Word 2007 for Writers: Part 2 – Using Styles

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4 Responses

  1. Ally says:

    Hi there, Dustin! I just wanted to say that I’ve recently discovered your blog and am so thrilled that I did (well, it was recommended to me by a friend, so I can’t take discovery credit!). A thought: this series would be more useful to me if you gave a few more real-life writerly examples. For instance, you talk about changing formatted headers that are in boxes, but most writers aren’t working on projects that require such design. Could you elaborate on how styles are useful to me for regular document use, such as when writing a novel, short story, or article? Or perhaps how it is useful in creating business materials?

  2. Dustin says:

    Ally: Hopefully the following parts of this series answered some of these questions. I use styles all the time, for documents, letters, ebooks, etc. When I write a manuscript for submission, I set up a custom style set (called “Submission”) according to the market’s guidelines. I cut-and-paste my articles from the web into Word documents and create PDFs to use as clips (since web pages tend to print out badly), using Styles to assure consistency. I use styles on my letterhead template so my letters look the same. I just published an ebook/self-published paperback (more on that shortly!) and used styles to define chapter headings and sub-heads, paragraph spacing, and virtually every other detail of the print-ready text.

    I can’t think of a document longer than a page that I *wouldn’t* use styles on — especially anything I was sending for publication, since a) web editors can cut-and-paste into their Content Management Systems and most modern ones will pick up the style settings and convert them to the house styles, and b) most paper pubs can import the document into their layout programs and, again, the style settings will remain so they can easily style the headings, etc. to fit their pub’s house style.

  3. Dimblor says:

    Hi.
    default keyboard shortcuts for styles are ctrl+alt+1, ctrl+alt+2, ctrl+alt+3 for heading styles 1-3 and ctrl+shift+n for normal style.

  1. March 7, 2012

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