Using Styles

When typesetting, you probably use styles (such as Heading 1) to format various levels of type. Applying Heading 1, for example, might format a heading with 24-point Arial. I’ve heard people ask, “Why not just mark each heading as 24-point Arial? Why bother with styles?” If these are questions you might ask, you’re about to increase your productivity. The beauty of styles is that they allow you to change your mind. Let’s say you’ve marked all of your main headings—102 of them, to be exact—as 24-point Arial, but your client thinks they should be bigger—28 points instead of 24. Let’s also say that you’ve used 24-point Arial elsewhere in your document, so you can’t just find and replace the formatting you need to change. What does that mean? It means you now have the painful task of selecting and reformatting every single one of those 102 headings—unless, of course, you’ve used styles, in which case you can adjust the heading style with a few clicks of the mouse, automatically changing all 102 headings at once.

Using styles provides other advantages, too:

1. You can easily find one style and replace it with another, using Microsoft Word’s find and replace feature. This is much simpler than having to search for directly applied formatting, such as 24-point Arial bold no indent.

2. If you’ve used Word’s built-in heading styles (Heading 1 through Heading 9), you can see and change the structure of your document in Word’s Outline view and Document Map. These headings can be applied from the styles window or the headings buttons (1, 2, 3, and so on) on the WordSetter Style Formatting toolbar but also from the keyboard by holding down CTRL + SHIFT and pressing one of the number keys (1 through 9). I generally use Heading 1 for part titles, Heading 2 for chapter titles, and Heading 3 for subheads in a chapter. (CTRL + SHIFT + N applies the Normal style.)

If you’re a typesetter and you’re not using styles, you’re spending a lot more time on formatting than you need to, and you’re missing much of the power of Microsoft Word.