Formatting With Styles In Word

If you're using Word and not using styles, you're wasting a lot of time and increasing the chances that you will introduce flakiness, if not outright corruption, into your document. I spent a lot of time at the TSX trying to get people to use Word's paragraph and character styles to format their documents. Occasionally, I succeeded.

The Parlour, a blog for editors, proofreaders, and writers by Louise Harnby, has a good article that covers the basics of using styles in Word. It covers the following topics:

• What the Styles tool is
• The properties you can influence
• How to access the Styles tool
• Why it’ll save you time to use styles
• 3 ways to create a style
• 2 ways to modify a style
• How to assign a style to an element of text
• Troubleshooting
• How heading styles help you navigate

It's one of the better articles I've seen on the subject, succinct and illustrated with annotated screen captures. I wish I'd written it. 

Also, I just discovered Louise Harnby's site. There's much here of interest, including her podcast about editing. She includes transcripts if you don't have time to listen to the podcast, something that I wish more podcasters would do.