In this lesson, you'll learn how to use styles in your documents.
A style is a collection of formatting specifications that has been assigned a name and saved. A style could contain, for example, specifications for font name and size, attributes such as underlining and italic, indentation, and line spacing. You can quickly apply a style to any text in any Word for Windows document. Affixing a style is a lot faster than manually applying each individual formatting element, and has the added advantage of assuring consistency. If you later modify a style's formatting, all text in the document to which that style has been assigned will automatically change to reflect the new style definition. Every paragraph in a Word document has a paragraph style applied to it; the default style is Word's predefined Normal style.
Plain English: What Is a Style? A style is a named grouping of paragraph and character formatting that can be reused.
Word has two types of styles:
The formatting of character styles is applied in addition to whatever formatting the text already possesses. For example, if you apply a character style defined as boldface to a word in a sentence that is already formatted as italics, the word will display in bold italics.
Word for Windows comes with several predefined paragraph and character styles. You can use these styles as-is, or modify them to suit your needs and create your own new styles. These topics are covered in this lesson and the next lesson.
The Style box at the left end of the Formatting Toolbar displays the current style name-that is, the name of the style assigned to the text where the insertion point is located. If there is text selected or if the insertion point is in text that has a character style applied, then the Style box displays the character style name. Otherwise it displays the paragraph style of the current paragraph.
Every paragraph in a Word document has a paragraph style applied to it; the default style is Word's predefined Normal style.
Word for Windows can also display the name of the paragraph style assigned to each paragraph in your document. The style names are displayed in a column along the left margin of the screen. This is shown in Figure 24.1.
To display the style name area:
Figure 24.1
A screen with paragraph style names displayed.
Timesaver Tip: Quick Adjustment While the Style Name Area is displayed, you can point at its right border with the mouse and drag it to a new width. Drag it all the way to the left edge of the screen to hide the style area.
To assign a style to text:
Figure 24.2
You select a style from the Style box on the Formatting Toolbar.
Timesaver Tip: Which Kind of Style? In the Style box, paragraph styles are listed with the paragraph symbol next to them, and character styles are listed with an underlined letter "a" next to them.
Timesaver Tip: Removing a Style To remove a character style from text, select the text and apply the character style, "Default Paragraph Font."
In this lesson, you learned how to use paragraph and character styles to format your document. The next lesson shows you how to create your own styles.
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