Styling it out in Microsoft Word
This article was updated on 17 December 2024
One of the commonest things that learners tell me they want to achieve on Microsoft Word courses is “how to make my documents look more professional”. Once we’ve got the “don’t use Comic Sans” jokes out of the way, then how do we achieve this? Well, one of the easiest and quickest is to use styles.
Styles have been in Word as long as I’ve been teaching it (almost 32 years now), and Microsoft really pushed them to the fore back in 2007 when they were given a huge section of the then-new Ribbon.
What are styles in Word?
In essence, styles enable you to swiftly apply and modify the formatting of your document's text. If the objective is to "enhance the professional appearance of my document," they also provide consistency – each time a specific style is applied, Microsoft Word utilizes the same font, size, and colour, among other attributes.
Most of the built in styles are what are known as paragraph styles so they will apply their settings to an entire paragraph of text, even if you don’t highlight it first, which only helps speed up the process – click into the text and select the relevant style from the Ribbon – two clicks, and a load of formatting is applied! Quick, easy, and consistent – what’s not to like?
Applying your organisation's style to your document
In many cases, your organisation will have ‘corporate styles’ already specified so being able to apply the correct branding is important. However, we’re not always so lucky that Word has been configured accordingly – we may have been told what formatting to use, but no styles have been set up to match that – and so formatting becomes a manual chore.
Thankfully, Word will let you modify any of its styles (you can also build your own) – commonly by right clicking the name of the style in the Ribbon – meaning that spending a few minutes setting out your styles can reap huge rewards. If I’m creating something like a training manual then all the styles we use at QA have already been setup, but if it’s a personal document then I can set out my own styles however I want, and part of the beauty of styles is that I can setup my styles in advance of typing the content, partway through the document, at the end – and whenever I want to modify them, Word will update the entire document accordingly.
Just in case all of that isn’t enough, then styles also form the basis for many of Word’s features that might typically be needed in longer documents such as training manuals, tender documents, and reports.
Being able to generate a table of contents in seconds, easily caption images and tables, cross reference to key topics, quickly modify the structure of a document without all that monotonous cutting and pasting, or even create documents made up of documents (for those really big documents!) all rely on styles.
To find out more about styles and other long document features of Microsoft Word, have a look at our Mastering Microsoft Word course.
