Document formatting. Microsoft Word

IN previous versions Microsoft Word(until 2003 inclusive) styles were given little space and you may not even have heard of them. In Word 2007 and 2010, styles are placed on the main tab, and it is impossible not to notice them (see Fig. 1). Why are they so remarkable, and how to work with them? This will be discussed in this article.

Figure 1 - Styles on the main tab

Imagine that you are working on a fairly voluminous material of ten or more pages. You designed the text and showed it to the customer (boss, supervisor, teacher), but he was dissatisfied with the chosen font, color scheme and considered the line spacing to be too narrow. Scroll through the entire document and manually change the design? A very unpleasant procedure.

But if you use styles for decoration, you won't have to do such tedious work. It is enough to change several parameters of one header so that they all change in accordance with the new requirements.

Styles are easy to style a large number the same type of documents. You can use them in an organization to create a "corporate standard". In addition, with the help of styles, the structure of the document is set, making it easier to navigate and build a table of contents.

Let's take a look at working with Word 2010 styles using the example of a document with the text of the law "On legal protection programs."

1. Without any decoration;
2. Marked up with standard styles;
3. Marked up with custom styles;

To get started, we need the first document. The rest will be required to demonstrate the results in the course of the story.

Markup with standard styles

To begin with, we will deal with the use of standard sets of styles. Everything is quite simple here. You select a piece of text and click on the button of the corresponding style. You can see the entire set (see Fig. 2) by clicking on the button Extra options(see fig. 1)

Figure 2 - The whole set of styles

As you can see, there are several levels of headings, quotes, paragraphs, names of various objects, and so on. Style Usual used for default text. It does not need to be specifically assigned, but you can apply it to text to remove the specified appearance. Alternative return to usual style - keyboard shortcut . So you can quickly clear the entire document from the elements of structure and design. Clicking , you will return the standard set of styles to the document by removing the manually added formatting.

When marking up titles and headings, do not pay attention to appearance text fragments. They may look bulky, but we'll work on that later.

It would be quite logical to define chapters in the text as headings of the first level, and articles - the second. Some paragraphs can be styled as a bulleted list, and terms can be styled. Strict or just bold.

After laying out the structure, the document already looks much better than solid text, but you could achieve the same effect by setting specific design options. It would just take more time.

Open the second document from the attached archive to see the result I got.

Now you can see how easy it is to completely change the appearance of a document by changing only a set of styles (see Figure 3). Changes are displayed as soon as you hover over a new menu item.

Figure 3 - Selecting a new style set

Similarly, you can change colors, fonts, and paragraph spacing for the current style set.

Create your own style set

If you are not satisfied with any of the standard sets, you can create your own. It's not at all difficult to do this.

Click the style window open button (marked in Figure 1) to access the settings (see Figure 4). In the style window, you can choose between displaying titles and titles with typography by checking and unchecking Preview.

Figure 4 - Style window. On the left - only the names, on the right - the names with design

Let's change the style Name, let's make it less cumbersome. This can be achieved in two main ways.

Method 1. Format the snippet with the title according to your preferences using the font and paragraph settings of the tab home, then in the style menu Name(See Fig. 5) select item Update Title according to selection. The style will be updated and any other titles, if any, in your document will also change their appearance.

Method 2. Hover over the line with the name of the style and click the drop-down button that appears on the right. Select an item from the menu Change(See Fig. 5). Please note that if you click on the line itself, then the corresponding style will be applied to the selected fragment, or to future text from the current cursor position, if the fragment is not selected, we need a menu button.

Figure 5 - Style menu

A window will open (see Figure 6) where you can select a style from another set, or customize many settings yourself, such as changing the font size or text color. Pay attention to the list Next paragraph style. If you specify the same style as you are setting now, then the new paragraph (after pressing the ) will be formatted in the same way. When setting headers, it's better to specify here Usual, because in the vast majority of cases, after the headline, it is just plain text. But, for example, for the first level heading, you can also specify a subheading here. Be guided by your preferences and the structure of the document you are working on.

Figure 6 - Change style window

You may find this or that style unnecessary. You can remove it from the menu (see fig. 5), but it is not always necessary to refuse it completely. Uncheck the item Add to Quick Style List to remove the extra button from the tab home, saving only frequently used styles. You can access the rest by opening a floating window.

By checking the box Update automatically, you will change the style and therefore the appearance of all text fragments using it every time you apply new setting to the text (automatic analogue of the first method).

In general, there are not as many settings on the change window as you can find on Home tab. To access the rest, click the button Format and select the parameter group you need from the list (see Fig. 7).

Figure 7 - Style formatting settings

For example, clicking on the item Border, you will call the standard window Borders and shading(see fig. 8). Here you can add an underline to the left and bottom of the title.

Figure 8 - Adding Border Lines to the Header

Instead of changing existing styles, you can create your own. Click the button Create Style in the window Styles(see Fig. 4) and perform all the same manipulations that you did when editing. There are only two main differences here:

1. You need to set the name of the style (however, you could rename the existing one, but here it is more important, because by name Style1, Style2 etc. navigation will be impossible). Use a "speaking" name. For example, when developing a set of corporate document styles, you can use the names Requisites, Contract number/date, Notes etc. Then it will immediately be clear for which element the style was developed.
2. You need to specify the type in the dropdown list Style. There are five blanks:
   • Paragraph. Only affects individual paragraphs. If individual words marked with other styles, they will be saved when applying a new one;
   • Sign. These settings will only affect the text, not the paragraph style. Naturally, alignment, numbering and other "unnecessary" parameters will not be available to you;
   • Related (paragraph and mark). Specifies the appearance of both the paragraph and the text. Ideal for headings;
   • table. Affects only the appearance of tables;
   • List. Specifies the style for bulleted and numbered lists.

Figure 9 - Creating a new style

Please note that when using the new styles, you can quickly change the color scheme of the document. However, for this you should only use theme colors(see fig. 10) .

Figure 10 - Selecting a text color

If you choose other colors, they will not change when you select a new color theme.

But now you have created your set. What to do with him next? After all, I want to use it in other documents, as well as transfer it, for example, to colleagues for use in documents similar in type. In Word 2010, there are several options for further use of styles.

First, you can take a copy of the styled document, remove all text from it, and paste (or fit in) the new content. It is best to remove all content from the file before saving it as a template. Styles will remain even in a "blank" document. Don't forget to attribute the file Only for reading so that no one overwrites it by mistake.

Figure 11 - Saving a set of styles

A dialog box will open to save the file in the format word template(*.dotx). To use it, copy the text into an empty template document and save it under a new name or over a file with a document without formatting.

Using Document Structure

As I said above, styles can be used to define the structure of a document. Let's see what it's for.

The most obvious use is to create a table of contents. It is usually placed at the beginning or end of the book, but for electronic document the most relevant option is to place it at the beginning, especially if you are writing text divided into a small number of sections. It should be noted that the table of contents of the electronic document allows for quick navigation. It is enough to click on the list line with the mouse while holding down the key to jump to the corresponding section.

To insert a table of contents, open the tab Links and select the option with automatic assembly (see Fig. 12).

Figure 12 - Inserting a table of contents

An example format is already displayed in the selection list - your document styles are also used here. But I could not find any differences between the first template and the second one. If you are not satisfied with this format, you can go to the menu Table of contents even further and customize it according to your needs. We will not dwell on this possibility in too much detail, so as not to deviate from the main topic of the article.

You can find an example of a document with changed styles and a table of contents in the attached archive.

Structure Mode

You can view and edit the document in outline view. To do this, go to the tab View and select mode Structure, or click the corresponding button in the lower right corner of the window (see Fig. 13).

Figure 13 - Document view modes

Figure 14 - Structure view

But in structure mode, reading the text is not very convenient. Often the markup mode is used for reading - the same as when creating a document. You can turn on navigation area by checking the appropriate box on the tab View. The program will display the table of contents of the document in the left part of the window. You can navigate between sections by clicking on the headings. Headings are also grouped and can be collapsed (see fig. 15) just like in structure mode.

Figure 15 - Navigation area

The topmost navigation bar (above the first chapter in our example) takes you to the beginning of the document.

Also pay attention to the search bar. When you enter a word in this field, Word 2010 highlights not only fragments in the document itself, but also parts of the table of contents (see Figure 16). Thus, you can only search within the section you need.

Figure 16 - Search by structure

To quickly switch between sections, click on the circle in the lower right corner of the window. In the pop-up list, select Titles(see fig. 17). Now, by pressing the up and down buttons next to the circle, you can move between the headings. You can also use the keyboard: keyboard shortcut And will also send you to the previous and next heading.

Figure 17 - Quick Jump Buttons

But enough navigation, there is one more small area of ​​application of styles.

Saving a web document

Saving the document as html pages, you get a set of structure tags (h1, h2, etc.) instead of paragraph tags (p), which will have a good effect on the search engines' relationship to the site. In addition, it is possible to easily apply styles (CSS) of the site to such elements.

Conclusion

When you use styles, you greatly increase the efficiency of your work. They not only allow you to quickly change the appearance of documents, but also determine the structure used when reading, searching, and creating a table of contents. Not without reason in Word 2010 styles are given such a prominent place in the interface.

A well-designed template with styles will help increase the efficiency of work and your colleagues, as well as bring many documents of the same type to a single design standard.

It's no secret that professionalism is the ability to easily do what others think is impossible.

One of the steps to professional use text editor MS Word is mastering the correct styling of documents created with this software product.

A common method among users is when the entire document is formed using one style (“Normal” or “Document Body Text”). Further formatting is done by selecting certain element text and changing its display (for example, font type - Arial, style - italic, size - 10 pt., alignment - in width). This method is called manual formatting.

Fig.1 This way of working with a document is simple and clear - there are explicit tools on the toolbar that you can use.

This method is suitable for formatting small documents, but when it comes to large documents (such as thesis or a dissertation, contract or legal act), then this method of formatting the text will be of little use - it will require a lot of both manual labor and time.

One of the solutions for formatting large documents seems to be the use of styles for various blocks of the document.

A style is a set of formatting options that is applied to text, tables, and lists to quickly change their appearance. Styles allow you to apply an entire group of formatting attributes at once, including defining the outline level for a paragraph, in one action.

MS Word defines the types of styles that you can create and apply.

paragraph style fully defines the appearance of a paragraph, i.e. text alignment, tab stops, line spacing and borders, and may also include character formatting.

sign style sets the formatting of the selected text fragment within a paragraph, defining text parameters such as font and size, as well as bold and italic style.

table style defines the type of borders, fill, text alignment and fonts.

list style applies the same alignment, numerals or bullets, and fonts to all lists.

Applying Styles in MS Word

It should be noted right away that the algorithm for applying styles in different versions of MS Word is not the same. This is due, first of all, to the change in the interface of the program starting from MS Word XP - a new element "Task area" has been added, which makes it possible to present the contents of the clipboard, text formatting and much more in a more convenient form.

Common to various versions MS Word (from the sixth to the eleventh) way of setting styles can be considered the assignment of a style by selecting it in the "Style:" combo box of the "Formatting" menu bar (see). In this case, the selected style will be applied to the current paragraph or selected text fragments.

Applying Styles in Word XP

Applying Styles in Word 9x - 2000

Fig.2

As you can see, everything is simple to the point of banality ...

It should be borne in mind that with any formatting option, one should take into account what type the required style belongs to. So, for example, paragraph styles will change the styles of all characters within a paragraph, while character styles will only affect characters within the limits delimited by spaces (words)

Styles and Formatting in the Task Pane

Fig.3 Using the "Styles and Formatting" section in the Task Pane, in addition to a convenient presentation of the document's styling, also allows you to quickly change any of the existing styles and create new ones.

Through the "Select All" element, it is possible to select all text fragments that have the same style as the current fragment. Which is convenient, if necessary, to change for the text its affiliation from one style to another.

Creating Styles

Activating the "Create style" element displays the style creation window.

Creating a style is not difficult at all.

Fig.4 In the Name field, a unique name for the created style is specified. It should be borne in mind that you cannot use the names of already existing styles for the style being created. On such actions, the program will report an error.

Defining style text properties: typeface, font style, justification, and paragraph leading is almost the same as standard text formatting. There are both icons for setting parameters, and a menu for "advanced" formatting.

Note on style-specific properties:

In the "Style" field, the type of style being created is set - paragraph, character or table

In the "Based on style" field - the parent style for the created style is set.

Changing the properties of the parent style will cause the generated style to have the corresponding changes for properties that were not changed when it was created.

For example, if when creating the Style1 style based on the Regular style, the font size was changed (from 12 pt. to 16 pt.), And the typeface was left the same, then when changing the typeface in the Regular style (for example, from Times New Roman to Arial ) in the style "Style1" the font will also change (to Arial ), and the font size will remain the same (16 pt.)

In the "Style of the next paragraph" field - sets the style of the paragraph following the paragraph to which the created style has been applied. By default, the style of the next paragraph determines the style that is created.

The "Add to template" flag determines whether the created style will be included in the Normal .dot template (the default document template), and then it will be possible to use the created style in all other created documents in the future. If this flag is not activated, then the created style will be applied only in the current document.

The flag "Update automatically" determines automatic change style when applied to text with this manual formatting style. If the element is activated, then in the future, if you change the formatting of any part of the text to which the created style was applied, similar changes will be made for all text with this style throughout the document.

For example, if you select a piece of text with the style "Style1" and change its font style from Arial to Courier New, all text fragments with the style "Style1" in the document will be changed from Arial to Courier New .

Create styles in more early versions MS Word, rather than MS Word XP, differs from the actions described above only in that instead of the "Styles and Formatting" panel there will be a "Style" window

Outline Level Styles

MS Word has 10 levels of text blocks.

These are levels of hierarchy (from 1 to 9) and plain text level. Each of these levels has a corresponding text style.

There are 9 heading levels. Where the highest levels is level 1 and the lowest is level 9.

Headings act in MS Word as a means of creating hierarchical structure document.

One or another level can be applied to a piece of text in several ways:

Applying a style of a certain level to the text;

Level indication in outline mode;

Manually specifying the level for the current paragraph.

The level of styles created is determined by the level of the parent style. Also, the level can be changed in the "Level" field in the paragraph formatting window (Format > Paragraph > Indents and Spacing).

The practical significance of level styles can be illustrated by the example of creating a table of contents (Insert > Link > Tables of Contents and Indexes), which cannot be created without specifying the hierarchical structure of the document.

What are styles in Word?

Word Style- This is a set of formatting options that is saved under its own name and allows you to significantly simplify and speed up the formatting process. With one action - by assigning a style to the selected text - you can immediately change a whole group of formatting options. Let's say you want all the headings in a document to look the same. To do this, you set the heading style options beforehand, and then assign a style to each heading. If you did this without using styles, it would take much more steps: set the typeface, its size, style; determine the paragraph indent, the intervals before and after the heading, etc. Multiply all this by the total number of headings in the document - and the main time in preparing the document will be spent only on formatting operations.

Styles are also convenient in that when you change the style settings, all text on which this style is applied will be reformatted in accordance with the new settings. And vice versa, you can set such a mode when changing the text format automatically overrides the corresponding style.

When starting a new document, the Normal.dot template is used by default. Typing in this template is done in the Normal style. Based on this style, other template styles are formed - you can view them in the Style field on the Formatting toolbar (see illustration).

Word 2000/2003/2007 has the concept sign style and paragraph style:

• The character style sets the formatting options for text placed inside a paragraph. Such parameters can be any of those listed in the Font dialog: font, size, style, etc. The character style in the list of styles (Fig.4.18) is marked with a bold underlined letter a, located to the right of the style name.
• Paragraph style defines formatting options that apply to the paragraph as a whole, i.e. text alignment, tab stops, line spacing and borders - all that is in the Paragraph dialog. A paragraph style also includes character formatting, that is, a character style is a combination of character style and paragraph formatting. As a rule, most of the positions in the style list correspond to paragraph styles - they are marked with a ¶ to the right of the style name.

If a paragraph is assigned a certain style, then this does not mean that the characters within the paragraph and even fragments of text cannot be formatted in their own way. A piece of text in a paragraph can be styled with its own style, regardless of whether any paragraph style is applied to that paragraph as a whole.

Applying a Style to a Word Document

Until you create your own styles, you can use the styles provided in the template. To do this, follow these steps:

• If you want to apply paragraph style, you need to click on a paragraph or select the entire paragraphs that you are going to change (the first or last paragraphs may not be completely selected). If you need to apply a character style, select the word or piece of text that will be changed.
• Open the Style list (see illustration) by clicking the button of the same name on the Formatting toolbar. Then choose desired style mouse click. The selected text will be changed immediately.

Note that in Word style list the style name is displayed in the font of the same size as in the document (if this size is in the range from 8 to 16 pt). In the gray square to the right of the style name, the type of alignment is displayed with an icon (as on the corresponding buttons on the Formatting toolbar). In the same square, you can see the font size in points, as well as the ¶ or a icon, which indicates which object this style refers to: a paragraph or a character, respectively.

If your toolbar doesn't have a drop-down Style, bring it to the panel. However, you can select a style without using the specified list. Select the command Format - Style from the menu and then in the dialog that opens (see illustration) click on the name of the desired style. Close the window by clicking the Apply button.

If you often use styles when preparing documents, display the Style drop-down list and the Style button on the toolbar. To do this, open the Tools - Settings dialog, go to the Commands tab and drag the necessary icons to the toolbar. When you click on the Style button, a style definition dialog will be called up, which will allow you to make the necessary changes to styles while working on documents.

You can very easily copy all the formatting attributes from one piece of text or paragraph to another piece or paragraph:

• First, select the original fragment or paragraph. To select a paragraph, just click on it with the mouse.
• Click the Format Painter icon on the Formatting toolbar. The mouse pointer will take the form of a brush.
• Select the object to be modified and click on it with the left mouse button. You don't have to select a paragraph - just click on it with the mouse.

To apply selected formatting to multiple fragments, double-click on the icon. Then you can apply formatting to each of the fragments by selecting it and clicking on it with the mouse. When copying is complete, press the Esc key or click the Format Painter icon again. The described actions also copy the style.

Change the style in a Word document

It has already been mentioned above that the main advantage of using styles is the uniform change in the appearance of the text. Let's say your level 3 headings (Heading 3) use 13 pt Arial and you want to set them to 14 pt Pragmatica. To do this, you do not need to reformat each heading - just change the style properties of Heading 3. In order to change the style, you need to do the following:

• Enter the Format menu and select the Style command, or click the Style button on the toolbar (if available).
• In the dialog that opens, in the Styles list, click the name of the style you want to change and click the Edit button.
• In the new Change Style dialog (see the illustration below), click the Format button and select the attribute, such as Font or Paragraph, that will be changed from the drop-down menu.
• A separate dialog will be opened to change the attribute (for example, to change the font - dialog - Font. After changing the parameters of one attribute, close the corresponding dialog by clicking OK and go to the next attribute from the drop-down menu (for example, Tab or Border).

If you think that the modified style should be included in the template, select the Add to Template check box in the Modify Style window. The changes will affect the template on which the current document is based.

Contributing Word style changes, you need to take into account that there is subordination between styles. For example, in the Normal.dot template, the heading styles are based on the Normal style. Therefore, when you change the Normal style, the heading styles will also change accordingly. Such changes will automatically be made to styles whenever the style they are based on changes.

Another possibility style changes provided for in word processor, - this automatic update style. This update is performed when the Update Automatically check box is selected. The processor in this case keeps track of changes in the format of the text to which this style is assigned. If you change something in the formatting options, for example, using the toolbar or the Format menu, then these changes are made to the corresponding style. This simplifies the procedure for making changes to the style, since you do not need to make troublesome settings using the Edit Style window.

If you want to undo changes made to a particular style, do not use the Undo command or the Alt + Backspace key for this - this will lead to a processor freeze. Changes must be canceled using the Style dialog.

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To format a document, you can use styles, which allow you to quickly and easily apply a set of formatting options to an entire document. If you don't want formatting options to be available from the built-in styles and themes available in Word, you can edit existing styles, create new styles, and save those changes to your document and template. You can also add styles to the Quick Styles list for easy access.

Applying a style set

Select a location or text in your document, and then do one of the following:

On the tab home in a group styles select the desired style.

To apply a custom style or a Quick Style set, on the home in a group styles press the button styles area, and then select the desired style from the list Apply Style .

Changing an existing style

Adding a New Custom Style

You can create a new style and add it to the Quick Styles list.

Deleting a Custom Style

You can remove a custom item from the Quick Styles gallery if you no longer need it.

On the tab home in a group styles press the Control key and click right click click the style you want to delete, and then click remove from quick style collection.

see also

Applying a style

With the help of a style in Word, you can easily and quickly format text. There are paragraph, character, table, and list styles.

Style change

By changing a style, you can easily change the formatting of all text in the document to which it is applied. For example, if the "Heading 1" style is applied to chapter headings in a document, it is enough to change its definition to correct the format of all such headings.

Style creation

To create a style, you can adjust all of its settings manually, or you can save time by using an existing style as a base.

Deleting a Style

You can delete any style you've created in Word, but you can't delete all of the built-in styles included with Word. When you delete a style, Word applies the "normal" style to all paragraphs that were formatted with the deleted style and removes the style definition you deleted from the styles list.

Working with Quick Styles

By customizing the styles of paragraphs, headings, and other elements of your document, you can quickly apply a consistent set of Quick Styles. Quick Style Sets (such as Exquisite) are combinations of styles designed to create attractive and professional-looking documents. For example, such a set might contain styles for multiple levels of headings, body text, quotes, and titles. Although the Quick Style Set will most likely already contain all necessary components, you can add a new style to it or change existing ones. After you add or edit styles, you can save them as a custom Quick Style set with a new name.

FROM using CSS you can create bulleted and numbered lists, and use a suitable image as a marker.

In table. 1 lists the properties of elements intended for creating and modifying lists.

Because the tag