Chapter 9: Using Styles to Increase Your Formatting Power

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Overview

Formatting takes on new meaning when you create complex or long documents that contain recurring elements, such as headings, formatted paragraphs, figure captions, table headings, and so forth. Spending time formatting components one by one in a document that contains a variety of elements can easily lead to hours of tedium and increased chances of formatting errors. Conveniently, you can eliminate repetitive formatting tasks in Word by using styles.

A style is a named set of formatting characteristics that you can apply to characters, paragraphs, tables, and lists. When you use styles, you can quickly apply multiple formatting settings to specified text. In addition, styles enable you to modify the look of a document easily by changing a style (or styles) instead of manually reformatting components throughout your document. Styles also enable you to take advantage of the following powerful automation and organization features available in Word:

• AutoFormat  See Chapter 7, "Putting Text Tools to Work."

• AutoSummarize  See Chapter 6, "Making the Most of Research Services and Reference Tools."

• Master Documents   See Chapter 20, "Creating and Controlling Master Documents."

• Outlining   See Chapter 10, "Outlining Documents for Clarity and Structure."

• Tables of contents, tables of figures, and similar elements  See Chapter 21, "Generating First-Class Tables of Contents and Related Elements."

• Themes, templates, and add-ins  See Chapter 16, "Formatting Documents Using Templates, Wizards, Add-Ins, and XML Schemas."

• Web page wizards and templates  See Chapter 26, "Creating Professional Web Sites."

The bottom line is that instead of formatting each character, paragraph, table, and list in a document individually by using toolbar buttons, keyboard shortcuts, menu commands, and dialog box options, you can make better use of your time and resources by creating and using styles.

Unfortunately, the concept of styles tends to make most Word users feel a bit uncomfortable; even some experienced Word users rarely bother with styles (or they use styles only sporadically). Fortunately, if you're comfortable using Word but are new to styles, you needn't worry—creating, using, and modifying styles are skills that are well within your grasp. Most cases of the style heebie-jeebies are quickly eliminated with a little information and some hands-on experience. If you take a little time to understand and experiment with the concepts presented in this chapter, you'll be able to use styles whenever you need them during document creation and modification. More importantly, you'll discover that using styles can dramatically improve productivity.

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