Creating and Applying a Style

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Word Processing II >>
Using Styles

In this lesson, you will

Apply a Style
Modify a Style
Create a Style

for use in a word processing document. There are paragraph styles, which can be applied to headings and paragraphs, and there are character styles, which can be applied to words in your document. In this lesson, we will be working with paragraph styles.

Paragraph styles are very helpful in saving you from repeating the steps to apply formatting to headings and paragraphs. It also allows you to change the formatting of a heading by simply changing the style as opposed to going through and changing the formatting for each heading in your document. When working with long papers, this can be most helpful. In the level three module on word processing, you will learn how using styles can be used to automatically generate a table of contents for your paper. There is still a lot to learn about Word, if you can believe it!

Applying Styles

For your assignment, you will create a document named "XXXstyle" to demonstrate your use of styles. To do this,

Open a new word document, name it "XXXstyle"
Type in several headings and paragraphs between headings. You can copy and paste the first paragraph of this lesson to use as the content of these paragraphs and create level one headings like "Introduction," "Literature Review," etc.
Create level two headings (or "subheadings") for some of the sections. Perhaps insert "Past Research" as a subheading in the Literature Review section of the paper. I will let you choose the names for the headings and subheadings of your paper.
Do not insert empty lines between headings and paragraphs. You learned in the level one Word module about setting spacing between paragraphs. This knowledge will be applied in this assignment as well. Your paper before formatting should look look similar to the following:

Introduction
Paragraph styles are very helpful in saving you from repeating the steps to apply formatting to headings and paragraphs. It also allows you to change the formatting of a heading by simply changing the style as opposed to going through and changing the formatting for each heading in your document. When working with long papers, this can be most helpful. In the level three module on word processing, you will learn how using styles can be used to automatically generate a table of contents for your paper. There is still a lot to learn about Word, if you can believe it!
Literature Review
Paragraph styles are very helpful in saving you from repeating the steps to apply formatting to headings and paragraphs. It also allows you to change the formatting of a heading by simply changing the style as opposed to going through and changing the formatting for each heading in your document.
Past Research
When working with long papers, this can be most helpful. In the level three module on word processing, you will learn how using styles can be used to automatically generate a table of contents for your paper. There is still a lot to learn about Word, if you can believe it!

Apply a level one heading to some of the headings in your document. To apply a paragraph style, click the paragraph or select a group of paragraphs you want to change. Next, you can use either the menus or the toolbar shortcut to apply a style.
- Using the menus, you would go to the "Format" menu, select "Style...", click on the style "Heading 1," then click the "Apply" button.
- To use the shortcut, you must be viewing your "Formatting" toolbar. Go to the Style drop-down menu and select "Heading 1." This should look like the following:

Heading 1 is preformatted. In the above menu, it shows that it is 14pt and left-aligned. A paragraph mark ( ś ) appears beside paragraph style names and the letter "a" appears beside character style names. As you can see, there is additional formatting not shown in the above window. You can see the font and alignment settings change on the formatting toolbar as you click on different sections of text with different styles applied. Other formatting details, such as spacing, can be only viewed in the "Style" window, which can be accessed through the "Format" menu.
Apply a level two heading to the subheadings in your document. To do this, you would select the subheading, then select "Heading 2" from the above Style drop-down menu.

Modifying a Style

The Heading 1 style shown in the Style drop-down menu is bold and left-aligned. Let's say that we want our main headings to be underlined as well, and that we want the heading to be centred on the page instead of having a left-alignment. For your assignment, you will modify a style as described below:

Make sure your cursor is resting on your heading with the Heading 1 style applied. If it was sitting on your normal paragraph, the Heading 1 style would be applied to that text as well when you go to the format menu to modify Heading 1.
Go to the "Format" menu and select "Style..." to get the following window:

In the Styles box in the left side of the above window, select the style you want to modify. In this case, select "Heading 1"
Click the "Modify" button to get the following window:

Click "Format" button, which is actually a drop-down menu. Since we want to modify the font of Heading 1, select "Font" as shown below:

The Format Font window that appears is the same as the one you used in the Word 1 module. Change the Underline drop-down menu setting to "Single" and click OK.
Next, to change the alignment, select "Paragraph" from the Format button. Change the alignment to "Centered" and click OK.
Click OK on the Modify window to accept these settings.
Click the "Apply" button on the Style window to apply these settings to all text in your document with the Heading 1 style.
Styles can have also have formatting set for Tabs, Border, Language, Frame, and Numbering as shown in the Format menu above.

Creating a Style

If you find that a style provided in the list under the "Style" window does not match your needs, you can create a new style. For your assignment, you will create a new style that is basically the same as the Heading 1, but with coloured text. To create this new style,

Select one heading in your document, which will take the new style you create. Applying a new style to this one heading will not change all the other headings that have the same former style applied.
Go to the "Format" menu and select "Style"
Click the "New..." button to create a new style. A window similar to the following will appear.

In the "Name" field, give your new style a recognizable name. Usually, you would give it a name that resembles its purpose. For your assignment, name this style "XXXnew" where XXX are your initials.
In the "Style Type" field, choose whether you are creating a paragraph style or a character style. In this case, select paragraph style.
The "Based On" field will apply the formatting of an existing style to the new style. Our new style will be based on Heading 1, so select Heading 1 from the drop-down menu.
The "Style for following paragraph" will determine what style will occur when you press enter to start a new paragraph. You can select XXXnew to keep the same style for new paragraphs following this style (it will appear at the bottom of the scrolling list) or choose a different style. For this assignment, we want following paragraphs to return to the Normal document text, so select "Normal" from this drop-down menu.
The "Preview" pane will show you what the new style will look like and the "Description" section will state the formatting applied to this style.
The checkbox for "Add to template" will allow you to add this style to the list of styles showing when you open a document using the template. All new documents, except those you choose to open with a template, are based on the Normal.dot template. By selecting this option, this new style will be available when new documents are opened using the current template.
The checkbox for "Automatically update" will automatically redefine the style formatting when you manually change the formatting of any paragraph with this style. All paragraphs in the active document that have this style will then be reformatted or "updated" to match this style change.
Click OK in the New Style window to accept your formatting.
Click Apply in the Style window to apply your new style to the selected text.

Tips on Styles

If you have any problems using styles, you can look up "styles, troubleshooting" in your Help menu contents.
You can apply character attributes (bold, italic, etc.) of a paragraph style to just a single word in your document. The paragraph which holds the selected word will not take on the paragraph style. Furthermore, the word will not take on the paragraph style, but just the character formatting from it.
To apply a character style, click the word or select the words you want to change, then select the character style from the Style drop-down menu or from the Style window, which can be accessed under the Format menu.
On the Style window, you can click on a button called "Organizer" to copy styles from one document or template to another. To learn more about this, click on the question button in the top of the Organizer window ()and then click on the feature you wish to learn more about.

When complete, please save your changes, then return to the assignment section of the Word II module page to review your assignment requirements.