Tip of the Week: Word Process with Style Sheets

When many people turn on  their word processor they format text by enlarging fonts, using bold, and add white space by adding spaces. Whilst this is effective to a point it is a way of word processing that can actually make your life much harder than it needs to be. It makes features such as table of contents almost impossible to use and makes updating future versions of the document much harder than it should be.

• Image you have 50 page document and some one says that all the subheadings have to be changed to a different font
• Or your contents and index are written and suddenly you have to add another 10 pages to middle of your piece.

Using a style sheet would turn these arduous tasks into relatively quick and easy jobs.

Here’s how.

The stylesheet defines what aspects of your document such as  headings, paragraph text will look like. By applying these you regulate the look and feel of your document. The first advantage you gain is easy consistency – no more having to remember if that heading should by 16 or 14 point – the styles will set that for you. Life becomes easier and we all like that. Now for a clever bit – change the style and every piece of text in the document formatted with that style instantly and immediately changes to reflect the change. Remember the example of changing the subheadings. If you do it by hand, then you have to find all the subheadings and change them by one by one. Use a style sheet, and all you do is update the style and it is job done; time to sit back and relax.

What about my table of contents example? Well most table of contents are generated using styles. You tell the table of contents generator to place certain style types in the table of contents add note the page numbers. The upshot – if you use styles tables of contents are instantly genenrated and can be also be instantly updated when you change the documents.

The point to take from this tip is that if you take the time to learn how to use style sheets then you can save a lot of time when you work with documents.

Of course I’m not going to just leave you with ideas. Here are some useful tutorial links to help you learn more about this subject.

• Formatting a document with styles tutorial
• Customising a table of contents (part 1)
• Customising a table of contents (part 2)
• Customising a table of contents (part 3)

The tutorials all come Micrsofts excellent and free Office Training resource which can be found at:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/support/training-FX010056500.aspx