Thursday, August 20, 2026

Getting a Better List of Styles in Word

Styles are one of Microsoft Word's better features but Microsoft has never made them particularly easy to use and especially never easy to manage. In my last job, I eventually created a small set of templates with a common set of style names but with differing formats. Some documents could have more than thirty styles. Tracking changes to the styles across differnt documents was painful. 

Office Watch points outs that you can use AI tools like Copilot or Gemini to help you analyse and manage your styles. 
Copilot or any AI (Claude, ChatGPT etc.) can read a Word styles document and reorganize the contents into something more useful, such as:
  • Hierarchy table
  • Grouped Styles
  • Style Guide
  • Design System Diagram
  • Visual Table
  • Style Compliance Table

The article includes a sample prompt and some examples of reports and diagrams that you can create. 

As I recall, Adobe FrameMaker doesn't have many features for reporting on style properties, but there are third-party tools that you could probably use in conjunction with AI tools to create similar reports.


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