A style is a group of formatting elements that you apply to text all at once to change its appearance. Styles offer a quick, convenient alternative to separately applying different formatting elements such as fonts, font effects, paragraph alignment, line spacing, and so on.
For example, if you want to format a quotation in your document to make it stand out from the surrounding paragraphs, you don't have to separately change its line spacing, left alignment, and right alignment. Instead, you can make the changes in one step by applying the Block Text style, a ready-made - or built-in - style that comes with Word.
Word comes with a large number of attractive ready-made styles such as heading styles, bulleted and numbered list styles, and table styles. Using built-in styles not only speeds your work, it also adds consistency and polish to your document because the styles are designed to work well together in any document.
Tip You can also create your own styles (see Create a New Style in Word 97/2000) and then apply them to text.
For more information about applying a different style to text, type about styles or apply style in the Office Assistant or on the Answer Wizard tab, and then click Search.
Quickly Copy Formatting with the Format Painter in Office 2000