Applying styles in Microsoft Word
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Way back in issue #2 of the Red Pony Express, we wrote about the advantages of using Microsoft Word templates to improve the presentation and usability of your written materials. However, there’s not much use in having a suite of nicely formatted templates if no one actually knows how to use them.
Often when we create templates for clients we use the ‘restrict’ function in Word to limit users to the styles available within the template. This has two distinct advantages:
users must choose from the list of pre-determined styles when formatting their content, ensuring consistency within and across documents
users cannot accidentally introduce new styles by copying and pasting from another source, preventing corruption of the file and again providing consistent formatting.
Using a protected template does require users to think differently about how they use Word. For a start, the formatting shortcut icons (the Font and Paragraph sections in the ribbon menu of Word 2007 and 2010) are no longer available to be applied to text.
Rather than selecting the bold icon in the ribbon, styles such as bold text are applied using the options available in the Styles window (access through the Home tab or select ‘Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S’ to reveal).
While this does require a change in mindset when using Word, the feedback from our clients suggests that once they make the shift they don’t look back.
For a start, if they need to change the appearance of a particular document element (for example, a level 1 heading) they make the change once to the style, and the change is then applied throughout the document.
It’s also very useful for Word documents destined to be laid out using a desktop publishing application such as Adobe InDesign. This software also applies styles to each document element, so these can easily be mapped to the corresponding style in the Word source document.
Finally, if you are used to using shortcuts such as Ctrl+B to bold text, you will be happy to know that you can set up shortcut keys to apply any style available in the template in exactly the same way.
