Riverbank It management

Styles are a great feature in Microsoft Word. If you have a house style for everything you write you will immediately be at home with styles in Word. If not, here is a paragraph of explanation.

Every publication has its own style. The style of the Financial Times is different from The Sun – each has their own unique and identifiable style. It’s not just their style of writing, it’s also very practical things like the font they use, the types of headline they use and so on. It is this consistency of style that creates an identity. The same applies to any serious business. Your house style reflects the image you want to create. It has to be applied consistently across everything you write. That’s what Word’s styles help you create.

Create your first style

In Word you can define styles for headings, for normal type, for tables and so on. Without styles you would have to craft every heading individually; you would have to select the font, the font size, is it bold, italic or underline, its colour, etc etc. You would be there forever. Encapsulate all those settings in a style and you can set everything with one click. Let’s look first at a simple heading.

1. First of all just type the text of your heading. Here’s mine:

2. Now format it any way you want. I chose to make it bold, underlined, italic, chose a font called Baskerville Old Face and then set it to 18 point. Now it looks like this: 

3. Save your settings as a style. Right-click anywhere in your formatted heading and select Styles | Save selection as a New Quick Style. Give your style a name and click OK.

You have created your first style.

Apply your style

You need to know where to find your style. On the Home tab locate the Styles area. In the bottom right corner of this area click the little arrow to open the list of styles.

You should now see a list of available styles in a bar down the right-hand side of your Word screen. You should be able to see the style you just created.

Now select some text and apply your new style to it with a single click. Click on other styles to see how quickly and easily you can make changes. Finally go to Normal and set it back to Word’s default style.

Changing your style

Not quite happy with your style? Right-click on it in the list of styles and select Modify. In the Modify Style window find the Format button in the bottom left corner (see below) and use it to change individual elements of your style.

Create additional styles

You are now ready to create a whole set of styles for your business. Make sure you plan what you need first – this is your house style and your face to the world. At Riverbank we have just four heading styles and one style for bulleted lists. Less is certainly more - you need to keep house style simple so everyone can use it.