Word: Styles… or the lack there of…

By | September 3, 2009

This is a rant, so go away no if you don’t want to hear (see).

One of my major annoyances in life is receiving a document (generally Word) which has been manually formatting from top to bottom. The whole point (if I’m not mistaken) is to use paragraph styles to give a document a consistent theme. Now styles have been around since the late 80s and early 90s and I thought (probably wrongly) that typists, secretaries, PAs, etc had as one of their main assets the know to format documents using standard word processing techniques.

So next time you receive a word document, display the styles task panel and see if its formatted correctly. If so there will be 5 to 10 styles “in use”. If the style panel contains 30 or more with names like “Normal + 10pt + Bold + …” then you know its manually formatted and will consequently be a nightmare to reformat.

🙁