subject: Word Styles For Translators: Part 3: The Styles Pane [print this page] Open the Styles Pane by clicking on the small indented box at the lower right side of the styles portion of the "Home" ribbon.
Some of the styles will have just the "" symbol, meaning that they are "paragraph styles," and others will have just a letter ("a"), meaning that they are "character styles." Some will have both. This means that those styles can be used in either way: If you apply such a style to a selected word or block of text, the characters will all come out according to the character style preset. If you click in the paragraph anywhere (or select it all), then the whole paragraph will be formatted according to the paragraph style preset. It is possible to link up styles manually and to de-link them, but this can generate unexpected results.
Some styles are "built-in," which is to say, they come as part of Word's programming and cannot be deleted. For example, "normal" and "Heading 1" are found in every document. Not all built-in styles are mandatory, however. Some of them can be deleted if not needed, such as "Emphasis" (Italic) and "Strong" (Bold).
Properties of styles.
Although "character" and "paragraph" styles predominate, two additional categories can be important in working through a document. Here is a complete list:
Character StylesParagraph StylesList Styles (Bullets and Numbering)Table Styles
List Styles and Table Styles are covered in other parts of this series. "Linked Styles" just create automatic combinations of a character style and a paragraph style, for selective application according to how you set the cursor when you clicked on the style.
"Default Paragraph Font" is the built-in (required) character style. "Normal" is the built-in (required) paragraph style. The default paragraph font setting is not directly modifiable. Make your changes in the font formatting section of "Normal."
Some built-in styles are used for headings, titles, footnotes, headers, footers and other structural elements of the document. They are required for the automatic generation of indices and tables (contents, references, etc.).
For example, it is good practice to plan your "chapter titles" to be "Heading 1," and your "chapter sections" to be "Heading 2." Then, when you generate your table of contents, Word will look for those two styles and put them in the Table of Contents. Word will also generate two new styles, in this case named "TOC1" and "TOC2." By modifying those styles, you exercise control over how the Chapter Titles and Chapter Sections will appear in the Table of Contents. (It is possible to tell Word to use styles other than the usual presets for these elements, but this flexibility really is there only to save you when you forgot to plan the document ahead of time and do things correctly from the start.) The same point can be made about how Word is able automatically to generate an index or tables of authorities or figures in a document.
Other built-in styles that come by default when you open or create a document are not required as part of a document's structure. Rather, they are there for convenience. For example, the "Book Title" style can be defined to specify how titles of published works are displayed. If you need them to be in bolded large and small capitals, then just select the book title in the text and click on "Book Title" from the styles menu, and the formatting is done! If you don't need the built-in "Book Title" style, it can be deleted.
In addition to built-in styles, there are those you create yourself. Here is an example: Perhaps you have a number of lines in the document that represent text of a script or computer coding. You want this text to appear in 10 point Courier font. (Assume your "normal" font is something different, like Arial 12.) Also, the lines of code should not be justified text. Perhaps the separate stanzas of code need be separated by only a half linefeed. So, define a special style called "Code" (or whatever you like) and specify that every time you click on it, the selected text will appear as 10-point Courier (the font part) and left-aligned with vertical spacing of only 3 points before and after (the paragraph part).
It might be tempting to put a hard return after each line of code, but if the applicable paragraph style has 3 points before and after each paragraph, the lines of code will space out twice that much, since the blank linefeeds are interpreted as paragraphs by themselves.
The correct practice is to make each multi-line block or "stanza" of code its own paragraph. Thus the code can be single-spaced, but (in this example) each block would be set off with 3 points before and after. (Obviously, you have complete freedom to choose what the default "before" and "after" parameters are.)
This should lead you to a question: How do I end one line and go to the next one without inserting a hard return?
Word uses the "manual line break" ("Shift-Enter") to end a line short of the margin and to go to the next line. This thwarts automatic word wrapping but does not mislead Word into thinking that the paragraph is over. The symbol will appear with "reveal codes" activated) as a small left arrow.
The trick for custom-designed styles is to plan in advance whether to create a character style, a paragraph style, a bullet or numbering style, a table style, or some combination of them.
The Style Selector
Open the Styles Pane. Then right click on any style. You will see several choices.
If you have no text selected, the choice you make will apply to the whole paragraph in which the cursor is located (if it's a paragraph style). The same is true if the whole paragraph had been selected. However, if you have selected a string of text (part of a paragraph, up to several paragraphs or the whole document) and click on a character style, then all that text will receive the character style you chose.
To reverse what you just did, you can always enter Ctrl-Z, but if you click back on "normal," the character styling will not go away. Why? Because "normal" is not a character style -- it's a paragraph style. To neutralize the character styles as well, click on "Clear All."
If you are in the styles context menu and click on "Update (style name) to Match Selection" you will modify the style chosen to match whatever formatting you imposed on the selected text, and then that change will be applied to all instances of that style in the document! Usually this in not what you meant to do.
You can also choose to modify the style. This brings up a selection of all possible modifications.
Selecting all instances is a tool for going back and making sure you have been consistent. For example, if you want all instances of "strong" to look like "emphasis" instead, select all instances under "strong" and then click the style called "emphasis." Immediately all "strong" text will switch to "emphasis" text. You do NOT need to select all instances just to apply a consistent change to a style. Just selecting "modify" will automatically change how all instances of that style will come out.
If you select "Clear Formatting of all Instance(s)" of a style, you're wiping out all your work on those blocks of text, and you're going back to square one. By default, a block of text with all styles cleared will be set to "normal."
The "delete" option is not available for required built-in styles like "Heading 2" or "Normal." This choice is available only for optional styles (whether built-in or created by you). If a style is deleted while still in use, all instances of it will be "cleared," meaning they become "normal" by default.
You will also be allowed to Add or Remove the style from the "Quick Style Gallery," which is a special collection of styles that appear in the "Home" ribbon at the top of the screen. Only the styles you use most often should go there. It is a way to find the heavily-used styles (like those for body text and headings) without having all the other possible styles cluttering up the search.
Menu options might appear in grey because a style has not been applied anywhere in the document or the action is inappropriate (such as deleting a required style).
Another feature of styles comes when you press Ctrl-Shift-S. A small window called "Apply Styles" appears. You can move it around the screen to a place where it is most useful. Whenever you select text (or click anywhere in a paragraph) and then go to this small window (with a Ctrl-S if it is not already there). You can quickly locate the style you want. It will be applied automatically. You can also click on "reapply" or "modify" according to the requirement.
Styles Pane Options.
Open the Styles Pane again. Near the bottom, on "Show Preview," click it, then un-click it (clear) and then click it again to see what it does. This is a matter of taste. Clearing this box makes the styles list shorter, but does not show them in their formats.
Do not click on "Disable Linked Styles" under normal circumstances. If you have been careful about making your character styles work in combination with your paragraph styles, you do not want to de-link them.
The three icons at the bottom of the Styles Pane can be useful.
"New" is the right place to go when creating a style from scratch. Most of the time you might prefer to style your text, then right click, go to the bottom of the context menu to "styles" and opt for "Save Selection as a New Quick Style."
"Style Inspector" will tell you the style characteristics of selected text. This can be useful when styles have proliferated so much that it's hard to tell what style has been applied. Most of the time you can just select the text and then look in the Styles Pane for the black box, highlighting the style in use.
"Styles Manager" offers options for working with each style, and is useful for cleaning up the whole set of styles in one window. Check out the individual tabs of this window.
The "options" link (a blue text in the bottom right corner) lets you choose what you see in the Styles pane:
If you've planned your styles well, or are working from a previously polished template, you can choose to see only the styles in use. This makes life simpler.
The "show next heading" box can be cleared unless you plan to add new subordinate levels of headings to the ones you've already defined.
The "hide built-in name" box is useful to get rid of duplicate styles (which can cause confusion) if you've defined a style with a special name, but it is the same as a built-in style.
Unless you are preparing a styles template, it is probably prudent to retain the box that says "this document only." A goof on this choice may make every style you create update your template. If you are just using "normal.dot," they will become part of your permanent Word setup.
