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There are several advantages of using Word’s built-in text styles. When you create a new document, however, the Styles task pane and Quick Styles gallery display a limited number of the built-in styles. And some of the text styles shown by default aren’t altogether useful. So which of Word’s built-in text styles are the best to use? Read on to find out more.
Advantages of using Word’s built-in styles
There are three key advantages of using Word’s built-in styles, as detailed below …
1. Start from a solid base
Word’s built-in text styles give you a solid base to work from.
That’s because they’re formatted with the correct settings for their intended purpose. So the groundwork is already done for you. All you need to do is modify the ‘look’ of the style to suit your needs. This makes life a lot easier, particularly if you’re not an experienced Word user.
2. Create an automatic table of contents
Word offers nine built-in heading styles, Headings 1-9. These enable you to easily insert an automatic table of contents. And update it with the click of a button whenever the contents of your document changes.
3. Make use of the Navigation pane
The Navigation pane works in a similar fashion to a table of contents. That is, it shows all headings in your document. So you can use it to jump to a specific section in a document. This is a great time-saver, especially if you work with long documents.
What are the best Word built-in text styles to use?
There’s a range of built-in text styles to choose from which will be adequate for most users. In fact, the only time you should create your own style is if Word doesn’t have the specific style you need. For example, a style for appendix headings to differentiate them from other headings in a document.
I recommend using the following Word built-in styles. Some of these are shown by default when you create a new document. For others, show these by following the process outlined here.
Built-in heading styles
As mentioned, it’s particularly important to use Word’s built-in heading styles. Because they enable you to insert an automatic table of contents, and/or make use of the Navigation pane.
While there are nine built-in heading styles, you’ll likely only use the first three or four.
Where your document contains a title (and subtitle), be sure to use the relevant built-in styles for these. That is, don’t use a heading style. Otherwise, you’ll find the document title and/or subtitle appear in the table of contents!
Styles to format body text
Word displays the Normal style in the Styles task pane and Quick Styles gallery by default. The Normal style is also applied to paragraphs that follow Word’s built-in heading styles (Heading 1-9). That is, when you format a heading using a Heading 1-9 style, and then press the Enter key to insert a paragraph below the heading.
The above would suggest that the Normal style is the best option to use to format body text in your document. But this isn’t the case.
The main reason for this is because the majority of built-in text styles are based on the Normal style. So if you modify the Normal style, those changes have the potential to affect any of the styles that are based on it. This in turn creates more work for you given you may then need to revert the formatting of the affected styles.
Given the above, I recommend using one of the ‘body text’ styles (instead of the Normal style) to format body text. There are several to choose from including Body Text, Body Text 2, and Body Text Indent.
Other default styles in Word
Word has a number of styles that essentially work in the background. That is, they’re applied by default. So you don’t need to take any steps in applying them yourself.
These default styles include:
- Header and Footer – headers and footers (unless other styles have been applied) use built-in styles to format text. The Header and Footer styles are independent from one another. So you can modify the Header style without affecting the Footer style, and vice versa;
- Hyperlink and FollowedHyperlink – these styles are used for links such as websites and email addresses. Again, the styles are independent so you can change one without affecting the other;
- Caption – the Caption style is used when you insert a caption for an image, table, etc.
Remember: if required, you can modify styles to change the way they look.
