iWork '09: The Missing Manual

When You Need Styles: Know the Warning Signs

Styles are more than just a handy tool—they’re an essential part of good document hygiene. They keep your text clean, tidy, and consistent. If you’ve never used styles in your word processing—and most people haven’t—it’s time to start. Seriously: It’s a bad habit to go to the Format Bar every time you want to italicize text or change the font. Break that habit and use styles instead.

If you’re still not sure that styles are for you, you should at least get to know the warning signs. You know you need a style makeover when:

• The first thing you do when you open a document is go to the Format Bar to change the font or the text size.

• You frequently find yourself selecting the entire document to apply (or reapply) new formatting.

• You repeat the same formatting tasks over and over again when you add headings or other elements.

• You battle constantly with your fonts—you change the font of your text, for example, only to find that the old font pops back up when you type a new paragraph.

• You’re always reformatting text pasted into your document to fix font and size differences.

• You want to use Pages’ outline view to build an outline of your document (see Organizing Text with Outlines).

• You want to use Pages’ built-in tools for automatically building a table of contents (see Adding a Table of Contents).

If any of these symptoms sound familiar, styles are the remedy. In fact—surprise!—every time you use Pages, you’re already using styles. Every Pages template, ...