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This introduction includes a short example using MS Word.
CONTENTS
A style is a description of formatting, a “nugget” of formatting instructions that describes how a piece of text [1] is to appear. Word styles describe formatting on the printed page. CSS styles can describe printed pages, and moreover have been designed to accommodate descriptions in a variety of media. CSS can describe how a document is spoken (via aural stylesheets), or how it might “appear” in cyberspace or on the Web.
(Back to Word styles:)
Many people these days are using MS Word. But only a minority are aware of styles, their benefits and relative ease of use. Few users appreciate the fact that Word is fundamentally rooted in the mechanics of styles. Every paragraph in Word in fact, is always linked to some defined style. By default (that is, if you do nothing special) Word links all text you create to the style “Normal” [2]. Another way of saying this is that by default Word applies the “Normal” style to text as you type into a document.
We usually talk about styles as being linked to text, or that a style is applied to some portion of a text.
Looking at any Word document in Normal View, you can open the Style area. Figure A shows the Style Area toward the left, where you see the word “Normal” next to each line.
To open the style area:First change your document to Normal View (View Menu, Normal). Then go to Tools (on the menu bar), Options, and in the View Tab, you’ll see Style Area Width. Put some non-zero value (say .5”) in there, and you’ll then see the style area. |
Start with a blank, new Word document; then type in the text shown in Figure A.
(To get the view you see below, you need to be in Normal View with the Style Area open.)
If you’re agile with the Clipboard, you can avoid typing and simply copy the text via this link.
Figure A: Text for Exercise 1A
So far, we’ve got totally unformatted text. With a deft use of styles, we’ll create completely different looking document.
Before going further, however, be sure you know about Paragraphs in Word and the Style Box ...
Paragraphs in WordThe odd backward P symbol But alas, paragraph marks also serve as containers of formatting. Paragraph marks contain “paragraph formatting” for all the text in front of them (up to the previous paragraph mark). You can think of them as reigning over all the text in from of them. [To prove this, try copying a paragraph mark from a centered paragraph in front of the paragraph mark of a non-centered paragraph.] For short, I sometimes call Paragraph Marks “P Marks”. Don’t confuse the term “Paragraph” as used in grammar class with the concept of “Paragraph” in Word. The grammar class usage implies sentences that stick together as a block because of shared meaning. In contrast, a Word paragraph is simply text bounded by a P Mark. A Word paragraph can be “empty”. That is, a P Mark with no text in front of it is an “empty” paragraph. With regard to styles, we’ll be performing both paragraph and character level formatting (see Tutorial 2 for clarification). We’ll also find out that Word styles come in two flavors: paragraph and character. Our first foray into styles involves the most common of these: paragraph styles. |
The Style BoxYou’ll find the “style box” in most standard Word setups, toward the top of the Word window, on a toolbar . See the circled area below. Figure B: The Style Drop-Down List Box
The Style Box (more technically the “Style Drop-down Listbox”) on your machine probably reads “Normal”. The Style Box lists names of all the currently defined styles. Word, “out of the box”, comes with a complete family of pre-defined styles, among them the style “Normal”. |
Next, we’ll apply the built-in style “Heading 1” to the first line of the document.
Recall that a style is a nugget of formatting that can be applied to or linked to text. Word’s built-in styles are ready-made nuggets of formatting.
Figure C: After applying Heading 1 style
Continue formatting, following a similar procedure to apply “Heading 2” to the lines
Subtitle One goes here
and
Subtitle Two goes here.
As a last touch, we’ll apply the style “Body Text” to all remaining paragraph of the document (those still tagged with “Normal”).
NOTE: If you can’t find Body Text listed in the Style List, instead of just clicking on the down arrow of Style Box, hold down SHIFT while you click on the down arrow. You’ll then see the names of all of the built-in styles.
When finished, your document should appear something like Figure D.
Figure D: After applying Heading 2 style
For safety sake, save your document as Ex1a.doc.
This exercise continues using document Ex1a.doc, created and formatted above. This time, we’ll get a peek at the real power of styles — modifying them. We start by modifying style “Body Text”.
Figure E: After modifying style “Body Text”
Notice that all of the paragraphs tagged with style “Body Text” have changed in appearance. This is essentially what styles do: they facilitate centralized control of a formatting. By changing the definition of the style “Body Text”, we change the appearance of all paragraphs linked to this style.
NOTE: All the styles in these examples are Paragraph Level styles. By definition, paragraph styles always affect, at the very least, whole paragraphs. Later on, we’ll explore Character Styles.
Try changing the look of all “Heading 2” paragraphs so that they are Center Aligned, are Red in color, and are in the font Comic Sans MS (or make up your own formatting variation).
Figure F shows this completed variation. If you would like exact steps as to how to complete this variation click here.
Figure F: After modifying style “Heading 2’
In this short demo, you have seen that styles facilitate centrally controlling a document’s formatting. They also make it easy to quickly change the appearance of a document. Our example is of necessity short. But Word behaves the same whether a style is linked to 3 or to 30,000 paragraphs. It’s when working on long documents that you come to really appreciate the time-saving value of styles.
Fully leveraging the power of styles requires that you’re familiar with the varieties of Word formatting and the terminology used in discussing it. The next tutorial presents an overview of Word formatting.
[1] The term “text” is really not accurate since, CSS also describes images and other “objects”.
[2] Assuming use of the Normal Template using Word “right out of the box”. Recent versions of Word include an “AutoFormat” feature, that automatically applies styles as you type. For purposes of this discussion, and for other reasons, we assume this is feature is disabled.
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This page created directly from an original MS Word document using the W2CSS HTML Translator.
known as the “paragraph mark”, usually is simply tolerated by most Word users. One of these is deposited in your document every time you hit Enter (the Return key). Life would be simple if a paragraph mark was simply equivalent to what WordPerfect users used to call a “hard return”. 