Making Styles Work for You

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Before you create and customize styles to suit your purposes, you should be comfortable using and applying existing styles. Word provides plenty of styles that you can use to format your documents while you hone your style skills. Incidentally, the quickest way to apply styles to documents is to use the styles that already exist. Don't be intimidated when it comes to using styles. In Word, you can easily change all occurrences of a style. In fact, after you've applied styles, you'll be able to select and modify all instances of a style as well as clear formatting if you determine you'd rather not use a specified style. The next few sections examine how to apply, select, change, and clear existing styles.

Applying Styles to Text

Logically enough, applying a style entails first specifying the element you want to format. You can specify text to be styled by clicking within a paragraph, selecting text within a paragraph or multiple paragraphs, or positioning the insertion point at the beginning of an empty paragraph in which you want the selected style to be applied when you type. After you've specified what you want to format, you can perform any of the following procedures to apply an existing style to the text:

• Choose a style in the Style list box on the Formatting toolbar. You can click the Style arrow or press Ctrl+Shift+S to select the list and then use the Up Arrow and Down Arrow keys to navigate through the style options.

  Tip 

  To avoid having to scroll through the Style list box, click the Style down arrow, and then type the first letter of the style name. Styles are listed alphabetically, so the list will jump to the style names starting with the letter you typed.

• Select a style in the Pick Formatting To Apply list box in the Styles And Formatting task pane.

• Double-click the paragraph's existing style name in the Style Area, and choose a style in the Style dialog box.

• Press a preassigned keyboard shortcut (see Table 9-1) or a custom keyboard shortcut.

When you apply a style, the selected text is immediately reformatted in that style. If you find that the newly applied style isn't what you were looking for, you can replace it by applying another style, or you can undo the formatting by clicking Undo on the Standard toolbar, pressing Ctrl+Z, or choosing Edit, Undo.

Selecting and Changing All Instances of a Style

After you apply styles to your text, you can easily select all instances of a style whenever the need arises. In Word 2000 and earlier, you had to use the Find And Replace dialog box to find instances of a formatting style, and you were limited to finding instances one at a time—in other words, you couldn't select all instances of similarly styled text at once. In Word 2002 and Word 2003, you can use the Style And Formatting task pane to select all instances of a specified style quickly. This capability can considerably speed up a number of tasks related to global styles. For example, you might want to select all instances of styled text because you want to replace one style with another, or you might want to delete all text that appears in a particular style, or you might want to copy all similarly styled elements to a new document. Regardless of your reasons, you can select all instances of a style by following these steps:

1. Click a paragraph or word that uses the style you want to select. (You can display the Style Area to simplify the process of selecting a paragraph that has been formatted with the sought-after style.)

2. Click the Styles And Formatting button on the Formatting toolbar to open the Styles And Formatting task pane if it isn't already visible.

3. Click Select All, or hover the pointer over the text in the Formatting Of Selected Text section, click the style's down arrow, and choose Select All x Instance(s), as shown in Figure 9-5.

   
   Figure 9-5: Using the Formatting Of Selected Text list box, you can see exactly how many times a style is applied in the current document.

After you select all instances of text with a particular style, you can reformat the selected text by selecting another style in the Style list box on the Formatting toolbar or by selecting a style in the Pick Formatting To Apply list box in the Styles And Formatting task pane. You can delete all selected text with the specified style by pressing Backspace or Delete.

Cross-Reference 

For information about modifying a style's settings, see "Modifying Existing Styles,".

Clearing Formatting in Selected Text

In addition to simplifying the process of selecting all instances of styled text, the Styles And Formatting task pane enables you to clear formatting quickly. In Word, both the Pick Formatting To Apply list box in the Styles And Formatting task pane and the Style list box on the Formatting toolbar include a Clear Formatting option. You can use this option to remove all formatting settings from selected text, paragraphs, or entire documents. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Select the text or click within the paragraph you want to clear.

2. Perform any of the following actions:

   • Select Clear Formatting in the Style list box on the Formatting toolbar.

   • Display the Styles And Formatting task pane, and select the Clear Formatting option in the Pick Formatting To Apply list box.

   • Choose Edit, Clear, Formats.

   • Display the Styles And Formatting task pane, hover the pointer over the text in the Formatting Of Selected Text list box, click the arrow, and select Clear Formatting.

After you clear the formatting, the text reverts to Normal style (which is Times New Roman, 12 point, left-aligned, single-spaced by default). If you realize immediately that you don't want to clear the formatting, click Undo on the Standard toolbar, press Ctrl+Z, or choose Edit, Undo. Further, you can later reapply the style or apply a new style to the text the same way you apply styles to other text.

Tip 

Clear formatting  To clear all text formatted with a particular style, select all instances of the style (as described in "Selecting and Changing All Instances of a Style,"), and then, in the Styles And Formatting task pane, select Clear Formatting in the Formatting Of Selected Text list box.

Troubleshooting: The Clear Formatting option isn't shown in the Pick Formatting To Apply list box

If you select text, and then find that the Clear Formatting option isn't listed in the Styles And Formatting task pane, it might be because the All Styles option is selected in the Show list box. By default, the All Styles view doesn't include the Clear Formatting option. To eliminate this little annoyance, click the Show arrow, and then choose Available Formatting, Formatting In Use, or Available Styles, all of which are configured to show the Clear Formatting option by default. The Clear Formatting option will appear at or near the top of the list after you change the Show setting.

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