10 Minute Guide to Word for Windows 95

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Using Styles

In this lesson, you'll learn how to use styles in your documents.

Understanding Styles

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.

Viewing Style Names

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:

1. Select Tools Options, then if necessary click the View tab to display the view options.

2. In the Window section, find the Style Area Width box. This box displays the width of the area at the left of the screen where the style names are displayed. Click the up arrow, or type in a number, to set a positive width for the style name area. A setting of 0.5" is good for most situations. To hide the style name area, enter a width of 0.

Figure 24.1
A screen with paragraph style names displayed.

3. Select OK. The screen displays paragraph style names to the left of the text.


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.

Assigning a Style

To assign a style to text:

1. To assign a paragraph style to multiple paragraphs, select the paragraphs. To assign the style to a single paragraph, place the insertion point anywhere inside the paragraph. To assign a character style, select the text that you want the style to affect.

2. Open the Style drop-down box on the Formatting Toolbar. With the mouse, click the arrow next to the box. With the keyboard, press Ctrl+Shift+S and then press [breve]. The Style box appears, listing all available styles (see Figure 24.2).

Figure 24.2
You select a style from the Style box on the Formatting Toolbar.

3. Select the desired style. With the mouse, click the style name. With the keyboard, use the arrow keys to highlight the style name, and then press Enter.

4. The style is applied to the specified text.


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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