Office 2007 Bible

Styles and Paragraph Formatting

One of Word’s challenges is that there often are multiple ways to do the same thing. For any given set of circumstances, however, only one way is the most efficient. The challenge is to see through the clutter and determine which way is best.

“I don’t use styles” is something I hear quite frequently, but that can’t be true. If you’re using Word, you’re always using two styles: a paragraph style and a character style. When people say “I don’t use styles,” of course, that doesn’t mean that they don’t use styles at all. It’s that they use just a single paragraph style, called Normal, and a single character style called Default Paragraph Font. More to the point, it means that they simply ignore the existence of styles.

Any formatting variation such “astylists” might achieve is by applying variant or direct formatting. I’m not going to snobbishly sit here and tell you that paying no attention to styles is a sin. Although, come to think of it, this is a Bible . . . Even so, there are times when you have to do something ASAP, and if ignoring styles gets that “The building is on fire!” memo finished sooner than fumbling with unfamiliar tools and concepts, then so be it.

This chapter will tell style shunners what paragraph formatting is, what it’s for, and how to use it. It also will tell style users the same things, but the latter will have a broader context for it all as well as a strategy, because paragraph formatting is integral to paragraph style formatting. ...