Applying Styles in Microsoft Word is a great way to format your projects quickly, while allowing for ease in updating font size, face and color to create a consistent look throughout your whole document. One big advantage of using Styles in Word is the ability to have a Table of Contents generated automatically based on your style selections.

This Trainer Tip has some good hints on how to use Styles in Word. Full Circle offers five levels of Microsoft Word training in either Office 2007 or 2003 & prior versions. Summer is a great time to learn a little more about this powerful application.

For Our Word Users...

Are you using styles yet? If not, it's time to get efficient!

A style is a set of formatting characteristics, like font, size, color, alignment and spacing, used to format your document quickly, easily and consistently.

Instead of taking three separate steps to format your heading as 16-point, bold, Cambria, you can do it in one step by applying the built-in Heading 1 style. You do not need to remember the characteristics of the Heading 1 style. For each heading in your document, you just click in the heading (you don't even need to select all the text), and then click Heading 1 in the gallery of styles.

If you decide that you want subheadings, you can use the built-in Heading 2 style. In fact, Word offers you nine levels of already made heading styles so you can easily do headings, subheadings, sub subheadings, etc.

If you decide you want headings to have a different look, you can change the Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles, and Word automatically updates all instances of them in the document, whether you have two pages or five hundred pages.

Built-in styles turn on timesaving features

The built-in styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.) provide other benefits, too. If you use the built-in heading styles, Word can generate a Table of Contents automatically! Word also uses the built-in heading styles to make the Document Map, which is a convenient feature for moving through long documents. It builds a list of your headings that have hyperlinks that take you immediately to the part of the document.

Styles save time and make your document look good!

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Contact Full Circle's instructors by email or by phone at 610-594-9510 if you'd like us to address a specific software challenge in future Trainer Tip issues or if you'd like to share your own "tip" with the Full Circle team. We look forward to hearing from you.