Microsoft Word Styles Tutorials

So welcome to today's learning objectives webinar. This is brought to you by the Center for Practice Management at the North Carolina Bar Association, and my name is Catherine Sanders Reach. I am the director for the Center for Practice Management, and I have been helping lawyers with law practice management technology for about 20 years at different organizations. And today we're going to go over A basic overview of Microsoft Styles, and this is basically the backbone of everything that you can do with controlling the formatting in Microsoft Word. So what does it do? Kind of letting you control the formatting instead of individually formatting different lines of text, and you can change the formatting on identified headers, footers, things like that with a single click and update everything. It also lets you have a lot more control over moving content around your document. For instance, if you had a 15-page document and you wanted to move a particular paragraph to a different section of the document, you don't have to copy and paste. If you use styles, you can actually drag the whole segment based on the Basically gives you a navigation pane so you can do moving content around documents much more easily. You can also automatically generate a table of contents, which is incredibly useful, and some other things. So we are just going to go ahead and dive right into Word, and I'm going to show you what this all means. So I am using Word 2016, or it's really the, the Office 365 version of Word. If you installed Word, you probably have 2016 or 2019. However, if you have an older version of Word, styles has been around in Word since the dawn of the product. It wasn't always that easy to use. The reality now is that if you have at least the version of Word that has the ribbon, you have styles. You may have seen it, not known exactly what it was you're supposed to be doing with it, and that's what we're going to look at today. So I've just got a basic document up here, and right now it is nothing but text, plain text. And so if you weren't using styles and you were going to turn something into a different font or color, you would probably select the text and then you would go up here and you say, okay, I want this centered and I want it to be a different font and I might increase that font size. And for your title, that's not a big deal. But say I wanted to do this for each one of these headers. So I'd go in and I change the font type and I'd increase the font and so on and so forth and go through and do that throughout the whole document. Well, that takes way too long. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use styles, not so much because it's easy to do with an existing document, but once you learn how it works, works, and then you go start creating documents based on styles, it's a lot easier. But even if you have an existing document, the first thing you want to do if you are going to add styles to an existing document and it already has a lot of formatting that you've kind of added in the old-school way, just select all the text of the document, go up here into the Font group, and click Clear All Formatting. And what that does is it's going to remove any formatting that's been added to the document manually so that we can have kind of a clean slate. The next thing we're going to do is actually start applying styles. And so this is the Styles group right here, and you can see there's a bunch of pre-formatted styles. And if you click on this little down arrow, you can see these are not by any stretch of the imagination all the styles. They are the most popular styles used, and I'm going to show you how to make them your own and always have them available to you. So the first one, I'm gonna take this and I'm gonna say this is my title. So it automatically assigns it and you can see what the font is. It's Calibri Light, 28-point font. Say I wanted to make this bold and centered. So I can add bold and I can add centered. And then if I want to update this style to reflect my new reality and every time I use the title style, I want to have it look just like this, I can right-click. That's, I find that the easiest way. And then go to Styles. It shows you which style you're using. And then you right-click again and say Update Title to Match Selection. So basically I've made, you know, I've used the old school method to change into bold, increase the font, move it to, center justified, and then I'm going to click Update Title to Match Selection. So now if I scrub this all out and I applied my title, you can see that it changed that from what it was originally to what I want it to be. And so that's how you modify a style. So the next thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to select all the text that I want to be Heading 2. And if this were a really long document, you would want to have started with styles, but you know, if you need to go and add styles to something, this is the best way to do it. So I'm going to go through and I'm just selecting what I'm going to choose for Heading 2. Make sure I don't miss any. And then I'm going to select Heading 2. And so now everything that I've selected is Heading 2. One of the ways you can tell that it's a style is you get this little caret. And we'll look at those carets and the functionality a little bit more later. Now say that I want to— let me click out of that. Say I want this— I don't like the purple, so I'm going to change that to brilliant red, and I'm going to make this all uppercase so it stands out a little bit. And again, I'm going to right-click. I'm going to go into my styles. I'm going to right-click again, update the heading 2 to match the selection. And now heading 2, as you can see up here, is red all caps. Now the cool thing is that that should— whoops— it should make that work for everybody. And by the way, you can do this and then Heading 2. Well, I don't know why that didn't stick, but normally it does. And sometimes you just have to go back and try again. And that's typical. So the next thing is we're going to go select all these subheadings like that, and I'm going to say that this is Heading 3. Now you'll notice this is a numbered heading, and if I want to get rid of the numbered headings, I'm going to go in, modify it, and then here in Format I'm going to choose paragraph. You can see that you can control spacing before and after. And then I'm going to remove the numbering. And that removes the numbers. So you just go in and basically you can modify the cells to do whatever you want them to. And then it will apply to all of the different things. So it takes a second, especially if you have an existing document to go through and add styles. But this, what I'm going to show you next, is what happens once you've added all your styles or you start out with a document that's used styles. So this is a document that I have a whole lot of styles already put in. And one way you can identify that is, again, when you mouse over, you'll see this little caret. And you can actually close up all the information underneath if you want to be able to get through your document a little bit easier. The other thing is if I click on this, if you look up here, it highlights which style I'm using. But sometimes it's a little bit hard to see that, especially if you're using a whole lot of styles. So if you want to get a kind of style inspector, what you can do is there is a little caret here And if you click on it, then what it does is it pops up this little new style pane. And again, it's highlighted which one I'm using. If I want to do the style inspector, then I click on this, and it's just another way of seeing what's going on here. Again, I'm using Heading 2. I can click on this to reset it to normal. And it shows me that this is the default paragraph level. And then if you were a WordPerfect user and you were male, you kind of fondly remember reveal codes. This is where you can kind of get reveal codes. So I'm going to click on Reveal Formatting. And now I've got 3 different panes. I've got the Style Inspector that shows me what style I'm using here. All the styles that I have available here. So if I wanted to change this to Heading 3, as you can see, I changed Heading 3 with one click. So that makes it easy. And then the other thing is, for this particular style, I can see what the font is, what effects I have, small caps, and then if I wanted to change that style, I can do so here, and I'll show you that in a second. So Say I wanted to change the style here. I'm going to insert a footnote real quick. Now, say I wanted to make a change to all of the fonts for all of my footnotes. Footnote fonts and types are controlled by styles, but if I wanted to do this individually, I could go and click on the text in here, and I would go over into Home, and I can change it to, you know, a different font face. But if I wanted them all to change, then I have to do it through styles. So I've got my text selected here, and in Reveal Formatting, I'm going to go into Paragraph Style, I'm going to go into Modify, and you'll see the style for this is Footnote Text. If I wanted to change the style for all the footnote text, say I want to— well, just so we can see it, and I'm going to make it a pretty blue and click OK and click Apply, then every footnote I add will adopt this new formatting. So this reveal formatting thing is super useful because no matter where you click, you can modify it. You can see what the styles are. So one thing you can do is add the styles to your Quick Access Toolbar. So when you click on it, you get all these, and I'll close them all out so I can show you what that looks like. So all I did was go into here right-click and add to the Quick Access Toolbar, and then you can add it here. If you want to add this, you can go down here and add the Quick Access Toolbar. But if you want to add that Reveal Formatting, that takes a little bit more effort. So you can actually customize the Quick Access Toolbar by clicking on this, this arrow here and then More Commands, and then it only shows you popular commands. And we know that that was Reveal Formatting, that box that opened up. And if we scroll through, we don't see Reveal Formatting. So this is one of those funny little Microsoft things. It only shows you popular commands. I wanna see all commands. Once I show all commands, then I can scroll down And there are lots and lots of commands. And we will finally get to Reveal Formatting. Here, I'm going to click Add and say OK. And now when I just want to be able to get to that Reveal Formatting, all I have to do is click here and it opens that panel up and I don't have to go through all that stuff. So I'm a big fan of using the Quick Access Toolbar to add things that are— take too many clicks to find or too many clicks to get through otherwise. So another thing that I want to show you that is the benefit of using styles is If I want to add a table of contents to this, because I've used styles, all I have to do is go into References, Table of Contents, and then I can either choose kind of an automatic table of contents or I can create a custom table of contents. So we're going to choose what we want it to look like. You can go with Classic or you can go with formal, or you can go with simple. And you can change these as well because they're all based on styles. And we'll go with the classic. And we want to show page numbers, align them. You can have tab leaders or no tab leaders, so we'll put tab leaders because that's pretty traditional. Use hyperlinks instead of page numbers in the web Preview, which you probably won't be using a lot in Word, you can leave it there. The other thing to be aware of is depending on how many levels you have, you may have 4 levels, you may have 5, or you may say, okay, I only want to show 1 level. And so then what I'm going to do is click OK. And it's not identifying. So they are in fact styles. Let's go over to this other one and I'll show you. I'll just insert or go to References, Table of Contents, and it identified them all. So basically anything that I suggested that was a header and this is Header 1 and Header 2, creates an automated table of contents. What's cool about this is I can actually hit Ctrl-click and get to that element within the document really easily. When you convert this to a PDF document, if you use Nuance or Adobe Acrobat or something like that, it will do two things. It will keep your table of contents and keep the fact that you can click around within the document. It also will take the table of contents and turn it into PDF bookmarks. And that's not any extra effort on your part because you already created it, and so it just kind of migrates that content over, which is super useful. So going back to this document, the other thing is, remember I said you can move hunks of text much more easily than copying and pasting and dumping it in a different part of the document? This is an 18-page document, So that would be a real pain. So there's two things you can do to kind of get a sense of where these things live. And so I can go into the View and I can go into the Outline view. And when I do that, it, it puts me directly into the Outline view for the document. Because I've used styles, I can subsume and resume. I can close up all of these so it makes it a little bit easier to see. And I don't, I can go through and do this with the document. This, by the way, is the default header 3 for this document, and that's why it looks different. And push it back there. And then we'll close the Outline view. And we didn't really make any changes to the document. The thing that I find even more useful is again under the View menu and the Navigation pane. And so this basically lets me kind of search through my document, jump to different parts of the document, And say I want to move this whole section to be the next section. I just drag this up here and now that's the next section of the document. The other thing is you can reveal white spaces and delete the text or delete— you might have had an image there or something like that, so it kind of identifies where you can tighten up the document. If I wanted to move this to a different section like that, I can, or I can move it into another part entirely. So again, by using styles, kind of moving content around a document, getting a bird's-eye view of what's in there is much easier with the Navigation Pane and the Outline View than if you had to just go through the document and try to do that. Without having styles. So that's another big benefit of using styles. So the other thing, okay, when I say update the style, is it saved in a universal setting for all future documents? So that is a great question. So I'm going to go back to the Home. This document, when I applied the styles, the styles say stay saved with this document. So any modifications that I've ever made to the styles in this document stay with the document. If I add a style, it will stay with this document. So whenever anybody opens it up, and I'll show you that in a second, those styles stay with the document. But what we're going to look at next is saving this as a template. So that, that's going to let everybody else take advantage of the cells that you've created. And so I just created a really quick and dirty brief template. And you can see that we've got a whole lot of potential styles in here to use. We'll click on the Reveal Formatting and we'll open up this other over here, and you can see that we've got different styles going on— header 2. And once you've gone through and created this kind of template document, added your styles, and you save it, if somebody else opens it again, they'll have all the same styles available to them. But if you want to make sure that they don't overwrite this and make any changes to their styles, then you're going to have to save it as a template. But Before I do that, I just want to show you one trick that I really like for anything that has this particular little hunk of text. A lot of people use tabs to control this, which means that if you go back into the document and you need to make changes to this as a template, it's kind of a pain to try to fight with the tabs and all that stuff. So if you create this as a table, And I'll show you what it looks like with all the borders. All I did was create a 3-column table, and then you can go in and it's much easier to edit. And then when you don't want to see the lines anymore, you just go click in here and you say no borders. And no one's the wiser that you're controlling this with tables instead of tabs. But if you've messed around with tabs, you know that creating columns with tabs is rife with formatting issues, and so I think a table is a much better way to control this. So you go through, you make your kind of little, you know, we've got list headings, all that kind of stuff. You would probably want to put pagination in this, so you can go into Insert, and then we want to put page numbers, bottom of the page. There's your page numbers, all that stuff. Once you're finished making your perfect, beautiful, and appropriate to whatever rules you have to follow for formatting, then what we're going to do is save this as a template. And so you go into File, Save As, and then under the file type You're gonna choose Word template. Now, because I was using an existing document that lived in a particular folder, it's going to save it in that folder. But if you want this to be able to be available to you whenever you create a new document, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into more options. It automatically will identify where you should save it for personal templates. And Word has a particular place that it puts them. So we're gonna go to Recommended Folder. You'll see that it's under Custom Office Templates, and we'll click on Save. Now, this is particular to you. If I go into File, New, It gives you all these templates you can use. It's got some of your sample templates here, but if I click on personal, you can see that my brief template is here and I can open it back up real easily. You'll also notice because I saved this as a template and not a document, when I opened this new brief template, it changed the file name to Document 2. So what that does is when you create a document as a template document, when you open up the template, it creates a new file called Document 2, and you'll have to go and save this. So if you were going to do the Jones brief or the Maitland brief or whatever, then you're going to have to give this document a new name. This keeps you from overwriting the template. So while I save this in a place that's easy for me to use, this is probably the kind of thing that you want to have somebody work on and then save it to a folder on your shared drive, whether that be in the cloud or on a local server. And you know, you can create a folder called templates and then as many templates as you come up with, you can create these folders and subfolders and so on and so forth. So you have these really nice templates that you can create and people can't overwrite them as long as you save them as the.dotx. I want to show you a really fantastic template that took a lot of work and has a lot of bells and whistles on it. So I'm going to send you a bunch of materials that will give you Lots of other options, more than we're going to go over, because if you just start getting caught up with applying styles to your documents and creating templates with styles, it's going to save you a ton of time. So this one is the Tech Show template, and when we sent this out to other people, you'll notice that my styles have changed. So even though this was emailed to me by someone else, all of the styles that are part of this document transfer over. So those styles are available with the document. So it used to be they created these style galleries and you could pick all these different style galleries. Now they've kind of morphed towards something called themes, but I don't think that's necessary and I think it's overkill. And the styles that are used in a particular document just travel with it. And so this one, you know, we've got used some other formatting options like we can pick a date and you can type in stuff. This is a little small. I'll pop this up. This template we put instructions how to use this most effectively, how to use keyboard shortcuts. So there are keyboard shortcuts for all of these styles. So for instance, if I wanted to add the body text style, then I can use Ctrl+Alt+B. Or if I wanted to use the Heading 1 style, Ctrl+Alt+1. So if I do Ctrl+Alt+1, that changes that to the Heading 1 style, and so on and so forth. So, you know, as you learn more about styles and if you're a keyboard shortcut fanatic, You can certainly use keyboard shortcuts to make your life more easy. So that is pretty much all I have. Again, this can get very complex, but what you need to come away with is just realizing you can create documents with your own personal styles, save them as templates, and share them with the firm so that everybody's consistent You can get, you know, you can take your existing documents that have your firm logo in them and the headers and, you know, all the other stuff and then add styles to it and have even more control over what the documents look like and be consistent across the firm. It does take some time to get this stuff set up, but once you do it, it's worth it and will save you time on the backend after you've finished doing this. So with that said, I will— what I wanted to do was I'll open up for questions. I'm going to stop the recording and I'm going to send out the recording, but I'm also going to send you some links to other videos I've done where we formatted and applied table of authorities and all sorts of other stuff doing a appellate brief, and then some training online that you can take and share with the other folks in the firm if you want to get even more in-depth with styles. So thanks very much, and let me stop the recording.