Formatting Microsoft Word's "Styles"
Saturday February 18th 2006
Those who know me might be shocked to read two posts in a row that talk about Microsoft's products in any sort of positive light. Indeed I'm surprising myself. It's just that since coming back to school I've spent a lot more time writing papers, and while there are alternative browsers out there to M's Internet Explorer, not much can match the feature-richness of M's Word.
And like my last post, this one is also inspired by an "I wish Word could do _____" thought that, with a little poking around, revealed that Word could in fact do _____. This time, I was trying to control the styles of the document, in much the same way that I control the styles of a web page through CSS. I had noticed for some time that often Word would (seemingly) arbitrarily "label" a certain formatted text block as an "element" (i.e. labeling bolded text on a line by itself as "Header 3"), but until recently I didn't think I could control it.
I was also frustrated that Word insisted that every document I create use Times as the default font. What's more, sometimes the font would revert to Times even after I had selected the entire document and changed it (Verdana is my font of choice). There had to be a way to take back the control over my document's styles. Sure enough, there is.
Formatting Word's Styles
If you're familiar with CSS and semantically marked up (X)HTML, then you might understand that when describing your content instead of simply styling it, you gain both richer content and more flexible content. For example, instead of assinging a font thickness, size, and color to the header above this paragrah, "Formatting Word's Styles", I'm much better off labeling it as a "Heading 4" (Heading 1 is the top-most header of a document, and headings step down with each incrementing number), and then assinging font styles to that heading. Then, if I need to have another Heading 4 used elsewhere, it will automatically look like the rest. And similarly, I can change the look of all Heading 4 elements at once simply by changing it's style.
To accomplish this in Microsoft, go to "Format > Style...". The dialog box that opens will show you a lot of information, the most important of which is the list to the left. This shows possible semantic elements of your document (Microsoft labels them as "Styles"). Select one, and then click the "Modify..." button down to the right. This will bring up another dialog box previewing the style. To the bottom of this box is a "Format" drop-down menu: this list gives you access to formatting things such as Font, Paragraph, Border, and more. Play around with these, and once you're happy, hit "Ok".
Once you've formatted the element to your liking, the next step is to consider whether you'd like this element to be assigned this particular styling for the document you are currently working in, or to make it the default setting for all subsequent Word documents. To make it the default, click the "Organizer..." button to the bottom left of the "Style" dialog box that first popped up. This will bring up yet another dialog box (last one I promise), which will allow you to "copy" a style from your current document (on the left) to the "Normal" setting (on the right). Select the element you just modified, click "Copy -->", then click "Close" when you're done.
That's it. Complete control over the default look and feel of any semantic element in your document. This is a huge timesaver for me: now every document I create looks and feels the exact same.
I realize this was not a very helpful explanation, devoid of pictures and all, but it's all I have time for. Perhaps I'll come back later and give a more step-by-step, illustrated explanation. Until then, happy (word) processing!