What are paragraph styles in word

Right-click the text on which you want to base a new style. In the mini toolbar that appears, click Styles, and then click Create a Style. In the Create New Style from Formatting dialog box, give your style a name and click OK. Your new style will now appear in the Styles gallery.

How do I create a paragraph and character style in Word?

To create a new paragraph or character style:

1. Open the Styles pane by clicking the launcher in the Styles area of the Home ribbon.
2. At the bottom of the Styles pane, click the New Style button.
3. On the Create New Style from Formatting dialog:

Apply a paragraph style in Pages on Mac

1. Select one or more paragraphs, or click anywhere in a paragraph to apply the style to only that paragraph.
2. In the Format sidebar, click the Text tab, click the paragraph style name near the top of the sidebar, then choose a style from the Paragraph Styles pop-up menu.

What is paragraph style Word?

Paragraph styles are the most important styles. They’re called paragraph styles because when you use a paragraph style, Word can format a whole paragraph of text at a time. Word identifies paragraph styles with the paragraph symbol, ¶. Character styles are used to format a few characters within a paragraph.

What is the difference between a character style and a paragraph style?

A character style is a collection of character formatting attributes that can be applied to text in a single step. A paragraph style includes both character and paragraph formatting attributes, and can be applied to a paragraph or range of paragraphs.Paragraph and characters styles are sometimes called text styles.

How do you apply styles in Word?

To apply a style:
Select the text you want to format, or place your cursor at the beginning of the line. In the Styles group on the Home tab, click the More drop-down arrow. Select the desired style from the drop-down menu. The text will appear in the selected style.

How do you apply a line simple style set in Word?

Applying a Style Set

1. Click the Home tab in the Ribbon.
2. Click Change Styles in the Styles group. A drop-down menu will appear.
3. From the drop-down menu, select Style Set.
4. Select the Style Set you want to apply. The entire document will change (as long as you have applied styles in your document).

What are Microsoft Word styles?

What are Styles? Built-in styles are combinations of formatting characteristics that you can apply to text to quickly change its appearance. For example, applying the Heading 1 style might make text bold, Arial, and 16 point, and applying the Heading 2 style makes text bold, italic, Arial, and 14 point.

What is the difference between styles and templates?

Styles keep your formatting consistent within a document. Themes keep your look and feel consistent across multiple documents. Templates allow you to re-use text, and keep your look and feel consistent across multiple documents.

How can you apply style to a selected text?

To apply a style:

1. Select the text you want to format, or place your cursor at the beginning of the line.
2. In the Styles group on the Home tab, click the More drop-down arrow.
3. Select the desired style from the drop-down menu.
4. The text will appear in the selected style.

How will you apply styles to a paragraph from the Style task pane?

On the Home tab, click the Styles Dialog Box Launcher, and then click Options. Under Select styles to show, click All styles. All styles are displayed in the Styles task pane. Select text in your document and then click the style in the Styles task pane.

How do I change the start list paragraph style?

Define a new list style

1. Select the text or numbered list you want to change.
2. On the Home tab, in the Paragraph group, click the arrow next to Multilevel List.
3. Specify a name for your new list style.
4. Choose the number to start the list at.
5. Choose a level in the list to apply your formatting.

How do you apply a style set in Word 2010?

To apply a style set:

1. Click the Change Styles command on the Ribbon. A drop-down menu will appear.
2. From the drop-down menu, select Style Set. Selecting a Style Set.
3. Select the Style Set you want, and the change will be reflected in the entire document. Elegant Style Set. Formal Style Set.

Is a combination of title heading and paragraph styles?

Style sets include a combination of title, heading, and paragraph styles. Style sets allow you to format all elements in your document at once instead of modifying each element separately.

How do I change the template style in Word?

Modify Styles in a Microsoft Word Template

1. In your Word template, open the Styles pane.
2. In the Styles pane, click the Manage Styles button.
3. In the Manage Styles dialog box, click Modify.
4. In the Modify Styles dialog box, change any of the style definitions.
5. Save and close the template.

What are styles What are the advantages of using styles?

Advantages of using Styles
Using styles lets you quickly format a document with a consistent and professional look. Using styles enables you to quickly modify the look of a document, instead of manually formatting all the separate components. Using styles encourages a consistent format and look to your documents.

How many types of styles are there in MS Word?

four style types
There are actually four style types in Word. Each has an icon that appears next to it in the Styles and Formatting task pane. When you use the New Style dialog box to create a new style, the types are available on the Style type list.

What do you mean by style in computer?

Updated: 08/02/2020 by Computer Hope. In general, style refers to the overall appearance or design of an object, or method of accomplishing a task. For example, in web development, a developer using CSS can quickly change the look of the headings on all of a website’s pages at the same time.

What are the five basic elements of a paragraph?

A basic paragraph structure usually consists of five sentences: the topic sentence, three supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence.
How do you write a paragraph?

• Element #1: Unity. Unity in a paragraph begins with the topic sentence.
• Element #2: Order.
• Element #3: Coherence.
• Element #4: Completeness.

How do I create a new style?

How to Create a Brand New Style in Word 2016

1. Select the text you’ve formatted.
2. Click the Home tab.
3. In the Styles group, display the full Quick Styles Gallery.
4. Choose the command Create a Style.
5. In the Name box, type a short and descriptive name for your style.
6. Click the OK button to create the style.

Here’s the basics of Styles in Word for paragraph, character or both (Linked) plus Tables and Lists. I know talking about styles in Word makes eyes glaze over but they are a really useful part of Word (plus Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook).

Today I watched an ‘experienced’ Word user reformatting a document.  He laboriously worked through the document, selecting paragraphs, phrases and even individual words then clicking on the ribbon to change the look.  It took 10 minutes or more.  With styles it would have taken a few seconds.

Styles have been around for all of Word’s history.  They have changed and expanded over the years but the fundamentals are the same.

In this article we’ll explain the different types of styles including at least one that sneaked in without many people noticing.   From just one type in the early days of Word, there’s five different style types in modern Microsoft Word.

What is a Style?

A style is just a collection of formatting settings under a single name.

For example  ‘Heading 1’ has these default values in Word (choose Heading 1 style, right-click and choose ‘Modify Style’.

So ‘Heading 1’ means Cambria font, 14pt, Bold with a color setting, Left justified, 1.15 line spacing and 24pt line space before the text, plus other settings.

Instead of having to apply all those separate formatting options for each main heading, just apply the ‘Heading 1’ style.

Even better, if you decide to change the look of the headings, change the ‘Heading 1’ settings and all the headings with that style will be changed automatically.

Paragraph and Character styles

There are different types of style that can be applied to different parts of a document. Originally there were only Paragraph styles – styles you could apply to an entire paragraph.

That was OK but no help if you wanted consistent formatting for words in a paragraph like a product name  Office-Watch.com  or just emphasis.

So Microsoft added character styles.  These are styles that can be applied to a word or even a single letter.  A character style could be called ‘Product Name’ to ensure all references to a product or service look consistent.

Character styles have all the attributes of paragraph styles that are applicable to individual characters.  Things like font, size, color, bold, italic etc are in both character and paragraph styles.  Line spacing, Left/Right/Center/Justify etc. can only apply to entire paragraphs.

Linked styles

Adding character styles created a new problem.  Microsoft discovered that users sometimes had two styles with the same name – one as a paragraph style, the other as a character style.  Or people would have two styles such as ‘QuoteP’ and QuoteC’ with the same settings, one for paragraphs and another for word/characters.

So Word 2007 introduced ‘Linked Styles‘ which act as both a paragraph style and character style, depending on the situation.

A linked style acts like a paragraph style when a paragraph/s is selected and the style applied.

It acts like a character style when less than a paragraph (a character/word/phrase) is selected and the style applied.

Gone is the need for ‘twin’ styles – now you can have a single style that can applied to any text in a document.

The best example of a linked style is already in Word 2007 and later.  All the Heading styles were changed to linked styles.  Here’s an example of ‘Heading 1’ style used as both a paragraph and character style at the same time.

Both the paragraph and words were changed to the same style by selecting them and pressing the ‘Heading 1’ shortcut Ctrl + Alt + 1 .  The Style Gallery or styles list could have been used to do the same thing.

In the Modify Style dialog you’ll see the style type just under the name.

‘Linked’ isn’t the best choice of terms for this type of style. Most styles are already ‘linked’ to others through style inheritance.  ‘Merged’ or ‘Combined’ might have been clearer to most people – but we’re stuck with ‘Linked’.

Which is which?

On the styles list, the three types of style have their own markers.

The lower case ‘a’ next to a character style.

The ‘backwards P’ or Pilcrow is used as an end of paragraph mark in Word and also serves to denote a Paragraph style.

The combined pilcrow and a is, unsurprisingly, for a linked style.

Alas, the Style Gallery on the ribbon isn’t as clear.  Among various (ignored) complaints about the Style Gallery is the inconsistent marking.

Paragraph styles (e.g. Normal, Pictures etc.) have the pilcrow next to the style name.

Linked paragraphs (Heading styles etc.) have no marking next to the name.

But neither do the character styles!  In the above image there’s no way to know that ‘Subtle Emphasis’ is a character style.

Inheritance

A brief mention of style inheritance.

Styles are normally based on an existing style so only changes from the inherited style need to be made.  This lets you apply broader changes to a document a lot faster.

For example, here’s settings for Heading 2

Heading 2 is based on the Heading 1 style, so all the settings for Heading 1 are used for Heading 2 as a starting point.

The settings like ’13pt, Not Bold …’ etc. are only the differences between Heading 1 and what’s been changed to the look for Heading 2.

If the font for Heading 1 is changed then the font for Heading 2 will also change due to style inheritance.

In a standard Word document, styles can usually be traced back to some base Word styles like Normal and Default Paragraph Font (paragraph and character styles respectively).  However you can create a style ‘from scratch’ with no inheritance.  Here’s the same Heading 2 style with the ‘Style based on’ removed.

Now you can see all the formatting attributes in detail.

Unlinking styles might seem like a good idea that makes things simpler, but experienced Word users almost never do it.  Style inheritance can be a nuisance at times, but its more helpful than a hindrance.

What’s going on?

Sometimes the formatting can get confusing.  What’s a paragraph setting, what’s a character style and what is directly applied with no style?  WordPerfect had a ‘Reveal Codes’ feature which Microsoft resisted copying but finally added to Word.

There’s two options for exposing what Word is up to. The Style Inspector (Word 2007 and later) and Reveal Formatting.  Here’s both in action side-by-side.

As you can see the Style Inspector is a small box that can be dragged around the screen.  Open the Style Inspector from the button at the bottom of the Styles pane:

Reveal Formatting has a lot more detail and sits in the right-hand pane.  There’s a button for Reveal Formatting on the Style Inspector box.

The Shift + F1 shortcut will open the Reveal Formatting pane. This shortcut has worked since Word 2002 (XP).

Table and List styles

Added in Word 2007 were two more styles.

Table styles, let you group together all the many formatting options for tables.

Similarly, all the options for list formatting were a nightmare until Word 2007 when List Styles were introduced.  Now all the, sometimes complex, choices for lists (numbering, indenting at each level) can be more easily and consistently applied.

Fix your Word Style Gallery
Word style renaming and alias tricks
Show a Word style marked ‘Hide until used’.
What does Word style ‘Automatically update’ really mean?
Change Word style to match current paragraph

Paragraph styles are a collection of rules that define the way your text behaves and looks. They contain formatting for both the characters (fonts, color, scale, etc..) and for the paragraph (Indents, align, hyphenation, etc.).

What is the layout of a paragraph?

Document layout includes marginsthe space between the text and the top, bottom, left, and right edges of the paper. Paragraph layout includes line spacing, indents, and tabs. In Word, the information about paragraph formats is stored in the paragraph mark at the end of a paragraph.

What is paragraph style in Word?

Paragraph Styles in Word. Create paragraph styles for items based on function, not based on formatting. This approach allows you to modify formatting over time and the style names continue to apply. It also prepares you for structured writing in the future.

What is a list paragraph style in Word?

When you create a list using the Bullets and Numbering commands, Word uses a style called List Paragraph to format the text. Click in the list, then, on the Home tab, click on the dialog box launcher in the Styles group to open the Styles pane.

How do you do paragraph styles in Word?

Create a new style based on document formatting

1. Right-click the text on which you want to base a new style.
2. In the mini toolbar that appears, click Styles, and then click Create a Style.
3. In the Create New Style from Formatting dialog box, give your style a name and click OK.

What is emphasis style in Word?

The emphasis styles are based on what Word describes as the Default Paragraph Font. They would explicitly format the text in the font defined in the paragraph and then apply the emphasis over the top of that; they would not apply any emphasis to the text as it had been formatted.

What is the difference between paragraph and character style?

A character style is a collection of character formatting attributes that can be applied to text in a single step. A paragraph style includes both character and paragraph formatting attributes, and can be applied to a paragraph or range of paragraphs. Paragraph and characters styles are sometimes called text styles.

What are paragraph styles used for?

Paragraph styles allow you to save and re-use specific text formatting (e.g. font or size) and paragraph formatting (e.g. tabs, indents or paragraph spacing).

How can you know the style of current paragraph?

To find out which style is being used in a paragraph in Word for Windows, click the document and press Ctrl + ⇧ Shift + S . This opens the “Apply Styles” box, which displays the currently-selected style.

What are styles?

A style is a set of formats that you can apply to selected items in your presentation to quickly change their appearance. When you apply a style, you apply a whole group of formats at the same time. Using styles gives you more control over the entire presentation.

What is style and its types?

There are four main types of writing: expository, descriptive, persuasive, and narrative. Each of these writing styles is used for a specific purpose. A single text may include more than one writing style.

What are the different types of styles in Word?

To ensure that a document looks uniform and professional, Microsoft offers four types of styles in Word:

• Paragraph styles.
• Character styles.
• Table styles.
• List styles.

What are two types of styles?

There are two basic types of styles in Microsoft Word; character and paragraph. Paragraph styles are used more frequently than character styles, and they are easier to create.

What is normal style in Word?

Word’s Normal style affects the style of text in all new documents. In Word 2003, Normal style included Times New Roman, 12-point font with no specified paragraph spacing (i.e., the 0 space after a paragraph meant you pressed [Enter] twice to get a blank line between paragraphs).

Where is the style separator in Word 2016?

Even typing in the exact name of the Word feature won’t get any useful results from Word 2016! Style Separators can be inserted from the Quick Access Toolbar. It’s listed under ‘Style Separator’ not ‘Insert Style Separator’. As you can see, the Style Separator has an in-built shortcut Ctrl + Alt + Enter/Return.

What is the red paragraph symbol in Word?

In Microsoft Word, the non-printing paragraph symbol marks the end of a paragraph; it appears whenever a user presses “Enter” or adds a column or page break. This formatting mark is useful for finding and removing formatting that might otherwise go unnoticed.

How do you insert a number separator in Word?

1. Place the cursor at the location you want to insert the 1000 separator, click Insert > Symbol > More Symbols. 2. In the Symbol dialog, under Symbols tab select Verdana from Font drop-down list, then select Basic Latin from Subset drop-down list, now select the 1000 separator from the list, click Insert to insert it.

What is a delimiter in Word?

a blank space, comma, or other character or symbol that indicates the beginning or end of a character string, word, or data item.

What is delimiter example?

A delimiter is a sequence of one or more characters for specifying the boundary between separate, independent regions in plain text, mathematical expressions or other data streams. An example of a delimiter is the comma character, which acts as a field delimiter in a sequence of comma-separated values.

What is a delimiter in SAS?

A delimited file is a plain text file that contains a separator between the data fields. For example, to read Comma Separated Value (CSV) files in SAS 6, you had to preprocess the files in order for SAS to recognize that there were missing values between consecutive commas.

Is space a delimiter?

Any character may be used to separate the values, but the most common delimiters are the comma, tab, and colon. The vertical bar (also referred to as pipe) and space are also sometimes used.

To use styles, I believe it’s helpful for one to understand their purpose,
which is to provide standardization of formatting through a document or a group
of documents. There are other benefits to using styles in Microsoft Word,
though, and you’ll learn about them here.

If you already understand styles and would like to visit our extreme
tutorial,
click
here.

What is a Style?

A style is nothing more than a specific set of formats that are saved «as a
set», which is called a «Style». For instance, when you read a paperback book,
virtually every chapter’s title looks the same. Perhaps it is Times New Roman,
Bold, 18-pt, and centered. When you read a textbook, each Tip may have the same
border around it, and each exercise may have the same red font used as its
heading. Styles help us do this. They’re so easy to use, but not quite as easy
to understand.

Gotchas

One of the biggest problems with using styles is that people create this
gorgeous template with styles, and then copy information from the web or other
external documents, and now there are 20 more styles in your document. It’s
difficult to restrict this from happening, particularly if you’re not the only
user of the template. See
this article
for more information.

Another problem is often caused because we use the default Heading 1 style
and alter it to suit us. Then someone else comes along who isn’t aware of
styles, and they decide to italicize it. Rather than changing the style, they
manually italicize each Heading 1. Someone who knows what they’re doing comes
along and doesn’t get the same result when they apply the Heading 1 style. Doh!
When and if you create styles in a template, do a final review to ensure
absolutely that all the styles have been properly created and/or changed.

Outline numbered styles can be tricky. See

this article for more information.

Styles have a setting to Automatically update. I wish they didn’t. See
this article
for more information.

What Styles to Use?

I prefer to use the built-in styles whenever possible. Using, for instance,
the Body Text style, I can alter it. This does not affect all documents, it only
affects the active document or-documents from this template. However, you can create your own
custom styles. See this article.

Typical Styles

When I develop a template for a manual, I generally include the following
styles:

• Headings 1, 2, and 3 (sometimes 4 and 5, but more than 5 is a bit
  ridiculous and should be used only for the most technical of manuals)
• Body Text
• List Bullet and List Bullet 2 (for 2 different levels of bullets)
• List Number and List Number 2 (for 2 different levels of numbering)
• Note (or Tip; I usually put a border on this)
• Graphic (provides great spacing)
• Caption
• Header and Footer styles and page number styles are auto-created when you
  use headers and footers, and I don’t usually alter them.
• TOC styles are auto-created when you insert a Table of Contents and I
  often add spacing before the TOC1 style.

Components of a Style

There are two types of styles: Paragraph and Character.

Paragraph Styles

A paragraph style has
more format possibilities than a character style. For instance, a paragraph style could be bold and also
double-spaced.

Above we show the dialog for modifying the Heading 1 style.

• We have the Name, which I hope is self-explanatory. The
  Style type in this case is Paragraph.

• Style based on tell us that Heading 1 is based on the
  Normal style. Now, suppose we change the Normal Style to be red? Since you can
  see that the Heading 1 style has no special font color designated, it would
  indeed take on the red font we apply to the Normal style. I prefer to base my
  styles on No Style, which is a choice in the drop-down. This way, each of my
  styles is independent. While I may understand that styles are based on other
  styles, other users of my templates may not (and it happens to be rare that I
  personally use a template I have created).

• Style for the following paragraph denotes what style a
  new paragraph defaults to when you hit Enter while you’re in a paragraph that
  uses Heading 1. For Heading styles, I will generally make the Style for
  following paragraph be Body Text. However, if you’re using outline numbered
  styles, you might want it to default to Heading 2. Alternative, when I create
  my Graphic style, I like the following paragraph to default to be the Caption
  style because I always put Figure titles below my graphics.

For List Bullet and List Number, the likely following
paragraph would be another List Bullet or List Number, so I leave them to be
the same style.

• I rarely use Add to template unless I am working on a
  document that was created from a template, and realize I forgot to italicize
  the font or something, but this does add the style to the template as well as
  the document on which you are working. If your document is not based on a
  template, you’ll want to avoid this setting.

• I rarely use Automatically update. The only styles I
  use that have this checked are the Table of Contents (TOC) styles. If you
  change a paragraph to which TOC1 is applied to become italicized, all
  paragraphs with TOC1 applied to them will become italicized when this option
  is checked.

Character Styles

A character style might be any text that is bolded. For
instance, suppose we always want our company name to appear in bold red font,
regardless of the formatting of the paragraph in which that text resides. We
can create a character style for it. I’ve called it MyCharStyle in the graphic
below.

Unfortunately, when I apply the MyCharStyle style to some of the words in a
paragraph where the style is already bold, it unbolds it, as you can see below,
so be careful what font attributes you choose when creating your own character
style.

The following attributes cannot be built into Character styles: Tabs, paragraph
spacing, paragraph alignment, paragraph indents, bullets, numbering.

Welcome to Part 3 of the Harnessing the Power of Microsoft Word series. In the last post, I covered how to create and access templates. Today’s post will walk you through paragraph and character styles. Although you can use these concepts at the document level, defining styles in your templates will make them available to anyone creating a document based on your templates.

Before explaining what paragraph and character styles are and how they can help you, take a few minutes to ask yourself the following questions:

Have you ever found yourself scrolling through a document and applying the same formatting over and over again? 

Have you ever had a page break roll onto a new page creating a largely blank page in the middle of your document? Then had to go through the document deleting and re-inserting page breaks?

Have you ever tried to indent a single list item and had the entire list move? Then found yourself fighting with Word to get your indentation just the way you want it?

Have you ever noticed extra space at the top of a page and weren’t really sure why it was there? 

Have you ever received a document from another writer and found formatting that wasn’t consistent with your house styles? Or worse, formatting that was inconsistent within the document?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’ll be happy to hear that there is a way to eliminate these issues and the frustration that goes along with them. The solution, paragraph and character styles. They can be a huge time saver, reduce your frustration, and ensure consistent formatting throughout your documents.

Paragraph and character styles are pre-configured formatting rules that you can apply to paragraphs or selected text. These styles provide several benefits including:

• Much faster formatting—simply select the items to be formatted and click the applicable style;
• Ability to mass update—change all paragraphs of a specific style at once by modifying the style attributes;
• Numbering control—numbering controlled by styles will not misbehave;
• Indentation control—indentation controlled by styles will not misbehave either;
• Pagination control—avoid orphaned bullets or text by using the keep-with-next paragraph attributes;
• Paragraph spacing control; and
• Consistency in the look of all content throughout the document.

The rest of this post will show you how to:

• Plan for style creation based on your formatting needs
• Create paragraph and character styles
• Modify paragraph and character styles
• Display, configure, and use the Styles pane
• Apply the styles to your content

Consider Your Style Needs

Before I get into the mechanics of creating and using styles, I’d like to suggest taking a little time to think about the formatting elements and the content types you need in your documents so that you can figure out what styles you will need to create. Here are some questions to consider and the implications of various choices:

Do you want your headings to appear at the left edge of your documents to maximize page real estate or do you want each heading to be indented to show hierarchy? 

Indenting headings will require more styles because you will need content styles that align with the indentation of each heading level. For example, if all headings are left-justified with no indentation, you need only one or two styles for body text; if your headings are indented, then you will need a body text style that aligns with each level of indentation that your headings use. You will also need multiple levels of styles for bullets, numbered items, etc. As you can see, this approach can lead to a very long list of styles, making it a little harder to work with your styles list.

Also, indentation can eat up a lot of page real estate. If you have an 8.5” page with 1” margins, your usable real estate is 6.5”. If you indent each heading .5”, content under a Heading 5 will have only 4.5” of real estate. This may not be an issue if your documents are mostly text, but if they contain illustrations, you may want access to as much real estate as possible.

Do you want numbered or unnumbered headings? 

Numbered headings will help to communicate hierarchy so you don’t need to indent subheadings.

Do you want captions on your figures and tables? And do you want them before or after the figure or table? 

Captions allow you to cross-reference a figure or table from elsewhere in the document and they can be used to generate a list of figures or a list of tables. 

If you want captions, you’ll need a style to hold an inline figure or table and a style for the caption. These styles will automatically set the position of the figure or table and its caption. For example, if you want your figures left justified but indented a .5” you can create a style called Figure with these properties. When you insert a figure into a paragraph that uses the Figure style, it will automatically appear left-justified with the appropriate indentation.

In a style, you can tell Word what style to apply to the next paragraph, which comes into play in this example. Say you want your captions to appear above your figures or tables. You would create a style for the caption, something like “Figure_Caption,” and set it to return the Figure style as the next paragraph. When you’re working, you will insert your dynamically-numbered caption (discussed in a later post), apply the Figure_Caption style and then press Enter. The new paragraph will automatically be set to Figure so you can quickly insert your graphic with no additional style-application steps or positioning required. 

Finally, notice the example naming convention Figure and Figure_Caption. These styles denote their purpose making them intuitive to other authors in your organization and they will appear right next to each other in your styles list so you don’t have to scroll around the styles list when you applying these styles to existing graphics and captions.

What elements do you want to keep together on a page?

Word offers a keep-with-next property that you can use to control pagination so you don’t have to insert page breaks and deal with the issues that can arise from using page breaks, such as, half-empty pages in the middle of your document and time spent on removing and reapplying page breaks.

Likely you will want to keep a figure and its caption together on a page. Continuing the figure example, if you set the Figure_Caption style to keep-with-next, the caption and figure will always remain together.

You may also want bulleted lists to stay together on a page. You can achieve this by creating two styles, such as Bullet1_KWN (KWN denotes keep-with next) and Bullet1_Last ( _Last denotes that it should be applied to the last bullet in the list). 

If you also want to keep the sentence that introduces the list with the list, you could create a Body_KWN style.

How many levels of bullets do you want? And do you need different spacing options?

If you need three levels of nesting with your bullets, you’ll need at least three styles—one for each level of nesting. For example:

• Bullet1
  • Bullet2
    • Bullet3

If you want the option of controlling whether the list can break across pages, you’ll need two styles per list level—one KWN style and one _Last style for each level of bullets.

If you want various spacing options, you’ll need additional styles. For instance, you may want one style for short-item lists that has no space between the list items and another style for long-item lists (i.e., items that span lines) with space between for easier readability. 

I like to keep list items together on a page so readers do not have to flip back and forth or scroll up and down to see the entire list. I use three styles for each level of nesting:

• Bullet1_KWN (for long-item lists, produces 8 points of white space after each item)
• Bullet1_Comp_KWN (for short-item lists, produces no space between items—Comp is short for compressed)
• Bullet1_Last (for the last item in any Bullet1 list, does not keep-with-next, and produces 8 points of white space after to return to the standard paragraph spacing after the list)

I replicate this pattern for each level of nesting required.

Do you need any auto-labelled styles?

You can use auto-numbering to create automatic labels. For example, you may want a style for notes that automatically produces the word “Note:” in bold text, while the text you type into the note is not bold and has a hanging indent that aligns the text next to the label, as shown below:

You can use this approach for all sorts of things, such as question and answer pairs, where the auto-number produces the appropriate “Question:” or “Answer:” label. I’ll get into the specifics of how to accomplish this in a later post. For now, it’s important for you to know the option exists and to identify whether you need this type of element in your styles list.

What are your formatting conventions for selected text?

You may want to consider some standard formatting conventions for selected text to ensure consistency. For example, you may want authors to italicize or bold a term that is being defined in a given sentence or, if you are writing a user’s guide, you may want screen names, menu items, and buttons to appear with specific formatting. These conventions take the guesswork out of formatting for you and your authors and they help your readers consume content more quickly.

Think through the situations in which you use the controls in the Font group of the Home ribbon and then try to establish rules for when you would apply a given type of formatting.

Once you have the rules figured out, then you can create a character style for each rule. Continuing with the user’s guide example, you might create a character style for screen names, buttons, menu items, definitions, emphasis, etc. 

When you name your character styles, select names that are indicative of the style’s purpose, rather than its attributes. This will help your authors know what each style is used for and it will allow you to change attributes without affecting the meaning of the style’s name. I also recommend applying a prefix to your character style names so that they will be grouped in the styles list and easily differentiated from the paragraph styles. For example, I prefix my character styles with c-.

In addition to quick formatting, character styles provide mass update capability, just like paragraph styles. That is, changing the attributes of a character style will update all instances bearing that style. So, if you wanted to convert screen names from bold text to underlined text, you could do so in just a couple of clicks.

Do you want to minimize the learning curve for your template users?

Your organization may use a variety of document types and the formatting of each document may vary; however, the style names can be the same across all templates to minimize the learning curve for your authors. This also supports content reuse.

For example, say you have a product description that is used in a marketing document and in a user’s guide, but the fonts and colors are completely different for these two documents. If your templates use the same style names, you can apply the applicable template to the document containing the content and voila! Or you can copy the content into the applicable document using the Merge Formatting paste option and it will automatically reformat the content to match the style definitions in the destination document.

Now that you’ve given some thought to the formatting and layout elements in your document, you can begin creating styles.

Create Styles

To create a new paragraph or character style:

1.   Open the Styles pane by clicking the launcher in the Styles area of the Home ribbon.

2.   At the bottom of the Styles pane, click the New Style button.

3.   On the Create New Style from Formatting dialog:

a.   Complete the fields on this screen. See the field definitions following the screenshot.

b.   Use the Format drop-down to access additional attributes, such as font, paragraph, tabs, borders, numbering, and more.

c.   When you are done formatting, click OK.

There are a lot of options on this screen, some of which may be intuitive and others not so much. The following expandable table defines each field or control on this screen and provides some useful tips that can help you avoid some of the pitfalls that I’ve encountered when building styles.

When you want to format text in Microsoft Word, you can do
it manually, by selecting font, size, color, alignment and other attributes,
but you’ll often find it easier to apply formatting with Word document styles. 

What is Word document formatting with styles? A style is a
mixture of Word formatting that you can apply over and over, like paint. You can use
and modify Word’s built-in styles, and you can also create your own.

There are several advantages to using styles for document formatting in Word:

• Consistency — You’ll be sure that all the headers, subheads, paragraphs and tables have the
  correct formatting.
• Speed — It’s faster to apply a style than to apply all the formatting separately. And
  if you need to change some document formatting–like font size–you only have to
  change the definition of the style to change the formatting of all text that’s
  tagged with the style.
• Navigation — Styles are automatic bookmarks. When you enable the Navigation Pane, you can
  click headers and subheads in the pane to go to that spot in the document.
• Tables of
  Contents — With just a few clicks, you can insert a table of contents using
  the built-in heading and subheading styles.

See my tutorial in Word Tables of Contents at:

For the most part, Word document styles work the same in the Windows and
Mac editions.

How to Simplify Word Document Formatting With Styles (Video Screencast)

Watch this screencast video tutorial to learn how to format a Word document with styles. Or read through the comprehensive written tutorial that follows.

You can follow along using your own document, or if you prefer,
download the zip file included for this tutorial. It contains a document called
Lunar Laser Ranging.docx, which is a
public domain research paper, and it also contains a test document called Merging Styles.docx. Start this
tutorial with the Lunar document on your screen. 

1. How to Apply Built-In Paragraph Styles in Word

Word has two basic types of Word document formatting styles:

• Paragraph Styles — They apply to a minimum of an
  entire paragraph, and contain paragraph formatting (alignment, indents, etc.)
  and character formatting (font, color, etc.).
• Character Styles — They can apply to as little as
  one letter, and contain only character formatting.

Before applying any Word document styles, go to the View tab in Windows and enable the Navigation Pane. This will display the built-in heading styles for
navigating through the document.

For the same functionality on the Mac, click the drop-down
arrow next to the Sidebar button and select
Document Map Pane.

Go back to the Home
tab, and notice the Style section on the right. (If the window is narrow, the
section will just be an icon.) Click inside the title of the document at the
very top (“Lunar Science and Lunar Laser Ranging”); there’s no need to
highlight anything. Roll the mouse pointer over some of the styles to see a
preview, then click the Title style
to apply it.

The Title style doesn’t show up in the Navigation pane, but
the Heading styles will appear nested under it.

Click inside the first heading just below the title (1
Introduction), then click Heading 1
in the Style area. Not only does the text get formatted, but Introduction shows
up in the Navigation pane. You can also use the keyboard shortcut: Ctrl-Alt-1 (Windows) or Command-Option-1 (Mac).

Scroll down through the document and apply Heading 1 to the
remaining first-level headings:

• 2  Lunar Science
• 3 New Retroreflectors on the Moon
• Summary and Goals

Go back to page 2, then start applying Heading 2 to the subheads (the first one is “Fluid Core Moment of
Inertia”).

Each header that gets formatted appears in the Navigation
pane, nested below a Heading 1 item.

2. Modifying a Built-In Paragraph Style in Word

This is where the convenience of using styles for document formatting in Word comes into
play. To modify the formatting of all the text formatted as Heading 1, there’s
no need to select each line of text and apply the Word formatting individually. The
easiest way is to reformat one of them, then use that to update the style. That
will modify all the other headers tagged as Heading 1.

Select one of them and change the font, size and color. Also
insert a left-justified tab at ¼” (click inside the ruler). The header should
look something like this:

In the Style section, right-click Heading 1, and from the
pop-up menu, select Update Heading 1 to
Match Selection.

Now either scroll down through the document to see the other
Heading 1 items, or just click them in the Navigation pane. They all have the
updated Word formatting.

If you want to practice this again, update the Heading 2
style.

3. How to Create and Apply a Character Style in Word

If you want to format recurring text inside a paragraph, use
a character style. You can do this with the Styles panel.

In this document, there are two images, labeled “Fig. 1” and
“Fig. 2”. We’ll format just those labels. Select “Fig 1 (a)” and make it bold
italic. Leave the text selected, and in Windows, click the Down Arrow in the lower-right corner of the Styles section to
display the Styles panel. In the lower-left corner of the panel, click the New Style button.

On the Mac, there is a separate icon on the ribbon for the
Style Manager, and is immediately to the right of the Styles section. The New Style button will be clearly
labeled at the top of the panel.

In the New Style dialog, give it a name of Figure, set the Style Type to Character,
then click OK.

The style name is now listed in the panel and in the Styles
section in the ribbon bar. Notice it has an “a” icon, indicating that it’s a
character style.

Apply it: select the “(b)” in the caption, then click the Figure style name in either the panel
or ribbon to apply it. Scroll down, then apply the style to “Fig 2”.

4. Using Your Styles in Another Word Document

If you want to use the modified or custom Word Document styles in another
document, you need to bring them in. The easiest way to do this is to copy and
paste Word formatting.

Switch to Merging
Styles.docx. Notice it has plain, unformatted text.

Go back to the original document, click in the title, then
click the Format Painter on the Home tab.

Switch to the other document, then select the Title placeholder. It now matches the
Lunar document. Repeat the process with the Heading 1, Heading 2 and
Figure styles. You can also use the
keyboard shortcuts for the Format Painter: Ctrl-Shift-C (Windows) or Command-Shift-C (Mac) to copy formatting from selected, original text, and Ctrl-Shift-V (Windows) or Command-Shift-V (Mac) to apply formatting to the new text.

Work With Styles for Better Document Formatting in Microsoft Word

Now
you can see why styles are so great: it’s faster to apply a style than it is to
apply multiple document formatting attributes, there is much less chance of human error,
and document navigation is automatic. 

Also, when you change the look of a
style in Microsoft Word, all text formatted with that style will change immediately. And the
easiest way to use modified or custom styles in another document is to paste
the Word formatting from one document to another.

To learn more about working with Microsoft Word, study the following tutorials:

Editorial Note: This post was
originally published in 2014. It has been comprehensively revised to make it
current, accurate, and up to date by our staff—with special assistance from Laura Spencer.

Did you find this post useful?

Bob Flisser has authored many videos and books about Microsoft and Adobe products, and has been a computer trainer since the 1980s. He is also a web and multimedia developer. Bob is a graduate of The George Washington University with a degree in financial economics.

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