Understanding Styles

If you know a bit about how styles can benefit you, what kinds there are, and where they are stored, you will feel confident about creating and using them in your documents.

The Advantages of Using Styles

Styles are advantageous for several reasons:

• They let you apply formatting quickly. Instead of applying several formatting options one at a time, you can apply them all at once by applying a style that contains all the options.

• They let you modify your formatting quickly. If you decide to make a formatting change to some element of your document, you need to update only the style you applied to that element, and the affected text throughout your document reformats instantly.

• They let you create a consistent look for all the documents that you and your co-workers create.

Styles Come in Two Flavors

Word lets you create two types of styles:

• Character styles

• Paragraph styles

Character styles can contain only font formatting, and for this reason, they are far less useful than paragraph styles. However, you might occasionally want to create a character style if a word or phrase crops up frequently in your documents and has to be formatted in a particular way. For example, company style might dictate that the name of your company always appear in an Arial, 12-point, bold font.

Paragraph styles can contain both font formatting and paragraph formatting. This makes them much more versatile than character styles. As you might expect, paragraph styles can be applied, at a minimum, to a single paragraph.

You Can Store Styles in Documents or Templates

If you create a style that will be useful only in a particular document, you can store it in that document only. It will always be available in that document, but not in any others. If, on the other hand, you want to use a style in all the documents based on a particular template, you can store the style in the template itself.