Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
When I mention Word styles, you might assume I’m only talking about text styles. That is, styles that you apply to headings and body text in your document. But in fact, there are more types of Microsoft Word styles than just text styles. Word also includes styles for numbered and bulleted lists (or multilevel lists), and table styles.
What do styles do?
Every type of Word style has the same function as heading and body text styles. And that is they hold a set of instructions that tell Word how to format the element you’re working with. These instructions include settings for font size and colour, line and paragraph spacing, and so on. Table styles hold extra formatting for shading, border line weights and colours, etc.
What are the benefits of using Word styles?
Because styles hold ALL the formatting you need, they speed up the process of formatting Word documents. And that’s why they’re invaluable, especially for long documents.
But the time saving benefits are not only to be had when you’re formatting documents. Styles become even more useful if you want to change the look of an element in your document. That’s because when you update the style, all text or elements that use the same style are also updated.
How styles work
So you can get a clear visual of what this all means, let’s look at table styles in a bit more detail.
Word has built-in table styles which you can apply to tables. Table styles become available once you’ve inserted a table in your document. You’ll see them on the Table Design contextual tab.
Here’s what my table looks like when I format it using Word’s Grid Table 4 – Accent 1 style.
The table looks good, but I prefer more spacing above and below paragraphs. So I modify the table style to change this setting, adding 5pt before and after paragraphs.
Now the paragraph spacing in the table looks like this.
And because I modified the table style, this change is then also applied to all tables in my document that have the Grid Table 4 – Accent 1 style applied. So the paragraph spacing in each of the tables in my document will continue to be uniform.
This universal change took me all of a few minutes to make. And although the example above focuses on table styles, a similar process applies when modifying any type of style in Word. So you can see why using styles is a must when you format your documents. And why you should only ever use direct formatting in very limited instances.
