Introduction to styles

Styles are truly the gateway towards efficiently drafting long documents in Word. Almost all features for dealing with long documents rely in some way on the styles-system.

What are styles?

Styles are "blueprints" that centrally describe what a paragraph should look like: the font name, font size, text alignment, color, boldness, spacing, and so on. These blueprints are then applied to actual paragraphs within the document.

Styles allow for very fast and central changes, because a change to a style will immediately ripple down to every paragraph to which it is applied. Styles foster both consistency and quick & easy changes and are thus the opposite of the “local formatting” that you directly apply to selected text using the Format Painter or the other toolbar buttons.

Using styles

1. Initiating styles

Styles must be created before they can be applied to actual paragraphs. Microsoft Word will itself create a few default styles, and many organisations also define a few of their own default styles. But let’s create a new style step by step.

Before you start managing styles, it’s usually a good idea to show the Styles Pane, by clicking on the little expander-button in the bottom right corner of the Style previews in the ribbon:

The Styles Pane will then be shown on the right side of the Word-window:

The easiest way to create a style is to completely format a paragraph the way you like (font, color, spacing, alignment, space before/after, etc.), and then click on the “New Style” button at the bottom of the Styles Pane.

Alternatively, you can click on the dropdown button next to the style previews in the ribbon and then click on “Create a style”.

Give the style a descriptive name — e.g., “Title 1” — and click on OK to effectively create the new style. You’ll see it appear in the Styles Pane at the right.

2. Applying a style

Once you have created a style, it’s very easy to apply it to any paragraph.

To do so, put the cursor in the paragraph to which you want to apply the style, and choose the name of the style from either the Styles Pane or the styles dropdown in the ribbon.

To apply a style to multiple paragraphs, select several paragraphs at once.

3. Updating a style

One of the main strengths of styles is that they can be easily and centrally updated. You can do so in two ways:

• A first way is to select an entire paragraph to which the style is applied. Next, change the layout of the paragraph however you like by clicking the formatting buttons in the Home tab of the Ribbon (bold, italic, left/right/center align, color, etc). Finally, right-click on the name of the style in the Styles Pane and choose Update [name of style] to match selection. You’ll see that all paragraphs to which the style was assigned, will immediately match the new characteristics of the style.
• A second way is to choose the "Modify" option in the dropdown menu. You can then modify the style in the window that appears. Some detailed settings are only available by clicking on the Format button in the bottom left corner of the window.