Tool Time: Format your words with styles

I frequently collaborate on projects with several different people, exchanging documents to review and revise. And all too often, I see documents where all of the formatting—bold, italic, font, type size, and so on— has been set manually. That’s the hard way to do it. It’s like having a woodworking shop full of expensive equipment at your disposal, but building a cabinet using only a hatchet.

What’s wrong with manual formatting?

OK, those toolbar buttons are so tempting, sitting up there at the top of your screen. It’s so easy to think, “Hey, I should emphasize that word or phrase. I’ll just highlight it and click that nice B button, and maybe the I button, too. And this line is a heading, so I’ll change the font to Arial, bump up the size a bit, and set the whole thing bold.”

Next thing you know, your document is littered with bits and bobs of manually applied formatting. And making sure that you’ve done things consistently becomes a headache. For example, let’s say that your document—a 20-page whitepaper you’ll be presenting to your boss—includes section headings, subheadings, and a bunch of other text formatting applied to different sorts of information. Are you sure you’ve always applied the same combination of formatting to the same elements in your document?

And what if you want to make a change, like changing the font of your body text from Times New Roman to Century, with a bit more space between paragraphs, and an indented first line? Then you have to go through each paragraph, selecting the text, clicking all of the menus and buttons to make the changes.

You should be focusing your attention on the content, on making sure the words say what you want them to say, and here you are, fiddling with the cosmetics, wasting precious time making the document look pretty.

Styles to the rescue

A style is a collection of text and paragraph formatting settings that you can apply with a single click. And if you decide that you want to change it, you only have to change it in one place, and the change will apply everywhere in your document.

Styles are fast, easy to use, and they help you automate things like creating a table of contents. For example, if you’ve used the various Heading styles for the headings and subheadings in your content, creating a table of contents is as easy as a couple of mouse clicks. If you applied the formatting manually, you’ll have to create your table of contents manually, too. And update it manually every time your document changes.

In Microsoft Office Word 2007, you can apply styles using the Styles area of the Home Ribbon, but only a few styles are shown. Press Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S to show the Styles window.

If you’re using OpenOffice.org Writer, you can pick styles from the formatting toolbar (shown below), or you can click Format > Styles and Formatting to display the Styles and Formatting window, which gives you more choices.

If you don’t like the looks of the default styles in either Microsoft Office Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, you can change them. You can make the changes in individual documents, or you can experiment with different templates, and have your changes apply to all of your documents.

Learn more

Microsoft has a tutorial on styles in Word on the Office Online site.

My friend Solveig Haugland is an OpenOffice.org goddess, and has a great introduction to styles in Writer on her blog.

Stop messing around with manual formatting. Start using all of the tools at your disposal. Start using styles.

Comments

[Lars Walker]

That's interesting. I don't think I've ever read this stuff before. I'll have to look into it.

Although that would mean changing the light bulb. Not sure I'm ready for that.

[Roy Jacobsen]

And that raises the question: "How many [fill in the blank] does it take to change a lightbulb?"

And another question is "How much value will you get if you start using styles?" The answer depends on the types of documents you're creating. A novelist creating fiction manuscripts isn't likely to need many styles beyond one or two headings and body text, plus maybe something like Strong (which usually translates to bold face) and Emphasis (which usually ends up italicized).

On the other hand, someone creating documents with a complex structure will come to love styles once they learn how to make them sing and dance.