Using Microsoft Word Styles – Part 2

In the first part of my guide to using styles in Microsoft Word, I briefly covered the benefits of styles, and how to create a new style. In this post I will cover some of the other ways you can customize your new styles.

Once you are in the “Create New Style” window, click on the “Format” dropdown button in the bottom left corner. You will quickly find that by using the options found in this dropdown you will be able to customize your text to look and behave almost exactly the way you want. Now for a quick run through of the options that can adjusted with each of the items in the list.

Font:

Font tab:

Here you will find your typical options for formatting text. You can adjust the font, font style, size, and color.

Character Spacing Tab:

Here you can adjust the scale, spacing, and position of your font. You also have a checkbox for kerning. Kerning adjust the spacing between letters so the area between all letters is equal. It is common in certain fonts to have extra space between some letters that is especially noticeable in larger font size.

 

Paragraph:

Indents and Spacing Tab:

On this tab you will find everything you would normally find in the paragraph options window in Word. You can adjust alignment, indentation, and line spacing. I have found it especially useful to using the before and after spacing to control the spacing in my documents instead of using extra blank lines. For example, if you are creating a chapter heading style, you can set the spacing after to 18pt, and it will automatically create a blank space after the heading. This eliminates extra blank lines that can create formatting discrepancies when reformatting a document.

 

Line and Page Breaks Tab:

You set your line and page breaks here. So for your chapter heading you can select “Page break before” and you chapter will always start on a new page regardless of format changes done to your document.

 

Tabs:

You can customize your tab stop locations for each individual style here. It is really nice to have the ability to create different tab locations based on what type of text element you are working with.

 

Border:

I don’t use this one too often, but the one thing I found it really useful for is when creating a note, or tip item that has a boarder and back fill. If you are creating a long document that has many of these, you can create a style that automatically creates the boarder and shading. So instead of creating the boarder each time you want to insert a tip, you simply apply the style to the text that should be inside the box.

 

Language:

I can honestly say I have never used any options from this window. But this allows multi language documents to be formatted so the spelling and grammar tools use the correct language for the text.

 

Frame:

On this window you can customize how your text wraps around page elements such as pictures. You can also create a text frame where you can restrict the area your text can fill.

 

Numbering:

From this window you can customize how your numbered, and bulleted lists appear. You can customize how your numbered and bulleted lists look and behave. You can even import custom images to use as your bullet points. This is a great way to make these lists behave the way you want them to, as we all know numbered and bulleted lists in Word can be very aggravating.

 

Shortcut Key:

While this window will not allow you to make any customizations to your text, it does allow you to create a quick and easy way to apply your newly created style to your text. For example, you could set Word to apply your new “ChapterHeader” style every time you press “Alt + Shift + C”. If the keyboard shortcut you select is already set for something else, it will let you know where it says “Currently assigned to:”. This can allow you to continue typing without having to reach for your mouse every time you want to apply a style.

 

When you are back at the “Create New Style” window you will notice you have the option to apply this style to only this document, or any new document based on this template. Selecting the second option and creating a template allows you to use your styles you created in any document that is created from that template. This saves you time by keeping you from having to create the same style over and over. I hope to cover creating templates in a future post, so check back in the coming weeks.

 

Let me know if there is anything you would like to learn how to do with Word, or any other application or device. I will try my best to create a how to or tip to help you.