Sep 01, 2014

Recently, one of the students in a Microsoft Word training course asked me whether it was a good idea to use the existing Heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2 Heading 3, etc.) or to make your own styles. I replied that using the Heading styles in Word was an easier option and had several useful advantages. Here is a brief introduction to styles and some details on the advantages to using Heading styles. What is a style? A style is a pre-set set of formatting, both character formatting and paragraph formatting. So for example, a style could be Calibri, 11 pt, bold, colour blue, and centre aligned. To apply a style, select the text or paragraphs you want to apply and then choose the style you want from the Styles group in the Home tab.

An alternative is to turn on the Style pane by clicking on the dialogue launcher on the bottom right of the Styles group.

This pane makes it quicker to apply a style to text and also gives you a menu of choices to modify styles.

Heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.) are styles that Word starts with and can be modified to suit your document. Five reasons to use Heading styles: 1. Make a Table of Contents with Heading Styles If you have a document with Heading Styles, you can use the Heading styles to quickly make an updatable table of contents. Here is a document with Heading styles in it:

If you insert a blank page at the top and then go: References – Insert Table of Contents then choose either Automatic Table 1 or Automatic Table 2 and Word creates the below table of contents.

This can be updated easily (using the 'Update Table…' button) and each part of the table of contents is a hyperlink to that specific part of the document. 2. Set up multi-level numbering using Heading styles Once you have Heading styles set up, you can use the Multilevel List button to quickly create numbering that uses each level of Heading and gives it the appropriate level of numbering.

By choosing any of the four circled options above, you can apply a multilevel list to the levels of Headings. Here I've chosen the top right of the four circled options.

As you can see, Word has automatically applied the correct numbering level to the correct Heading level. Note: you can adjust the actual look of the multilevel list numbering by choosing the Define New Multilevel List option at the bottom of the multilevel list menu. 3. Use Outline view to edit your document By clicking on the Outline view button in the View tab, you can hide/show various levels of Headings and use this to summarise your document or reorder it easily.

4. Quickly navigate to a Heading There are two ways to do this. The first is using the Navigation Pane, which you can turn on by going to the View tab and clicking on the Navigation Pane button. Then when you click on the Heading, Word jumps you to that part of the document.

The second way is to use the Browse Object button on the bottom right of the Word screen. By clicking on the circle in the middle, you can choose to search up or down your document by choosing from the various choices, which includes Browse by Heading. Then use the up and down arrows to jump to the next heading in that direction.

5. Cross reference to a Heading In a longer document, you often need to refer to another part of the document by saying something like: "See page XX." Rather than having to recheck these cross-references every time you rearrange or add to your document, you can insert a cross reference field by going to Insert – Cross-reference.

Here, one of the choices is to use the Heading as the cross-reference, so if the Heading moves from one page to another the cross-reference will also update. Hope that helps you and you can now see the usefulness of using Heading styles in your documents.