Create a New Style in Word 97/2000

Creating and storing a new style in Microsoft Word 2000 or Word 97 offers two benefits: the same quick, convenient way to change the look of text that built-in styles offer, and text formatting that is original and tailored to the work you do.

For example, you might write a year-end report that contains numerous tables. You want the look of the table titles, headings, and text to coordinate with - yet still stand out from - the rest of the report.

To achieve this, you can create three new styles that are unique to your report: a table title, table heading, and table text style. Creating these unique styles has several benefits:

• The styles match the look of the rest of the document.
• Once you've created the styles, you can apply them as quickly as you apply built-in styles.
• You ensure that the text is formatted consistently. Sometimes when you manually apply multiple formats to text, it's hard to remember all the different formatting elements the next time you have to apply them. Applying a style ensures that all the formatting elements are the same, every time.

Other Types of Styles You Can Create

There's a large variety of formatting elements you can include in your new style. For example, you can create heading styles, bulleted and numbered list styles, footnote styles, or caption styles. You can include paragraph attributes in your style such as alignment, line spacing, and paragraph spacing, and character attributes such as font, font effects, and font size.

Create a New Style

The easiest way to create a new style is to type your text, format it as you want it, and then use the formatted text as the basis for your new style.

To create a new style

1. Format the text you want to use as the basis for your new style.
2. Select the text.
3. On the Formatting toolbar, click inside the Style box.
4. Type over the existing style name to create the name for the new style.
5. Press ENTER.

The new style is added to the list of styles available in this document, and you can apply it to text the same way you do built-in styles.

See Also

For more information about what paragraph styles and character styles are and how they work together, type about styles in the Office Assistant or on the Answer Wizard tab, and then click Search.

Polish Your Word 97/2000 Document by Using Ready-Made Styles

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