The 4 style types
There are four style types in Word. Knowing about them will help you understand what you’re looking at in the task pane, what your options are for creating new styles, and what impact a style will have on the text in your document.
Word Styles
Let’s get ‘under the hood’ and leverage the real power of Microsoft Word and, by the way, defuse many of the weird things that happen when swapping docs to other computers…
This is my take on managing Word styles from an organisational perspective. It’s important in minimising disruption when rolling out changes to organisational templates. It’s need-to-know in setting up a Style Guides.
Also covered are style types to be careful of, cascading styles and some font tweaks.
A Style can be created that captures certain character and paragraph settings. Applying that style quickly applies those settings. This allow you to easily apply consistentcy to your document. Ther is no longer need to manually format each time.
Here are some handy shortcuts to kick off with some style related shortcuts for Word
| Shortcut | Description |
| [Shift]+[Ctrl]+[Alt]+[S] | Toggles the Style Pane (open/closed) |
| [Ctrl]+[Z] | Undo, use the undo toolbar button |
| [Ctrl]+[Y] | Redo (re-applies your last undo) |
| [Ctrl] + [Spacebar] | Reset only character formatting |
| [Ctrl] + [Q] | Reset only paragraph formatting |
| [Ctrl]+[ [ ] | Decrease font size |
| [Ctrl]+[ ] ] | Increase font size |
Paragraph styles
Paragraph styles include not just font type and size but also formatting for a whole paragraph’s text positioning and spacing. A paragraph style can be applied to one or more paragraphs.
A paragraph style’s formatting will be applied to all the text within the end paragraph mark of where your pointer is positioned and controls all aspects of that paragraph’s appearance, such as text alignment, tab stops, line spacing, and borders. It can include character formatting.
Character styles
These are applied at the character level – to blocks of words and letters – rather than at the paragraph level, such as emphasis that applies, say, both an underline and an italic.
A character style affects selected text within a paragraph, such as the font and size of text, and bold and italic formats. You can apply character styles along with the paragraph style. So, if the paragraph style is Normal, using Noto Sans as the font, and you applied the “emphasis” style to a word, you’d still have Noto Sans as the font, but it would also have italic and underline formatting.
List styles and table styles
These two other types of styles provide a consistent look to tables and lists, but can be problematic:
- A table style provides a consistent look to borders, shading, alignment and fonts in tables.
- A list style applies similar alignment, numbering or characters, and fonts to lists.
Some tips
Although there are no absolute rules for formatting a document, the following guidelines make it easier to maintain consistent formatting.
- Base new documents on a template
By basing new documents on a template, you’ll immediately have most of the styles you need to format the document. - Format all text with a style
Format distinct elements with appropriate styles. For example, format all top-level headings with the Heading 1 style and format all lengthy quotations with an indented quotation style. If your document doesn’t have a style for a particular element, crate a new style. or copy a suitable style from another template. - Change formatting by changing the style
To change the appearance of text, modify the style used to format the text. Avoid using formatting commands or toolbars that apply formats directly.
- Deleting a Style
If you delete a paragraph style. Word applies the Normal stye to all paragraphs formatted with that style. - Renaming a Style
You can rename a style simply to change its name or to give it an alternative name or alias. You can use an alias for a built-in style instead of renaming it.
Displaying Styles
Open the Styles pane
The Styles pane shows a list of styles, with the active one highlighted. To toggle the pane open/closed:
- From the Home tab, select the small square to the bottom right of the Styles section;
or - use the shortcut [Shift] + [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [S].
At the bottom of the Styles pane, there are four buttons:
- New Style – creates a new style
- Style Inspector – information of the style currently selected
- Manage Styles – opens the Manage Styles dialogue
- Options… – Style Pane options
Show Style Names in the Style Area Pane
If you are in Draft View you can display style names in a pane to the left of the text in the Style Area. It’s handy to see all your styles at a glance as you scroll through.
- Change to Draft View by opening the View tab and from the Views section choose Draft.
- To have the Style Area visible, you need to open Options from File. It’s at the bottom of the ‘menu’ (it’s called ‘Backstage’, but to me it’s just a big menu – like the Windows Start).
- The setting is found in the Display section of the Advanced part of Options. The Display is just over halfway down.
- Just to the right of Style area width in Draft and Outline Views: there’s a field box where you can enter the desired style area width. Try 1 cm. Reset to zero to remove the pane.
- Select [OK] and you return to your document with the styule for each paragraph listed to the left.
- You can drag the black line that separates the pane from the document to the left or right to suit. Dragging it all the way to the left removes the pane.
Create - Manage - Produce 