Question

1. How can using styles make it easier to change the look and feel of your documents?
2. Describe an example of how you can use styles. You can include a style sample in an Word document.
3. How would you go about customizing or creating your own style?

Answer 1

What are Styles?

---> Built-in styles are combinations of formatting characteristics that you can apply to text to quickly change its appearance.

---> For example, applying the Heading 1 style might make text bold, Arial, and 16 point, and applying the Heading 2 style makes text bold, italic, Arial, and 14 point. (Those are examples; exact formatting characteristics depend on Word's default settings and those you might have chosen for yourself.)

Here are the top 5 reasons to use Word Styles:

1. Styles application means easy Table of Contents generation:

The easiest way to create a table of contents is to use the built-in heading styles. You can also create a table of contents that is based on the custom styles that you have applied. Or you can assign the table of contents levels to individual text entries.

Mark entries by using built-in heading styles

1. Select the text that you want to appear in the table of contents.
2. On the Home tab, in the Styles group, click the style that you want.

For example, if you selected text that you want to style as a main heading, click the style called Heading 1 in the Quick Style gallery.

• If you don't see the style that you want, click the arrow to expand the Quick Style gallery.
• If the style that you want does not appear in the Quick Style gallery, press CTRL+SHIFT+S to open the Apply Styles task pane. Under Style Name, click the style that you want.

2. Styles cascade and so when you make one change to a document you have made them all

Instead of using direct formatting, use styles to format your document so you can quickly and easily apply a set of formatting choices consistently throughout your document.

3. Styles allow you to use Outline View

When you enter your first top-level outline entry, Word automatically formats it with a built-in style, Heading 1. As you continue to build your outline by adding subordinate and body levels, Word in turn continues to apply the appropriate built-in style to each heading and body text entry. In this way, your outline levels (Level 1, Level 2, Body Text, and so on) are directly tied to built-in heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, Normal, and so on).

4. Restrict formatting changes

You can lock down styles in a document to make sure that others don’t apply direct formatting and change your document creating a huge mess.

5. Templates are much more efficient and kinder to others if they're based on styles

A template is a Microsoft Office document that’s been designed with pre-existing themes, styles, and layouts, which has placeholder information instead of real content.

---> Templates are a great way to save time and create consistent Office 2010 documents. They are especially valuable for types of documents that you use frequently, such as weekly presentations, application forms, and expense reports.

---> If possible, you want to use a file that already has the look and feel that you want, with placeholders that you can change to tailor it for your current needs. That’s what a template is—a file where the hard work has been done for you, saving you from having to start with a blank page.

Understanding Styles in Microsoft Word:

* Understand the importance of Styles
* Understand the difference between Paragraph, Character and Linked Styles
* List all available styles
* Create, Modify and Locate your Own Styles
* Understand the Clear All Command in the Styles Pane and the Clear All Formatting Button on the Home Tab

5 ways to modify and customize styles in Microsoft Word:

Microsoft Word users tend to either love or hate working with styles. Here are five tips for applying and managing them.

1. Start over:

---> Despite the best of intentions, a document can become overwhelmed by direct formatting and modified styles. This is especially true when a document has gone through several different users, each making the document their own by modifying styles and adding direct formatting.

---> Formats comes in two levels: direct and styles. Direct formatting is a manually applied format, such as clicking the Bold or Italics button.

---> You apply numerous attributes at once using a style. It's important to understand the differences between the two when removing them.

2. Modify the built-in styles:

---> Styles may streamline formatting tasks, but the built-in styles won't always be adequate. It's easy enough to create a custom style, but that presents a problem--many Word features, such as the table of contents, depend on the built-in styles.

---> For example, if you assign a custom style to headings, you'll have to work extra hard to get Word to recognize those headings when generating a table of content.

3. Create a custom style:

---> If Word feature integration isn't a consideration, you can quickly create custom styles from formatted content.

---> It works with character and paragraph styles. Simply format the text or paragraph.

4. Use styles in other documents:

---> You won't have to modify an existing style or create a custom style if it already exists in another document.

---> You can copy it from the other document using the Organizer.

5. Quick style overview:

---> For a quick view of the styles in use, click the View menu and choose Outline or Draft in the Views group. Doing so will display the paragraph styles in use to the left.

There are several reasons for using styles in a document:

* Consistency — When you use styles to format your document, each section is formatted the same and therefore, provides a professional, clean-looking document.

* Easier to Modify — If you use styles in your document consistently, you only need to update a given style once if you want to change the characteristics of all text formatted in that style.

* Efficiency — You can create a style once, and then apply it to any section in the document without having to format each section individually.

* Table of Contents — Styles can be used to generate a table of contents quickly.

* Faster Navigation — Using styles lets you quickly move to different sections in a document using the Document Map feature.

* Working in Outline View — Styles allow you to outline and organize your document's main topics with ease.

* 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.

* Efficiency of Word — Files which are predominantly manually formatted are less efficient than those which have formatting that has been imposed by styles: manually formatted files, such a converted documents which have been File, Opened, are bloated in file size (bytes) and do not render to the screen efficiently when you scroll through them. This is because Word is a styles-based application.

it first reads the attributes of the underlying style, then has to broadcast anything contrary (e.g. manually formatted on top of that). As such, a lengthy document that has been predominantly manually formatted, will behave sluggishly because Word has to work harder at managing it. Additionally, the print formatting processes are equally labored as opposed to using styles.

* HTML AND XML — What lies ahead? A fully structured, styled document will move into HTML and XML incredibly well.

---> Styles are an essential part of Microsoft Word. In fact, everything you type into a document has a style attached to it, whether you design the style or not.

Create a custom Style Sheet in Word:
----------------------------------------

---> Imagine that you must create a weekly report for your branch of the company that will, eventually, be merged into a bigger report for the corporate offices.

---> The CEO has instructed you to create a Style Sheet for everyone in all the branches to use, so the reports can be merged seamlessly with minimal reformatting.

---> For the sake of brevity, we’ll create just one custom style for that Style Sheet. You can then use these instructions to create all the remaining styles such as titles, subtitles, and so on.

Using the Styles panel in Word:

---> On the Home tab, click the expansion arrow in the lower right-hand corner of the Styles menu.

---> The default Normal Style Sheet panel drops down and displays a list of all the paragraph, character, link, table, and list styles in that Style Sheet.

---> You can add new styles to this Style Sheet or modify the existing styles and save them under a different name.

---> Or you can clear these styles and start fresh, then re-save your custom Style Sheet with a new name.

Formatting section:

---> In the Font section under Formatting, select a large serif font like Bookman Old Style.

---> Choose 11 point from the Font Size drop-down list. In the box that says Automatic (color options), choose a dark blue for your font color.

---> Common Character attributes (bold, italic, and underline) are the buttons between the Size and Color fields.

---> The next row of buttons are the most common Paragraph format options: Justification, Line Spacing, Spacing (before and after paragraphs in points), and Paragraph Indents.

---> Note that the Sample text in the large, center panel changes based on your selections, so you can view them live, and the following panel provides a text description of the options you’ve chosen.

Options:

---> Next, check Add this style to the Styles Gallery so your styles appear in the style list.

---> Then check Automatically Update so your styles automatically update when changes are made, and then choose the radio button for New Documents Based on this Template, because you plan to use this Style Sheet for your weekly reports.

Custom format menu:

---> Additional format features and more character and paragraph options reside under the Format menu.

---> Select the Format button, and a drop-down list appears listing the submenus for these extended features and options.

Format font:

---> For style sheets, font choices go beyond the font, font style, size, and color you've already set on the previous screen.

---> You'll also set up text effects like strikethrough or underline, and more.

Format border:

---> To add borders to your style sheet, from the Format menu, select Border.

---> This menu provides border and shade options for your text box.

---> Select Setting: Box, then choose a color and line width. Next, choose the Options button and set the spacing inside the box between the text and the borders. Click OK, and OK again.