
Word has not created new styles in your document (see Figure 1).įigure 2: To apply a style, locate the Style box on the Formatting toolbar. These are combinations of a style and direct formatting that you have used in your document. They're not styles! Entries without a symbol have names like "Body Text + Bold" or "Heading 1 + Orange". In Word 2002 and Word 2003, in the Styles and Formatting Pane, you may see entries without a symbol. Word identifies them with table and list symbols.

In Word 2000 and earlier versions of Word, to display a list of all the styles: To use all the styles, you might need to see a full list. By default, Word only shows you a few of them. So you would use the "Title" style for your title, "Body Text" style for body text, "Caption" style for the picture captions, and "Heading 1" for the major headings.Ī.Word comes with dozens of built‑in styles. You use styles to format the paragraphs in your document. In Word, a style is a collection of formatting instructions. Or we might need a lot of vertical space before all the major headings, but none before picture captions. For example, we may want all the ordinary body text in a smaller lighter font, but the title in a larger, heavier font. Typically, we want to format each kind of paragraph consistently. We use different kinds of paragraphs (such as a title, headings, sub‑headings, or picture captions) to help our readers make sense of our documents. Paragraphs play different roles in our documents.

What are styles and what do I use them for?Ī. Microsoft no longer publishes the article on its site.Ĭorrectly using styles in Microsoft Word is the best way to create consistent, well-formatted documents.

This article was originally written for Microsoft and was published by Microsoft at office/using/column14.asp
