Special Edition Using® Microsoft® Office Word 2003

What Styles Are and How They Work

In Word, a style is a series of formats that can be applied all at once to one or more paragraphs, or one or more characters. Rather than applying formats one at a time by clicking toolbar buttons or using keyboard shortcuts or dialog boxes, you choose a style and Word automatically applies all the formatting for you. If you want or need to change the appearance of your entire document, all you have to do is change the styles. Styles can be named, making it easy to choose the right formatting for headings and other document elements and keep that formatting consistent.

→ For more information about keeping styles consistent using Word's Format Checker and related features, see Chapter 4, “Quick and Effective ...