.

You should now see a list of styles.  Right-click on “Heading 1″ and select “Modify…”.  This will take you to the “Modify Style” menu.

Once on the “Modify Style” menu, note a couple of things:

• “Style based on“: For computer scientists, you can think of this as the style’s “super-class”.  That is, this is the base style from which the current style is derived.  In this example, “Heading 1″ is based on “Normal”.
• “Style for following paragraph“: What should happen when you hit “Enter”?  Do you want to keep typing in this style, or do you want to switch to another style?  In this example, “Heading 1″ is assumed to be one paragraph: why would you want to keep typing in Heading 1 for several paragraphs?  Therefore the style goes back to “Normal” when you hit enter.
• The little block below the preview shows all modifications from the base style.  In this case, we see every possible change from the “Normal” style.  For my MS word installation, which includes some extra language packs, we see some references to “(Asian)” fonts but mainly we see that the font becomes 14 point, bold, there’s 24 point of space above the heading, and there are several other differences mainly having to do with magic associated with “Heading 1″ that you don’t see.

So, how could this be useful?  Well, one style I created is for “dictionary entries.”  Dictionary entries are underlined with a roman numeral, e.g.

1. Test: Definition of test

To do this, I created a new style called “Dictionary.”  Then I used the “Format” menu to say that the style should be underlined, and that the “Numbering” should be roman numerals.  While writing my document, I select the style from the “Styles” menu when I’m ready to create a dictionary entry.

Why?

Why go through this effort?  Why use styles rather than just create a list and remembering to use underline?  For me there are a few reasons:

1. You can save your styles to use over and over.  If you set up your styles in a blank document, and “Save as…” a “Word Template (.dotx)” or “Word 97-2003 Template (.dot)”, then whenever you double-click on these templates they will create a new blank document that already has these styles in it.
2. You can update your entire document formatting through changing styles.  My most hardcore use of MS word was in college, when four of us were simultaneously writing a shared 60-page document.  We used “compare & merge documents” a lot, plus we used styles.  MS word automatically creates style entries for weird stuff you put in your document; you can then select all the weird styles and convert them to normal styles.  Then, if you decide that all of your “dictionary” elements should use a different type of numbering, you can change them in one fell swoop.
3. MS Word does magic for certain types of styles.  Most notably, MS Word will automatically create a table of contents for you.  It does this by looking through your document for paragraphs with the “Title”, “Heading 1″, “Heading 2″, and “Heading 3″ styles.  It assumes that Heading 2 entries are sub-entries of Heading 1, and so on.

So, that’s my own little intro to MS word styles.  For the official story, check out Microsoft’s “Style basics in Word” article.