Using Styles in Word may seem daunting at first - but there a couple of instant wins and a simple approach to using them. Once you master a few straightforward tricks you will save time and will better understand how to make your reports easy to manage, You can leave the more complex usage until later...

Styles are ever present in Word, have something to do with Tables of Contents and appear to be hard to control. However in bite size chunks they can be mastered. 

Like any good story, let's start at the beginning and go on until we come to the end.

Preamble

Styles can include many aspects of the way text looks; from font, font-size, BOLD, italic to setting which style follows next. They are also a good way of telling any software that is reading your document where it can find information.

We will start from a fresh document and set some simple styles for our own use, and add a table of contents. Along the way I'll show you some other tricks to help you better understand why text in Word documents sometimes behaves very oddly.

Turning over a new leaf (as in page)

Start Word. You will have a blank document by default. Here is a picture of a blank document:

First I add some text for demonstration purposes. I am using Word 2013, but the following all works in 2010 as well. This may well work in earlier versions of Word, but I have not tested it.

I select the text I want to be in my main Heading ("This will be my heading level one." in the image above). I then set the font and size I want all my main Headings to be. In this case I choose the font (Baskerville Old Face) and also the Font size (18). 

As I want this new size and font to be my Heading Level 1 I right click on Heading 1 in the styles section - a pop-up menu will appear. Left click on 'Update Heading 1 to Match Selection'.

Highlight the text that is formatted as you want, then update the style to match.

By doing this I have changed Heading 1 to suit my needs. I can now apply this to other heading text. 

Select the other heading text ("Look heading level one again" in my document), and click (which is a left click) on Heading 1 in the styles. The Heading 1 style is applied to my text.

Highlight the text you want to change, then click the style to apply.

Now for Heading Level 2 ...

Just as I redefined Heading Level 1 I can now redefine Heading Level 2 - my sub-headings. 

I highlight the text I want as Heading Level 2 and format it as I would like it to appear. I choose Baskerville Old Face again, but a smaller font size (14).

Once I have formatted the text I right click on Heading 2 and choose 'Update Heading 2 to Match Selection'.

Highlight the text that is formatted as you want, then update Heading 2.

My Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles are now redefined in my document.

Now I want to add a Table of Contents. These are defined in Word to automatically pick up and use text from the document that uses Heading 1, 2, 3 etc. As I have defined these styles and used them I expect that if I insert a Table of Contents it will show my headings.

... and then the table of contents

Click at the start of your document, and then goto 'REFERENCES' on the ribbon. There is a button for 'Table of Contents'. Click it and a menu pops down with different types of Table of Contents (TOC). Left click on one to choose it.

Choose the TOC to insert into the document.

But golly gosh! I truly hate that blue heading 'Contents' I want it black, and in a different font. So following the same procedure as before I highlight the text, and format it as I want it to look. I choose Bookman Old Style, and change the colour to black with font size 16.

To change this style I open the Styles dialog (click on the little button in the bottom right of the 'Styles' ribbon)

Highlight your formatted text, click on the circled button and you get to redefine the TOC styles.

The 'TOC Heading' is already selected, so I can move my mouse over 'TOC Heading' and click the drop down to get the option 'Update TOC Heading to match selection'.

Why did we do this? 

We did it so that when we update the Table of Contents (TOC) the style doesn't go back to the way it was before.

If we really wanted to we could do the same with the style and formatting of each line in the Table of Contents until we get it just the way we want.

Take a Break

This is a bit of a boring Table of Contents with everything on the same page. 

So let's add a new page.

I want the first page to be the table of contents and the second page to have the first Heading Level one, and the third page to have the second Heading Level 1.

Some people would click in the text and add tap 'Enter' a lot until the text flowed onto the next page. This however can lead to difficulties, such as if I add more text to the first paragraph all the headings will move down their pages.

To see why this happens turn on 'non-printable characters'. You do this by clicking on the symbol shown below. This is on the 'HOME' tab.

This button turns non-printable characters on and off

Non-printable characters show where you have used the 'Tab' and 'Enter' key as well as where other formatting things are used in the document that are there for structuring your text, and are not for people to read.

If you pressed the 'Enter' key many times to make text go to the next page, then it looks like this behind the scenes...

Lots and lots of 'Enter' to make the text flow to the next page. Ugly, and hard to manage and maintain.

You can see above that there are lots of 'Enter' symbols that have pushed my Heading Level one onto a new page.

A better way of doing this is to use a Page Break. This tells Word to put all the text following onto a new page. 

To insert a page break, click where you want it to be (after the TOC) then click on Insert>Pages>Page Break (this is slightly different in Word 2010, and easier to get to). 

The shortcut keys for this are ctrl+enter at the same time (hold the CTRL key and tap the ENTER key).

Insert a Page Break. Word 2010 inset in circle.

After inserting the page break the page looks as follows. Just what I wanted.

I do the same for my next Heading Level 1. I now have three pages. Time to update the Table of Contents.

To do this click inside the Table of Contents and a button will appear 'Update Table'. 

Need to update this - the page numbers are incorrect!

Click it. If you are prompted to update the whole table then say OK.

Now the Table of Contents has the correct page numbers. 

The page numbers are now correct.

As with the Blog post last week, a quick way of doing this is to select the whole document (ctrl+A) then tap the F9 key - updates all fields and the TOC in the document at once.

Wrap up

You can easily get control of your styles and formatting and get Word to do what you want. There is another step to take if you want to add these new styles into a template (.dot) or make them available for all new documents - but, one step at a time.

Showing 'non-printable characters' whilst you are editing is very useful. You can see where all text is and why it is there - I recommend this for all editing. When you are proofing, just turn their visibility off again.

You can never learn enough shortcut keys, they really save you time when writing up your reports. each time you have to move your hand from your keyboard to the mouse, then move the mouse, then click and move your hand back again is annoying and a waste of time. 

I make use of styles and page breaks in all my documents - saves me time and allows me to produce professional templates for my clients and for processing in the Clarinspect reporting system.

I hope that whirlwind tour through styles has helped lift the veil on the mystery - happy report writing!