Microsoft Word Styles

There are 2 posts tagged Microsoft Word Styles (this is page 1 of 1).

Lyonizing Word: But Which Styles?

by Jack Lyon

In my previous article, Lyonizing Word: Taming Styles in Microsoft Word, I explained how to make Microsoft Word display only the paragraph styles you want to use. But that raises an important question: Which paragraph styles do you want to use?

If you’re writing a simple business letter, the only style you may need is Word’s default of Normal. But if you’re editing a book, things immediately become much more complicated. Consider: What different kinds of text exist in a book? Let’s start with the title page; at a minimum, it includes the following elements:

  • Title
  • Author
  • Publisher

It may also include these:

  • Subtitle
  • Publication date

And that means you’ll probably need a paragraph style for each one of those. Why? Because the designer may want to format each element differently. Even if that ends up not being the case, you’ve at least allowed for the possibility. In addition, using a different style for each element makes it possible to use those elements as metadata, and that can be important in electronic publishing. Back in the late 1990s, I was involved in the production of an enormous electronic library. Most of the books were already styled with—that’s right—Title, Author, and Publisher, making it fairly easy to access those elements through a database and thus allow the user to sort books by title, author, and so on.

What styles will you need as you get into the book’s chapters? You might want to pull a couple of books off your shelves and see. You’ll probably find that you’ll need (at a minimum):

  • Chapter number
  • Chapter title
  • Body text

And as you get deeper into the book, you may need some of the following:

  • Block quotation
  • Poetry
  • Subheading
  • Subsubheading

Most books include a multitude of other elements, such as:

  • Dedication
  • Epigraph
  • Caption
  • Notes
  • Bibliography

And on and on and on.

Do you really need all of this detail? Yes, you do. Even if epigraphs and captions are going to look the same (e.g., both will use left-justified 10-point New Century Schoolbook), you as an editor, working in an editorial capacity, shouldn’t be thinking about how epigraphs and captions will look; you should be thinking about whether a specific bit of text is an epigraph or a caption and applying the metadata (a style) that marks it as such. Otherwise, the designer and typesetter won’t know for sure which text they need to format in a certain way. In addition, applying the proper metadata (styles) to epigraphs and captions makes them accessible and manipulable in various ways for later electronic publishing.

Can’t you just let the designer or typesetter take care of all this styling? No, you can’t. Deciding what text should be marked with which style is an editorial matter, not a design or typesetting one. Is this bit of text a subheading or a subsubheading? Should that bit of text be run in or pulled out as a block quotation? Is this line really an epigraph or just part of the body text? Is that line a chapter title, or should it be relegated to a subheading? All of these are editorial decisions; they have to do with what the text is and with what the text means.

Design decisions, on the other hand, have to do with how the text looks. The editor has styled this line as an epigraph. Should it be set in Comic Sans? (Horrors!) Should it be set in italics? Should it be a smaller point size than body text? Should it be centered?

So what styles do you really need? It depends on the book. And there’s no way to know without actually going through the book to find out. I tend to do this as I work, creating new styles as the need arises. Hey, that’s a poem! Guess I’ll need a poetry style (which I then create and apply).

And what should my poetry style look like? For editorial purposes, it doesn’t matter, as long as I can tell that the poetry style has been applied. For example, I might set up the style to be indented half an inch on both sides, with the text color set to blue. When the designer and typesetter bring the text into InDesign, they can redefine the style any way they like. But for now, I can tell that I’ve styled that text as poetry, which, for me as an editor, is all that matters.

In this article, I’ve assumed that you’re creating the styles you need to use, as that’s how I usually work. But for the most part, editors who work for publishers don’t need to do that. Publishers often have their own sets of styles that they require editors to use, and these styles are usually stored in a Word template. For example, you can download the Springer template and the Wiley template. Both templates are well worth looking at, just so you can get an idea of what publishers are looking for in the way of styled manuscripts. Wiley provides additional information in an online article "Applying Formatting Styles."

You may also be interested in my Author Tools Template, which is a collection of styles that make it easy for authors (and editors) to produce properly styled manuscripts, which means that publishers can then use those manuscripts without having to restyle the text.

In addition, if you’re working with styles as I’ve explained in this article, you owe it to yourself to check out the Style Inserter in Rich Adin’s EditTools. This is a slick feature that overcomes the problems with styles that I discussed in my previous article (see Lyonizing Word: Taming Styles in Microsoft Word) and makes it easy to apply publisher styles to a manuscript.

bodytextIt’s worth noting that some publishers don’t use styles at all. Instead, they require editors to mark up text with publisher-supplied codes like the one at the beginning of this paragraph. In that case, it’s important not to type the codes in by hand, as doing so can easily lead to errors. Instead, editors should use something like Code Inserter, which is included in EditTools.

In the 1980s, I worked on the Penta system, which used such codes extensively. During the 1990s, however, I switched to WordPerfect 6.0 and finally to Microsoft Word, and marking text with styles became a more intuitive way to work.

So what styles do I routinely use today? Here’s the minimal list, which I use in all of the books I publish at Waking Lion Press:

  • Half-Title
  • Title
  • Subtitle
  • Author
  • Publisher
  • Copyright
  • Dedication
  • Epigraph
  • Epigraph Source
  • Part
  • Chapter
  • Section
  • Subsection
  • Block quote
  • Poem
  • Poem Heading
  • Poem Source
  • Bibliography
  • Notes

How about you? What styles do you routinely use? And do you have any tips on how to use them? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.

Lyonizing Word: Taming Styles in Microsoft Word

by Jack Lyon

Microsoft Word includes a powerful feature for marking the various levels of a manuscript (such as headings, block quotations, poetry, and so on). That feature is styles, which are valuable for many reasons, including:

  • They make it possible to reformat a whole document simply by redefining styles or applying a different template using those styles.
  • They make it possible to find and replace only text using a certain style. For example, you might want to find source citations by searching for parentheses in text styled as block quotations.
  • They make it possible to generate a table of contents based on specified styles.

So styles are very useful. The problem is that Microsoft Word, in its usual “helpful” way, tries to manage which styles are available, in which document, and how those styles can be accessed. Finally growing tired of this nonsense, I decided to take the matter firmly in hand by writing this article.

My first gripe is that Word decides which styles to show in the Styles area of the Home ribbon, which decision seems to be based on nothing that makes any sense. Right now, it’s showing the following:

Quick Style Gallery

Quick Style Gallery

Of the styles available, I use Normal and Heading 1. But Strong? Subtle Emphasis? Intense Emphasis? Who makes this stuff up? Not an actual writer or editor, that’s for sure. So the first thing to do is get rid of the icons for the styles I never use:

  1. Right-click the icon (such as that for Strong).
  2. Click “Remove from Quick Style Gallery” (which, evidently is what the Styles area is called).
Remove from Quick Style Gallery

Remove from Quick Style Gallery

Now, the question is, when I restart Word or create a new document, does the Strong icon come back? Let’s find out. (Now restarting Word.)

Ha! It’s gone! But what happens if I create a new document? (Now creating a new document.)

Shoot, Strong is back again. So we can conclude that removing a style from the Quick Style Gallery applies only to the document in which we remove the style.

I could get rid of Strong and then save what I’ve done as a Quick Style Set:

Save as Quick Style Set

Save as Quick Style Set

But I’d like to get rid of Strong once and for all. How can I do that?

Well, I’ll start by showing Word’s task pane (by clicking the little arrow at the bottom right of the Styles area):

Word's task pane

Word's task pane

Now I should be able to click the drop-down arrow next to Strong and delete it, right? Nope. Word won’t let me. How annoying!

Delete Strong

Delete Strong

Well, then, where does the Strong style live? In Word’s Normal.dotm template, of course. Can I get rid of it there? I open the folder where the template lives, which on my computer is here:

C:UsersJackAppDataRoamingMicrosoftTemplates

Then I open the Normal.dotm template. Now can I delete the Strong style?

No, I can’t; same problem as before. Word really, really, really wants to keep its built-in styles — which is why they’re called “built-in,” I guess. So my only recourse is to (1) set how the style will be displayed and then (2) tell Word which styles to display. Here’s how:

  1. Open the Normal.dotm template, which is where your default styles are stored.
  2. Under Style Pane Options (the blue “Options” link at the bottom of the task pane), set “Styles to Show” as “Recommended.” Select “New documents based on this template.”
Show styles as recommended

Show styles as recommended

  1. Under Manage Styles (the third button at the bottom of the task pane), set all styles to “Hide” or “Hide until used” except those you want to show. (Even now, Word won’t let you hide everything.) Select “New documents based on this template.”
Hide Strong

Hide Strong

  1. Make any other adjustments you’d like, such as the order in which the styles will appear in the task pane.
  2. Save and close the Normal.dotm template.

After you’ve done that, every time you start Word or create a new document, you’ll get only the styles you want to see. I think. I hope. Maybe.

How about you? Do you have any helpful hints about how to tame Word’s styles? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.