Word Formatting using Styles in Word 2007

Word Formatting is a way to format your word documents. Earlier we saw how to create a Word Table in Microsoft word 2007. This article describes the various Word Styles in Microsoft Word 2007, to format the content of your Word documents.

Styles in word documents are a collection of formatting characteristics, such as font name, size, color, paragraph alignment, spacing and even borders and shading.In Word, the above formatting effects can be achieved in several ways in your document. For example, to format headings, you can select the text, apply a font say Cambria, apply bold formatting, and then apply a slightly larger font size (say 16-point) than the size that you use for the body text. Applying formatting in this manner is known as direct formatting.The same can be achieved in one step by applying the built-in Heading 1 style!!! For each heading in your Word document, you just click in the heading (you don’t even need to select all the text), and then click Heading 1 in the gallery of styles!!!

Direct Formatting is not only a time consuming task but it is also prone to mistake mistakes, and you might not get a good looking document. In the above mentioned example, you must repeat the direct formatting process for each heading, and you must be careful to select the same font size every time. If you want subheadings, you must decide how to differentiate the subheadings from the headings (smaller size? italicize?) and repeat the direct formatting process for each subheading. If you don’t have expertise in design or typography, it may take some time before you create a look that you like.

On the contrary, the built-in Quick Styles are designed to work together. For example, the Heading 2 Quick Style is designed to look subordinate to the Heading 1 Quick Style. Quick Styles can not only be applied to paragraphs, but can also be applied to individual words and characters. For example, you can emphasize a phrase by applying the Emphasis Quick Style. When you format text as part of a list, each item in the list is automatically formatted with the List Paragraph Quick Style.If you later decide that you want headings to have a different look, you can change the Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles, and Word automatically updates all instances of them in the document. You can also apply a different Quick Style set or a different theme to change the look of the headings without making changes to the styles.

The built-in styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.) provide other benefits, too. If you use the built-in heading styles, Word can generate a table of contents automatically. Word also uses the built-in heading styles to make the Document Map, which is a convenient feature for moving through long documents.If you have a document that uses the built-in heading styles, open it, and on the View tab, in the Show/Hide group, select the Document Map check box. Click a heading in the document map to jump to the corresponding part of the document.

The following are some of the types of styles in Word 2007:

• Character and paragraph styles determine the look of most of the text in a document. Some styles work as both character and paragraph types, and these styles are known as linked styles.
• List styles determine the look of lists, including characteristics such as bullet style or number scheme, indentation, and any label text.
• Table styles determine the look of tables, including characteristics such as the text formatting of the header row,
  gridlines, and accent colors for rows and columns.
• Heading styles that determine to look of headings from H1 to H9

Use Word Templates and styles in Word 2007, and improve your productivity.

You can also find out more about Word Macros and how to create a Word Macro using VBA.

Filed under: MS Word Tips office 2007