Office 2007 Bible

Styles and Character/Font Formatting

A few Word versions ago, possibly while many users weren’t watching, Microsoft added to Word a new type of style. Before that, there was just one type of style—the paragraph style—and styles could be applied only to a whole paragraph. It soon became clear, however that a more flexible, sophisticated style was needed—one that could be applied to characters within a paragraph.

The character style was born. Using this new invention, it was suddenly possible to create styles for formatting book titles, article titles, names, phone numbers, Internet links—you name it.

Later in this book (Chapter 7) you’ll find an entire chapter on styles, but to understand character formatting, there’s a little you need to know at the outset, so please bear with me for another couple of paragraphs.

Even if you yourself never apply a style using Word’s vast array of formatting tools, two styles are always in effect: a paragraph style and a character style. To demonstrate this, display the Style Inspector by clicking the Styles Dialog Box Launcher at the bottom-right corner of the Styles group. Then, click the middle icon at the bottom of the Styles task pane to display the Style Inspector, shown in Figure 5-2. You can dismiss the Styles pane if it’s distracting.

Figure 5-2. Use the Style Inspector when you want to fully examine the styles and direct formatting in use (direct formatting is identified by Plus in the Style Inspector).

Here, the two styles applied ...