Publishing E-Books For Dummies

Applying Styles in Microsoft Word

You might not know that Microsoft Word has a styles feature, allowing you to instruct the program to always format a certain type of text (such as a chapter header or a quotation) in a certain way, for every instance of that type of text. Many people use Word for years without experimenting with its incredibly useful styles. I’m one of those people. In fact, the first time I had to use styles, I couldn’t quite see the point. Now I cannot imagine creating e-books, or even writing blog posts, without using styles.

The styles feature allows you to format paragraphs of text. (Note that these may be single lines, which is commonly the case with headers.) You can also format individual words or characters within your text using bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough formatting — this is separate from the paragraph styles feature.

Before you convert your document into a PDF, MOBI, or EPUB file, be sure that every paragraph is formatted as Normal text. You aren’t deleting italic or bold formatting, but you are changing entire paragraphs to ensure that each one is formatted in the same consistent way, by removing any unusual fonts or line spacing. (For example, if some sections of your manuscript are double-spaced or in a different font, applying the Normal style will turn them all back to the default text.) To set everything to Normal, open ...