Oct 12, 2016

Previously on Word Styles we looked at creating new styles over a document that will create, in effect, a company style guide. Now the company has a complete style guide which includes the modified Heading Styles and its own collection of Styles we will have a look at managing these Styles.

It is important to note that the Styles you’ve created on behalf of the company are only available in the template where you created it. This means that if you wish to apply these stles over existing or new documents, further settings are required. In today’s blog on Word Styles in our 5 part series, we will look at managing Styles.

We had previously explored that in order for us to carry over a custom Style for all new documents, we use the Modify Style panel to select the ‘New documents based on this template’ feature located in the bottom left hand corner of the panel.

However, this feature will only allow you to access custom Styles for all new documents. To allow us to create a Style Set which is a combination of all custom and modified Heading Styles we will go to the Design tab. Across the prior Word 2010 version, this Save Style Set feature was just located on the right of the Styles gallery in the Home Ribbon. You will find the Design ribbon gives us a gallery of Word’s own Style Sets which can be applied over the entire document of text whether its headings, paragraphs, titles etc. This is certainly an automation in formatting a document, however, these are not the company’s Styles.

So, by selecting the third dropdown arrow found on the right of the gallery you will find down below the presets ‘Save as a new Style Set’. Word will then direct you to the save window where you are prompted to provide a name to the Style Set. You will notice in the top address bar that you are about to save it to the Microsoft QuickStyles library. By saving in the application’s library or global template you can retrieve this Style Set across all documents.

By returning back to the full display of the Style Set gallery you can now find the additional Custom group where all of the company’s Style Sets will be stored when saved to the application. This will mean when you open an existing file and by selecting the custom Style Set and as you return to the Home ribbon’s Style gallery, you can access all Styles that are found from the selected Style Set.

Styles is a powerful set of tools found in Microsoft Word that will ensure not only a consistent font theme for the company’s documentations but to enhance the usability of files. Can you guess how Word detects the page number for each topic found throughout a document if you were to create a table of contents?

You guessed it, it detects it through Heading Styles, but that will be next time. Stay tuned for more on Microsoft Word.

For more information, take a look at New Horizon's Microsoft Word training courses.