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Ways to more conveniently work with styles.
CONTENTS
Word users probably divide clearly into 2 groups: those who regularly use and rely on styles and those that don’t.
Those who do regularly use styles usually develop a bag of tricks for using them.
Word supplies a variety of features that support styles.
The following list includes tips to improve your pleasure and efficiency using styles. I don’t claim this list to be exhaustive. Included are methods I’m personally familiar with. If you know of other to add, please contact me.
Mentioned in previous tutorials but probably due for clarification here, are tips and tricks about how to select text before applying character and paragraph level styles and formatting — the rules are the same for both.
Paragraph formatting, by definition, affects at the very least, a whole paragraph. If you wish to apply, say center alignment to a paragraph, you don’t need to fully select (highlight) the whole paragraph. The presence of a blinking insertion point somewhere within the paragraph is enough to tell Word that “this is paragraph I wish to affect”. To apply paragraph formatting to multiple paragraphs, the rule is that all paragraphs containing a portion of highlight will be affected.
In short, you need not highlight every character of a paragraph in order to apply paragraph level formatting to that paragraph. And this works for paragraph level styles as well.
To apply Character level formatting, be sure to highlight exactly the text you wish to affect. This is the basic rule that applies to both character styles and character formatting.
Exception: Since version 6 of Word, Character formatting (and also styles) will apply to the “word[1]” that the insertion point is in. That is, if there is no selection other than the insertion point (which is considered a collapsed selection), then the character style or formatting is applied to a “word” of text.
The example in Tutorial 3 demonstrates how to use Word’s Find and Replace function to search and replace style tagging.
Word now offers a feature called “Automatic update” available in the Modify Styles dialog. This is how it’s described in the Word documentation:
Automatically redefines this style whenever you apply manual formatting to any paragraph with this style. Word updates all paragraphs in the active document that are formatted with the style.
Basically this means that you can change one example and the whole style will change. This is very much like the “style by example” above but without the extra step of explicitly telling Word to update the style definition. This can either be a bother or a convenience, depending on your point of view. I personally don’t like this method because it precludes direct formatting. Also, it’s a bit too heavy handed for my taste. I still like explicitly telling Word to update a style.
The style Organizer is found under Styles..., Organizer (see Figure A). The organizer is somewhat like the old Macintosh Font/DA mover.
The organizer allows you to copy styles into the active document from another document or template. This can be very convenient. It allows you to import styles you’ve already defined.
Figure A: The Style Organizer Dialog
Word’s templates always seemed to me a sort of holy arena, a place only for the initiated. Now that I’ve used them, they’re not that bizarre or difficult.
One of the things you can do with a template is load it up with ready-made styles. Then, when you’re ready to create a new document, start out picking your customized template (from the File, New dialog). Doing so “bases your document on the template”. The styles from the template will then be there, ready to use, in the new document.
The complete hierarchy of built-in styles would take more time and space than I currently am willing to accommodate in these tutorials to completely describe. Suffice to say, the built-in styles you should be aware of include:
The heading styles in particular play a significant part throughout Word and also figure prominently in HTML. To properly use the W2CSS translator, you must be aware of the built-in styles, and especially the Heading styles.
Autoformat has grown in the last few versions of Word into a kind of benign cyst with tentacles into more and more parts of the Word program. (I can imagine that 10 years ago, “autoformat” was the responsibility of just one guy on the programming team; today, there must be a whole department, maybe even a whole floor of a building at Microsoft, dedicated to Autoformat)
Autoformat these days can creep up as a sort of bug. As the old saying goes, “a feature is just a bug that’s been documented”.
But seriously, Autoformat can be your friend. However, I personally don’t use it much and so I can only point it out for you to look into for yourself. I’ve tried using Autoformat to apply styles as I type, but I prefer a less “smart” approach.
Autoformat options directly related to styles are found in the AutoCorrect Dialog (below) under the tabs AutoFormat As You Type and also AutoFormat.
Figure B: The Autoformat Dialog
If you’ve done the exercises in previous tutorials, you may have started to get the idea that styles can involve a certain drudgery. And in fact, on a long document, style tagging can become quite tedious (hence these Tips And Tricks).
Properly used , styles be like a kind of “magic wand” allowing you to “ding” (like Samantha on the old television show Bewitched) and apply a whole spit-load of formatting at once. With added benefit that you’re not only applying formatting, you’re creating an updateable link.
Oftentimes, it’s convenient, if you know ahead of time that you’ll be applying styleX to a number of lines in you document. Keeping this in mind, you can utilize the Repeat Last Action command, available via the F4 Key (for Windows/DOS users) and also via keystroke CTRL+Y [2] .
To use Repeat Last Action apply styleX the first time, by whatever method; then scroll to the next paragraph that’s to take styleX, select it and hit F4. F4, or Repeat Last action will mean “apply styleX”, this time to the selected paragraph. Repeating the last style application also works for character styles.
The first three heading styles are so often used that Word has set aside 3 memorable keystrokes for them:
|
Control + Alt + 1 |
Applies Heading 1 |
|
Control + Alt + 2 |
Applies Heading 2 |
|
Control + Alt + 3 |
Applies Heading 3 |
Try them out, especially if you wish to utilize the outliner often.
Another memorable keystroke applies the Normal style:
|
Control + Shift + N |
Applies Normal |
When creating a style, you have the option to establish your own “customized” keystroke for it. To access this feature, click the button Shortcut Key, found in either the Style New, or Style Modify dialogs. If you’re repeatedly using a style, this feature can be a real energy saver.
“Style for following paragraph” is found in the Style New, or Style Modify dialogs.
The best way to get a handle on this easy-to-understand but difficult-to-simply-put-into-words feature is to use it.
[EXAMPLE HERE]
By default, whenever you create a style, “style for following paragraph” is set to the same name as the style you created. Customize this only if you really need to.
This isn’t so much a tip as a fact of Word styles. All styles you create can be based on another style.
Another way of saying this is that a style can be created as a “child” of another. In fact, most styles are children of other styles. Word’s many built-in styles are mostly children of a few base styles.
When you base a style on another, let’s call it the parent style, the formatting of a child style will include all that comes from the parent together with the overriding effects of the child. By overriding, I mean that the child style can over-ride properties of the parent.
For instance, if style Body Text is set as Arial, 10 point, and a style Body Text Emphasis based on Body Text is created, Body Text Emphasis can be defined as being the same as Body Text with the addition of Bold and Red. Word notates the based-on property with the plus sign:
The appearance of Body Text Emphasis paragraphs will be Bold and Red, in addition to being in 10 point Arial font and centered.
This based on property is dynamic. So, if Body Text is modified to become Left aligned, then so becomes Body Text Emphasis. However, if Body Text is specified as Green, this will not affect Body Text Emphasis because it’s own color is explicitly specified and hence “overrides” its parent’s specification.
Tutorial 3 described a method of style creation I’ve dubbed “style by example”. This allows you to define a style by first formatting one paragraph as an example, and then naming that formatting as a style.
An analogous method for modifying a style is described below.
Start with the same text as used in Tutorial 1. It’s shown below (#include “include-beforeIMG.txt”Figure C
) and also available at via this link.
Figure C: Text for Exercise 5A
Apply the built-in styles Body Text, Heading 1, and Heading 2 as indicated in #include “include-beforeIMG.txt”Figure D
, below. HINT: It’s easiest to start by selecting all and formatting as Body Text. Then changing the other lines to heading styles.
Figure D: After applying some built-in styles.
[You might want to save this as file Ex5a.doc; it come in handy in a future tutorial.]
So far, we’ve just set up a situation. Now we’ll go ahead and modify styles “by example”.
The result should appear as in #include “include-beforeIMG.txt”Figure E
You can see (as in #include “include-beforeIMG.txt”Figure E
), that the result of “updating the style to reflect recent changes...” is to reformat all paragraphs tagged to style Body Text.
Figure E: After applying some built-in styles.
To get more practice, try modifying the Heading 2 style in the same manner.
The same method can be used to modify a character style “by example”. (NOTE: Paragraph styles can be both created and modified using “style by example”; character styles can only be modified using this method. To create character styles anew, you must use the Styles dialog.)
Outline view (available under View on the menu bar) is highly intertwingled with the built-in Heading styles. Paragraphs tagged with built-in heading styles are treated as demarcation points, announcing sections or subsections of a document in Word. The levels of section and subsection [3] can go nine deep — up to Heading 9.
Many times I refer to Outline View as “the Outliner” since in many ways, it’s like a separate outliner program integrated tightly into Word [4] . By way of paragraphs tagged with the Heading styles, a document can be “collapsed” and “expanded”, allowing you to view overall organization of the document. This greatly facilitates editing. Outline view also assists when creating a document from scratch, aiding you in fleshing out an outline much in the way many of us were taught in grade school.
An example using the Outliner may be included in the next version of these tutorials. Suffice to say, you are highly advised to look into the Outliner if you intend to regularly use styles in Word.
The methods and tricks mentioned above are standard fare for the heavy duty Word user — that poor soul regularly saddled with the task of creating 50 or 100 page booklets and reports. Like anything, using these methods is the way to understand and appreciate them.
And now, a sharp-angled turn in our tutorials, to a discussion of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
NOTES
[1] A “word” is whatever MS Word decides that to be. In most cases this is a string of characters set off by (or more technically “delimited by”) spaces. However, punctuation also delimits one “word” from another.
[2] Also on the menu bar under Edit Repeat last-action, although using the menu choice can defeat efficiency.
[3] Don’t confuse this use of the term “section” with Word’s section level formatting.
[4] Many of use remember the Outlining programs of the ‘80s. Outliners have now been subsumed into larger programs as is the case here in Word.
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