[Home] [Styles] [Tutorial 1] [Tutorial 2] [Tutorial 3] [Tutorial 4] [Tutorial 5] [Tutorial 6] [Tutorial 7]
Details of how to use and create Word paragraph styles.
CONTENTS
|
A style is a description of formatting, |
Now that you’ve got an idea what’s meant by “levels of formatting” in Word (from the Tutorial 2) together with a sense of the variety of formatting you can perform, we now get down to specifics about Word styles.
Just as Word formatting falls into levels “Paragraph’ and “Character”, so Word styles also are of two types: Paragraph Styles and Character Styles.
This tutorial discusses Paragraph Styles since they are the most common. The next covers Character Styles.
Paragraph formatting, as you may recall, affects at the very least, whole paragraphs.
In a like manner, Paragraph Styles affect whole paragraphs. (Character styles can affect less than whole paragraphs.)
Paragraph style descriptions can and do however include both Character and Paragraph Level formatting.
Another way of stating the above point is that the formatting described by a paragraph style is applied to all the text in the paragraph that the style is linked to.
Take a moment right now to review the points just made. Re-read them even.
Remember:
|
Paragraph styles can and do include both and Paragraph Styles always affect whole paragraphs. |
Don’t worry if at this moment these ideas are hard to fully take in. Working with styles will clarify how they behavior. Like driving a car — reading about it is not the same as doing.
This example uses a much longer text than previous ones. The complete text for this example is available via this link. In this exercise, in addition to using built-in styles, we’ll create our own styles from scratch[1].
Start by creating a new Word document and either keying-in the text or copying it. When finished, your screen should appear like Figure A (which shows Normal view, and the Style Area).
Save your document as Ex3A.doc.
Figure A: Text for Exercise 3A
We’ll start by creating a style for all lines that are section headings (those lines starting with the word “Section”). We’ll name this style SectionHeading.
The method used here to create style SectionHeading I call “style by example”. This method involves A) formatting one paragraph as an example of the way you want all paragraphs in the style to appear, and then B) naming the example paragraph’s formatting. That’s it.
Somewhat arbitrarily, we’ll define SectionHeading to be
More complete details as to how to perform the formatting of Steps A & B is available via this link.
After Steps A and B, (and after removing the highlight by clicking somewhere else in the document), you should see the stylename SectionHeading appear in the Style Area to the left of the example paragraph. (see Figure B)
Figure B: After defining style SectionHeading and linking it to a paragraph.
Bear in mind that we’ve actually accomplished two task at once: defining style SectionHeading, and tagged this style to the example paragraph. Note also, that when tagging the style, we also applied it to the selected paragraph.
There are other ways than “style by example” to define styles. But this is by far the easiest method.
Now that SectionHeading is defined, we’ll apply it to other paragraphs that function as section headings.
Specifically, the section heading paragraphs are these lines:
Section 1. Congress
Section. 2. House of Representatives,
and
Section. 3. The Senate
Be sure you’ve applied SectionHeading to all 3 section heading lines. Then re-save the document.
It’s helpful to see styles not simply as a formatting convenience. To a greater or lesser degree, styles demand that you come to terms with the logical structure of a text. In tagging all section headings with style SectionHeading, we’re delineating the structure (or framework) of the document. After such tagging, a computer could potentially “understand” our document — for instance, we could ask it to “find the next SectionHeading.” This idea may take some getting used to. It might be better stated that “Styles can be used to delineate, or mark off document structure”; it depends on context and intention.
Also remember that in “tagging” style SectionHeading to various paragraphs, we not only apply formatting to those lines; we also link those lines to the style. When the definition of SectionHeading is modified, all linked paragraphs will reformat.
Now we’ll follow the same “style by example” procedure in creating a style for the descriptive lines that precede each Constitutional clause.
We’ll define ClauseDescription to be
The following lines are the ones to be tagged with style ClauseDescription:
Preamble
Election of Representatives
Qualifications of Representatives
Apportionment of Representatives
Vacancies
Officers of the House -- Impeachment
Number of Senators
Follow the same procedure as above to create style SectionHeading.
Start by highlighting one clause description paragraph. Use this paragraph an example of how the style is to look. Set all the Character and Paragraph formatting.
Then, name the style by clicking in the style box and typing ClauseDescription (hit the Enter key to finish).
Continue tagging style ClauseDescription to all the relevant paragraphs following the same procedure as used for SectionHeading.
HINT: If you repetitively applying the same style, instead of having to select from the style box, use Word’s Repeat Last Action function (F4 key or Ctrl+Y key combination).
Finally, we’ll apply Word’s built-in Body Text style to the remaining paragraphs in the document.
Because Body Text is built-in, it’s already defined and ready to use. All we need to do is apply it.
Instead of tediously selecting each paragraph and applying Body Text, we’ll use a neat trick, made possible via Word’s Find and Replace feature.
Find and Replace is most commonly used to find and replace strings of text. However, via the More button you can find and replace formatting. We’ll take advantage of the fact that remaining paragraphs we’ve not yet touched are all tagged with the Normal style. We’ll search for all paragraphs tagged with Normal and tag them instead to style Body Text.
Figure C: The More button in the Find and Replace Dialog
Figure D: The Find and Replace Dialog just before performing a “Replace All” operation to replace Normal-style-linked-paragraphs with links to style Body Text.
Once you work with it and come to appreciate its usefulness, Find and Replace quickly becomes part of your style formatting “bag of tricks”. See Tutorial 5 for more Tips and Tricks.
Finally, we’ll finish style tagging by applying styles to the title of the document and to the one line that announces Article I.
In a real world situation, it’s a judgement call as to how to handle single lines. If you’re using styles to lighten the burden of formatting a long document, then single lines might just as well be formatted by direct formatting. However, at times, for instance, when using the W2CSS translator, the style tagged to each and every paragraph can figure significantly.
Follow the procedure you’re now be familiar with: first highlight the Title paragraph; then pick the style Title from the Style Box.
Same as above: first highlight the Article 1 paragraph; then pick the style Heading 2 from the Style Box.
At this point, all paragraphs have been tagged with styles of our choosing.
You may be wondering why we didn’t just leave the Normal style attached to the body text paragraphs, eh? (or maybe the thought didn’t even occur to you). The answer could actually be a bit involved. Suffice to say, that almost all styles are “based on” Normal, through a sort of style “inheritance” scheme. It’s generally better not to mess with the Normal style unless you have a good reason to.
Up to this point, we’ve finished defining and tagging styles to all paragraphs in the document. Now is the time to make adjustments. For instance, the Heading 2 style applied to the Article line might better indicate a major change in the logic of the document with a change in formatting, i.e., possibly more space before and maybe a different text color and background.
Speaking generally, once the tedious work of tagging styles to paragraphs is accomplished, you can then set about perfecting the look of the document. This is when styles become fun. For just a bit more work, you can get a lot of return. The “bit more work” in this case is modifying and tweaking each style to create exactly the effects you desire.
The following are suggestions for modifying the Heading 2 and Body Text styles in our example document:
Modify Heading2 so it’s formatting becomes
All of these formatting choices can be accomplished under the Modify button in the Styles Dialog. If you need reminding how to get there, follow these steps:
Modify Body Text so it’s formatting becomes
NOTE: There are quicker ways to modify styles, akin to the “style by example” method used earlier to create styles. However, when you’re new to styles, it’s good to first become familiar with the “long way”, and learn the shortcuts later.
This particular tutorial is about styles in Word. However the whole tutorial series discusses both Word and CSS (HTML) styles. In that light, it’s useful to mention that the same styles used for a printed page won’t necessarily work well for an HTML, web-type page. For instance, style Heading 2, used above to separate the large Articles of our Constitution document, on paper might be so defined as to start each new Article on it’s own page [2]. Mapping page breaks into an HTML document, however, doesn’t make immediate sense because a web page is really one long scroll. In order to accomplish the equivalent effect of “Page Break Before” in HTML, we either need to start another web page (necessitating creation of another file) or we need to create an effect equivalent to the paper document formatting command “start a new page”.
After all that work, your document should appear something like Figure E.
Figure E: The final results of Exercise 3A:
You should by now have developed not only a conceptual understanding of Word styles, but also a sense of what they’re about from having worked with them.
There’s more to come. If you found some of the tasks in this tutorial tedious, for instance tagging each paragraph with a style, there are a number of tips of the trade that cut down on drudgery and increase efficiency (see Tutorial 5, Tips & Tricks).
NOTES
[1] This is a truncated version of the whole US Constitution. If you’d like more extensive, real world practice, try getting the whole text of the US Constitution (from http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Constitution.html) and using it for an exercise in styles. The Clause Description lines won’t be there (They’re copped from my 1948 State of California State Legislature Handbook). Doing such an exercise, with a long document, will help to foster in you an appreciation for styles
[2] Accomplished via the Text Flow option “Page Break Before” under Paragraph Level formatting
[Return to Home] [Next Tutorial]
Tutorials at this site presented by
This page created directly from an original MS Word document using the W2CSS HTML Translator.