Learn to use Styles to save time when you are working on a longer document.
When you’re typing longer documents in Microsoft Word you may find you spend a lot of time formatting the document to make it look good. If you struggle with this you will find that Microsoft Word has a feature called Styles that you can use to format text more quickly.
The key to using Styles successfully in your Word documents is to avoid formatting the text any other way. So, for example, don’t select your document title and then manually format it so it is a larger size text, blue and bold. Instead, use a Style. So, select the title text and from the Home tab on the Ribbon locate and open the Styles Gallery. There is a Title style already created for you so click it to apply it to your text.
Likewise for headings, select the text and use the Heading1 style. If you have subheadings then select the text and click on Heading2. There are also styles that you can use for quotes such as Intense Quote and you can also use Subtle Emphasis or Emphasis to draw attention to words or phrases. To use these, select a word or phrase and then select either Subtle Emphasis or Emphasis to format the text that way.
One benefit of using styles to format your text – apart from the speed of applying the formatting – is that styles make it easy for you to apply formatting consistently throughout your document. Provided you always use Heading1 style for your headings then every heading will look exactly like every other heading.
If you want to change how a heading looks that’s easy too. Right click the style in the Styles Gallery on the Home tab of the Ribbon and click Modify. This opens up a dialog that lets you change how the style looks. So, to make heading text purple, click the Automatic dropdown list and select a purple color and click Ok. Immediately every heading in the document that you formatted with Heading1 will be updated.
When you format your document with styles you can also use Style Sets to change the entire look of the document. So, after you have applied your styles, choose Change Styles > Style Set and hover your mouse over each entry in the list. As you do this, you will see the look of the document change. Click on one to select it.
