How to Create and Use Styles in Microsoft Word

Edited 3 weeks ago by ExtremeHow Editorial Team

Microsoft WordFormattingMicrosoft OfficeOffice ToolsWritingDocumentationProductivityDesignText ProcessingTemplates

Microsoft Word is a versatile and powerful word processing tool used by millions of people around the world for a variety of tasks, from creating simple documents to preparing complex reports and manuscripts. One of the key features that makes Word so useful is its styling capability. With styles, you can quickly apply a consistent look to your documents. This guide will show you how to effectively create and use styles in Microsoft Word, ensuring that your documents look professional and are easy to manage.

What is a style in Microsoft Word?

In Microsoft Word, a style is a set of formatting instructions that you can apply to text in your document to quickly change its appearance. Instead of applying individual formatting options, such as font type, size, color, alignment, line spacing, and indentation, separately, you can design or choose a style that includes all of these settings. Applying styles ensures consistency throughout your document and makes formatting changes easier and faster.

Types of styles

Word offers a variety of styles, each designed for specific document elements:

• Paragraph Styles: These styles are used to format entire paragraphs, affecting line spacing, indentation, alignment, etc.
• Character styles: These styles apply to individual characters or words, and they mainly affect font type, size, colour, and effects (such as bold or italics).
• Table Styles: These are used to format tables, control the look of table borders, shading, etc.
• List styles: These styles control the appearance of lists within the document, including bullet type, numbering, and indentation.

Benefits of using styles

Using styles in Microsoft Word provides many benefits:

• Consistency: Styles ensure that your document maintains a consistent look and feel, which is important for professionalism.
• Efficiency: Applying one style is faster than applying many different formatting options.
• Ease of updating: Changing the style definition will automatically update the formatting of all text where the style is applied, saving time when making document-wide changes.
• Navigation and organization: Applying styles helps organize your document with headings and subheadings, which Word can use to automatically create a table of contents.

Creating a style

Creating a custom style in Word is a straightforward process. Here are the steps to create a new style:

Step 1: Open the Styles pane

First, you need to open the Styles pane. To do this, go to the 'Home' tab on the ribbon, then click the small arrow in the lower-right corner of the 'Styles' group. This opens the Styles pane, which lists the available styles.

Step 2: Create a new style

At the bottom of the Styles pane, click the 'New Style' button. This will open the 'Create New Style from Formatting' dialog box.

Step 3: Determine your style

In this dialog box, you can define various characteristics of your new style:

• Name: Give your style a descriptive name that reflects its purpose (for example, "Body Text", "Heading 1").
• Style type: Choose whether this is a paragraph, character, linked paragraph and character, table, or list style.
• Style based: If it's similar to an existing style, you can base it on that, and inherit all its properties.
• Style for next paragraph: Specify which style Word should apply to the next paragraph or content.

In the Formatting section of the dialog, set the font, size, color, alignment, line spacing and other attributes as per your needs. You can also click the 'Format' button to access more detailed formatting options such as font, paragraph, tabs, etc.

Step 4: Save your style

Once you're satisfied with your settings, click 'OK' to save your new style.

Applying the style

Applying a style to text in your document is easy. Select the text you want to format, then do the following:

1. With the text selected, go to the Styles pane.
2. Click the style you want from the list. The selected text will immediately update to reflect the formatting of the chosen style. Note that you can also use this same process to apply styles to paragraphs, lists, or tables.

Modify an existing style

If you need to update the formatting of an existing style, follow these steps:

1. In the Styles pane, right-click on the style you want to modify and select 'Modify.' This opens the "Modify Style" dialog box.
2. Here, you can change the name, style type, font size, color, and other applicable formatting settings.
3. Once you’ve made the changes, click ‘OK.’ Your document will automatically update wherever the style is applied.

Using styles for a table of contents

Word's table of contents feature depends largely on styles. To create a table of contents:

1. Where appropriate, apply heading styles (e.g., Heading 1, Heading 2) to your document as appropriate.
2. Go to the 'References' tab.
3. Click 'Table of Contents' and choose the built-in options or 'Custom Table of Contents'.
4. Word creates a table of contents based on the document's applied heading styles.

Organizing and management styles

Effective style management is important when working on large or complex documents. Here are some tips:

• Use a consistent naming convention for styles to make it easier to identify their purpose.
• Group related styles by beginning their names with the same prefix (for example, report-title, report-heading, report-text).
• Regularly delete unused styles to keep the list of styles manageable.

Tips for working with styles

Here are some additional tips to improve your use of styles:

• Remember that styles can be shared across documents by saving them to a template. Use the 'Organizer' tool in the Styles panel to copy styles to another document or template.
• To prevent accidentally overriding styles by formatting text directly, lock formatting by going to 'Design', then 'Restrict Editing', and choosing 'Restrict formatting to allowed styles'.

Advanced styling techniques

For users familiar with Word's basic style features, the following advanced techniques can be quite useful:

Adding styles

Linked styles combine character and paragraph formatting so you can apply them to entire paragraphs or selections of text. These hybrid styles provide flexibility when formatting document sections.

Using a style set

A style set is a collection of styles that gives documents a consistent visual theme. Changing a style set will change all styles to match the settings of the new set. This feature is available under the 'Design' tab.

Conclusion

Understanding how to create and use styles in Microsoft Word is important for anyone who regularly works with documents. By streamlining formatting tasks and ensuring consistency, styles save a lot of time and effort, whether you're preparing a business proposal, research paper, or everyday correspondence. Mastering styles not only makes documents look more professional, but also increases your productivity, giving you more time to focus on the content rather than on formatting the little things.

  Share This Article

If you find anything wrong with the article content, you can request an update