Getting a bit fancy – altering heading Styles

In an earlier lesson we looked at applying styles to text in our document.

In this lesson we’re going to look at simple ways to alter the styles available, so they are not only consistent throughout your document, but also look how you want them to look.

Set up your document for this example

For the sake of this example, let’s start with the document looking like this:

“This is the heading” is in the style of “Heading 2”.

“Themes” is how it ended up looking when we pasted it in with Merged Formatting: Calibri, 11pt font, Bold.

Creating consistent headings as you want them

In our document we want these both to be headings, but of course they should look consistent.

1. Highlight “Themes”.
2. Change the font size to 24.
3. Change the font to Bold.
4. Change the line spacing to 1.15.

It should look a bit like this:

Now we’re going to update our styles to match the heading we’ve just created.

1. Move your mouse over the styles “Heading 2” – but don’t click on it.
2. Instead, right-click and choose “Update Heading 2 to Match Selection”.

   

It should now look like this:

The key things to note are:

• The text “This is the heading” automatically adopted the new styles. You can see how you could make tweaks to your styles and they would then replicate everywhere throughout your document.
• The styles “Heading 2” shows a new preview. This helps you recognise which style you want to apply to text. You could now create a new heading anywhere in the document, and when you click “Heading 2” it will style it to match the other headings.

Another two ways consistent headings are useful

Creating consistent headings like this will make it easy to create a table of contents for a long document. We’re not going to cover that in this course, but it’s something to keep in mind.

Heading styles also help you navigate a document. Go to “View > Navigation pane” and tick the box. A navigation panel will slide out from the left, like this:

Notice how the headings are in this panel. In longer documents, this navigation panel will help you move around quickly. If you click on the headings in the document, you will jump right to that section. Super convenient!

Awesome work!

You’ve now learned some key skills for formatting your text in Word. With a bit of practice you’re going to comfortable creating amazing Word documents!

Before moving on, have a look at the checklist below. You should be able to do all these things now. If not, go back through this lesson and practice some more. When you feel comfortable that you’ve got these things sorted, tick them off and move on to the next lesson.

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• Cut, copy and paste text
• Adjust line spacing
• Create a bullet point list
• Create a numbered list
• Use Styles to create consistent headings

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