Word 2000 in a Nutshell

Creating Styles

One of the most important aspects of creating any template is controlling the formatting of the text in the documents created from that template. No other Word feature is more useful for creating consistent, easy-to-apply formatting than styles.

Styles are really just collections of formats that have been given a name and can be applied all at once. There are two types of styles in Word:

Paragraph styles

These contain formatting that is applied to an entire paragraph. Paragraph styles can include paragraph formatting (such as tabs, line spacing, and indenting), character formatting (such as font, size, and color), and formatting that applies to either characters or paragraphs (such as borders or languages).

Character styles

These contain formatting that is applied only to selected characters within a paragraph. Characters within a paragraph can have their own style even if a paragraph style is applied to the paragraph as a whole. Character styles can only include character formatting.

Character styles overlay paragraph styles. For example, if a paragraph style uses a bold font, all of the text typed in a paragraph using that style is boldfaced. If a character style that uses normal text is applied to any text in that paragraph, the text turns out normal. Remove the character style (or any manual formatting) and the text reverts to that defined by the paragraph style. You can do this by applying the “Default Paragraph Font” character style, which reverts any selected ...