A style is a predetermined combination of size, font style, and color which is applied to any document in your word processing application. Styles can sometimes help your documents reach a more streamlined and professional appearance. Styles are sometimes used together with other effects to quickly vary many different items in your document all at once. They allow you to create a variety of results and also add a certain “shine” or “glow” to your work.
The majority of Word processing applications have built-in styles. To activate a custom style, just click your cursor on the toolbar (or you may press Ctrl + Z), and choose Style from the options available. In most cases, you have two selections: one for the style of the text, and one for the style of the background images. You can activate a style either by changing the font style, or by selecting a specific background format.
There are a number of different ways in which a Word document can be edited using styles. If you have been working in Word for some time, chances are that you have used some sort of formatting utility. If not, here are some methods you might not have tried. The first way to use default styles is to apply a style to the entire document, or just parts of it. To do this, select Format from the Edit menu and choose All Options. Then, under General, click on Home Font.
This will apply a default style to all text in the document, unless you specify otherwise using the Formatting dialog box. If you have several sections of text, but only one needs formatting, you can create a section named Specific Section. Then, using styles, you can specify a style for each section, or for the page as a whole. However, if you want to apply a style to only a certain portion of the document, you can move the cursor to that spot and then enter. You do not have to have the cursor at the exact position in order to format a part of the page; you can specify a limit to where the cursor will be and use the Return key to set the cursor at that point permanently.
One of the most important things you need to know about styles is how to make a selection with the arrow keys and the Select tool, or right-click the Select button and select, to drop-down a style. Of course, there are many more commands you can use with the toolbar, if you prefer standard features. Another handy feature is the possibility to reverse a style, by selecting it and clicking on the reverse link in the Properties panel. This command is particularly useful for reverse engineering, changing a style to match the target application’s file format.
In a sense, you can think of Word as having its own form of CSS, since it has a similar file format. If you format your Word document in Word, you can keep all your styles in one document, keeping them ready for quick changes. And because you can use a “drop-down” menu to drop down specific styles, you can quickly find and change styles without having to physically go through each individual entry in the Styles window. It may seem like a very complicated feature to learn, but once you get to use it, you will wonder how you ever got along without it! Learning Word’s CSS capabilities is only the first step towards taking advantage of this great software.