Cybrarian.com™ View Reports Customization

Styles easily apply a set of formatting choices consistently throughout your document.

A style is a set of formatting characteristics, such as font name, size, color, paragraph alignment and spacing. Some styles even include borders and shading.

• Character and paragraph styles determine the look of most of the text in a document.
• Table styles determine the look of tables, including characteristics such as the text formatting of the header row, gridlines, and accent colors for rows and columns.

Style Basics in Microsoft® Office Word

Microsoft Office Word makes it easy to benefit from styles without having to know much about them. However, you may want to know how styles work behind the scenes.

For example, instead of taking three separate steps to format your heading as 16-point, bold, Cambria, you can achieve the same result in one step by applying the built-in Heading1 style.

If you later decide that you want headings to have a different look, you can change the Heading1 and Heading2 styles, and Word automatically updates all instances of them in the document.

You can also apply a different style to change the look of the headings without making changes to the Word styles.

Character styles

Character styles contain formatting characteristics that can be applied to text, such as font name, size, color, bold, italic, underline, borders, and shading.

Character styles do not include formatting that affects paragraph characteristics, such as line spacing, text alignment, indentation, and tab stops.

Word includes several built-in character styles, such as Emphasis, Subtle Emphasis, and Intense Emphasis. Each of these built-in styles combines formatting, such as bold, italic, and accent color, to provide a coordinated set of typographic designs. For example, applying the Emphasis character style formats text as bold, italic, in an accent color.

To apply a character style, you select the text that you want to format, and then you click the character style that you want.

The text that you selected is formatted with the characteristics of the style that you chose.

Paragraph styles

A paragraph style includes everything that a character style contains, but it also controls all aspects of a paragraph's appearance, such as text alignment, tab stops, line spacing, and borders.

For example, you can have a character style called Alert that formats text as bold and red. Additionally, you can have a paragraph style called Headline that formats text as bold and red. But the Headline paragraph style also centers the text horizontally and adds 24 points of space above the text.

In this scenario, if you select a paragraph and then apply the Alert style, all the text in the paragraph is formatted as bold and red, but nothing else about the paragraph changes. However, if you select the paragraph and then apply the Headline style, the text become bold and red, extra space is inserted before the paragraph, and the paragraph is centered between the left and right margins.

Word includes a built-in paragraph style: Normal Paragraph. By default, Word automatically applies the Normal paragraph style to all text in a blank, new document.

To apply a paragraph style, you select the paragraphs that you want to format, and then you click the paragraph style you want.

To select a single paragraph for applying a paragraph style, you can click anywhere in the paragraph. To select more than one paragraph, click anywhere in the first paragraph and drag to anywhere in the last paragraph that you want to select. You do not need to select the entire paragraph.

Table Styles

A table style provides a consistent look to borders, shading, alignment and fonts in tables.

To apply a table style, you select the table that you want to format, and then you click a table style from the gallery of table styles on the Design tab, on the Table Tools contextual tab. Within a table cell, you can use styles and direct formatting to format the content of the cell. Formatting that you apply this way overrides the formatting that comes from the table style.

You can apply formatting to the content of a table, such as changing the header row to blue.

When you switch to a different table style, the header row remains blue.

You can change the selection of table styles in the gallery by selecting or clearing check boxes in the Table Style Options section on the Design tab, before you open the gallery of table styles. For example, if your table has no header row, and you don't want rows to alternate shading, clear the Header Row and Banded Rows check boxes. When you open the gallery of table styles, you see previews that do not include formatting for header rows or banded rows.

If you want formatting choices that are not available from the built-in styles, you can create custom styles to suit your needs.

The easiest way to create a custom style is to modify a built-in style and then save it as a new style.

For example, you might want to format a table of numbers with a Arial, 9 point blue with a white background.

Font Properties

Text Properties

Background Properties

Colors

Additional Style Properties

Border and Outline Properties

Padding Properties

Margin Properties

Links

Print Properties

Learn more about Styles: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/css/overview/css_overviews_entry.asp