Change a style

Word comes with built-in “Styles”. You can see them here:

Note: The styles in these examples may be different to the styles you see, depending on how your computer is configured. In particular, corporate computers sometimes use the organisation’s styles by default. The principles are still the same.

What are Styles and why are they useful?

Styles are a useful way to format text with very little effort. But aside from saving you time, they also have other useful benefits. Using the “Heading” styles means that, later on, you can easily add a Table of Contents, you can link directly to headers, and you can see the structure of the document using the navigation pane.

We’ll talk more about styles in a later lesson. But right now, let’s practice applying some styles to our document.

Applying Styles

Here’s a document that has different fonts, different font sizes, and some text in bold and italics.

The text formatting is not consistent. We’re going to correct that in a flash! Watch the video to see how:

Here’s how we apply styles:

1. Click and drag your mouse to select the “body text” paragraph
2. Click on Styles > Normal
   

Notice how your text has all reverted to the “Normal” style.

Practice point: Apply the “Normal” style to your paragraph text.

Use the in-built heading styles for our heading text:

1. Click and drag your mouse to select the “heading” text
2. Click on Styles > Heading 1

   

Notice how your text has changed. It should look something like this:

Generally speaking you will use headers like this:

• Heading 1 – the title of the document
• Heading 2 – headings of sections throughout the document

It’s possible to add new styles (eg Heading 3), and to change the formatting of the default styles. We’ll look at that a bit later, once your comfortable with some more of the essentials.