Laying the Ground Work for Changing Styles

As a reminder, when you want to change the way text looks (a paragraph), you simply click in the paragraph, display the style list, and pick a style. The look of the text changes.

As a reminder, all of the information about a paragraph style resides in the paragraph mark that is hidden at the end of the paragraph.

As a reminder, you click the Show/Hide paragraph button to show/hide the hidden paragraph marks.

As a reminder, you use styles to produce a consistent, professional looking document. In addition, if you need to make changes (for example you need to change the font), you change the style and Word updates every instance where the style is applied.

As a reminder, I’ve covered many of the styles in the All list. Please feel free to post questions if you need any additional info on a particular style or a style I haven’t talked about.

As a reminder, the skills that you learn in Word are transferable to other Microsoft programs. For example, Excel and PowerPoint use styles. So learning to use them in Word means you know how to use them in other programs.

Altering Styles

All of the buttons and menu selections you see on menus or ribbons are just small pieces from the Modify Style dialog. Knowing that piece of information is important, because there are times when you are going to want to use the buttons and individual menu/ribbon selections to make changes. There are other times when you will want to change the style. Here’s a rough guide to picking a method when making changes. The following assumes you have a document with styles applied to the text.

• If you want to change a style, you display the Style or Styles and Formatting pane, and then right click the style you want to change.  A pop-up appears; pick Modify. The Modify Style dialog appears. The basic font information appears on the dialog.
• If you want to change one instance of a style (a paragraph), you pick from the menu or ribbon. For example, if you want to change the space before and after a paragraph to nudge something onto a page, you would display the Paragraph dialog to make the change.

None of this is going to make immediate sense. I keep feeling like I should do a You-Tube to show it. However, I think if you bear with me, I do this is small enough doses that you’ll understand what it going on with styles.