Word Styles: First steps with Word Styles

5/8/2021

Word Styles: First steps with Word Styles

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Word Styles are one of Word’s (many) hidden secrets. Everyone who has used Word will have seen them – Styles is one of the biggest groups on the Ribbon – but apart from being able to “mess” up your text with one accidental click, what do Word Styles actually do?

Styles determine how the text is formatted – ie which font size, bold/italic, colour, etc. – and set parameters of other features of the text, which we all know about but don’t necessarily get involved in when doing basic editing – ie spacing, indents, justification etc. Once a style is applied to some text, the text is effectively “tagged” and you can search in, or select, text tagged with the same style independently from the rest of the document – in addition to quickly altering what this text looks like and how it behaves in relation to other text.
This topic is worth a few blog posts, but I’ll start here with the basics of using heading styles when you’re editing.

Why I use heading styles

The documents I receive often look something like this:

At first glance, it looks as if the author may have used Word’s heading styles to denote the different heading levels ...

...but the navigation pane looks like this:

... and this leaves me feeling entirely at sea!

Once I have applied heading styles to the text, it looks like this ...

... the Navigation pane is populated with all the heading levels in the document, and I feel much more in control!

Why do I use the Navigation pane?

The navigation pane has several uses relevant to editors:

it provides an easy overview of the document – it's always useful to get an idea of what the document you're working on contains; heading styles aren't the end of the story here, but they are a good start
it allows us to quickly see where the heading levels have been applied incorrectly; reassigning heading levels is easily done using the menu that pops up when you hover your mouse over the heading and right click
each heading and its contents can be moved around the document by dragging with the mouse – this is useful for rearranging illogically ordered documents, and can be used for reordering any other text, for example, references if you convert it to a suitable heading style for the purpose (and convert them back again when you’ve finished)
right-clicking on each heading level gives you an option to select that heading and its content; this has various uses including easily obtaining word counts for each section to help estimate editing times and to monitor progress
the ability to easily select sections also allows you to copy each section and paste into a new doc (CTRL-C, CTRL-N, CTRL-V); I use this to extract reference lists or to divide documents into chapters
sections can be deleted in their entirety by using the Delete option on the right-click menu – use with care!

The right-click menu in the Navigation pane ...

Other benefits of using Word headings

If you have used heading styles in your document, you can also use Outline view to check that the headings are correct and that the levels make sense. You can choose how many heading levels you can see:

Word can also use the heading levels in a document to create an automatic table of contents:

Easy ways to apply heading styles

There are a few ways to apply heading styles:

You can apply them manually using shortcut keys: Heading 1 is CTRL-ALT-1; Heading 2 is CTRL-ALT-2 and Heading 3 is CTRL-ALT-3. I have assigned CTRL-ALT-4 and CTRL-ALT-5 to Headings 4 and 5 – use the instructions in my How to set up a keyboard shortcut post
You can semi-automate this process by searching for formatting features used to distinguish headings from the main text; for example, combinations of bold and italic text. Use the Format menu to add Bold and Italic to the Find box (leave it blank); replace with "^&" (which just means "what was found") and the Heading style you want to use

There are also simple macros that allow you to quickly click through a document and style each paragraph, and Paul Beverley's FREdit macro will replace text that it has found with styled text, which can be a quick way of applying heading levels to, for example, journal articles which have the same basic structure.

See How do I know what Style I'm using for tips to work out what styles are applied to your text and Four ways to apply a style to find out how to add styles yourself.

Author

Andrea at Yours Truleigh Editing.
www.yourstruleighediting.com