Aims of the lesson
- Understand the importance of using styles when creating documents
- By able to apply styles to text
- Know how to modify the style e.g. changing the font, text size, colour, spacing
- Automatically create a contents page
- Save your new style for future use
What are styles?
- Styles are where a set of formatting options are automatically applied to text which you select.
- It enables you to set the font, text size, spacing, colour and other formatting elements for different text elements within a document.
- This is typically used to style the ‘Normal’ text (paragraph text) and any titles and headings quickly and consistently
Why are they important?
- They can help you to save time when creating and editing your document, quickly applying formatting to the text.
- Provides consistency of formatting throughout you document or across documents if you save it as a new style set.
- Help to navigate around and reorganize a document using the navigation pane
- Create an automatic contents page, rather than manually updating the headings and page numbers
- Using styles can make a document more accessible helping people using assistive technology to understand the layout of a document.
How do I use them?
- Watch the first three videos from Microsoft to learn about using styles in you documents. Please note: although this video is for Word 2013 the style settings are similar across versions of Word.
- Take a look at the following guide and scroll down to the section on ‘How to save a custom style’
- Watch this video about automatically creating a contents page using styles in Word.
- Take a look at the following guide which explains how to use the navigation pane to get around a document without scrolling
Accessibility
- Not all styles built into Word use an accessible font, text size and layout.
- Try and ensure the style you use has the following as a minimum
- Sans serif fonts (without the flared extensions) like Arial or Verdana
- Text size of 12 and larger for headings
- Text is aligned to the left, unless it is identified clearly as a heading
- Spacing provides sufficient gaps between text to make it easier to read
- Try running the accessibility checker to pick on any further issues
Conclusion
- Using styles can make formatting documents quicker and easier. Not only do they help you to be consistent they can also assist you in creating a contents page and navigating through long documents.
- They also help others who view your documents. Helping them to quickly navigate to the relevant parts and distinguish between different headings.
Further Help
- Free online course for help with Microsoft Word 2016 (other versions of Word can also be found here.