Word: Types of Styles

By | September 3, 2009

After my last post (rant) you probably want to know about styles and how to format word documents correctly… well lets see if I can get you on the right road.

Word contains four paragraph types “Paragraph”, “Character”, “Table” and “List”. I’ll talk about paragraph and character only for the moment. A paragraph style is one that applies to a single, or multiple paragraphs in a document given those element a consistent look. For instance, they might use Times New Roman for the font, the font size is 12pt and the paragraphs have 6 pts between them give a small amount of white space between the paragraphs (instead of needing carriage returns). Character styles are applied to elements within a paragraph. For instance, in order to make a word or phrase bold you format is with a “Bold” character style rather than pressing the “B” tool bar button for “Bold”. You many need to create these character styles if they don’t already exist.

What this all means is that should some one come along an insist that the document be reformatted with a different font, say Ariel, then all you need to do is change the font of the “Normal” paragraph style and the document is changed. A number of the other styles in word inherit information from “Normal”, for instance, Heading 1 to 6, thus the change in “Normal” is also reflected in Headings 1 to 6.

This might seem like overkill for a small document, but when you started getting large documents the power and flexibility of styles comes into its own.

🙂