Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Using Styles and Templates to Manage Formats

Word's formatting behavior can be confusing, even to expert users. To understand formatting, it's important that you grasp several key concepts.

Word allows you to apply multiple formatting settings at one time by using styles. You gather the settings together and give them a name. Then when you want to use all the formatting at once, you apply the style. For example, you could tell Word that you want the ProductName style to consist of centered paragraphs, with Arial 18-point, italic blue characters. Then, every time you apply the style ProductName to a paragraph, Word formats it as centered, Arial 18 point, italic blue.

Think of styles as an easy and fast way to organize the format settings you see ...