What Is a Style?

Most word processors today include a way to make changes to text not just word by word, but throughout an entire document using styles.

Styles collect all the different properties, such as font family, size, and color, that you want to apply to similar types of texttitles, headers, captions, and so onand give these groups of properties a common name. Suppose you want all the section titles in your document to be bold, Times font, italic, red, and 14-point. You could assign all those attributes to a style called Section Title (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2. Styles being applied to section titles in a word-processing page.

Whenever you type a section title, all you have to do is use the Section Title style, and all those attributes are applied to the text in one fell swoopno fuss, no mess. Even better, if you decide later that you really want all those titles to be 18 point instead of 14 point, you just change the definition of Section Title. The word processor then automatically changes the appearance of all the text marked with that style throughout the document.