Saving Formats as Named Styles
Although Word ships with more than 100 defined styles—they're built in to the Normal template—you'll quickly find that they don't always apply to your documents and your specific needs.
If your needs are simple, you can set up a paragraph style by formatting a paragraph the way you want, and telling Word the name of the style to be based on that formatting. To do so:
Format an entire paragraph to have all the attributes you want—both character and paragraph formatting apply.
Click once inside the paragraph.
Click New Style in the Style and Formatting task pane, and type in a name for the new paragraph style in the Name box (see Figure 18.3).
Figure 18.3. Creating a new style can be tricky. Make sure you understand what all the options mean before using them.
In the Style Type box, choose Paragraph to create a paragraph style, or Character for a character style.
In the Style Based On box, you can set up an inheritance scheme that can help you propagate changes quickly—or mess up a document mightily. Say your new style, ProductName, is "based on" the Normal style. If you change the Normal style to be right-justified with bold characters, the ProductName style takes on the formatting—that is, right-justified with bold characters. You can create complex hierarchies of styles this way. You can also create a mountain of spaghetti that takes hours to fix. If it all gets too messed up, your only recourse is to delete the file with the fancy styles, and start all over again with a new template.
The Style for Following Paragraph box lets you tell Word which style it should use for the next paragraph when you press Enter. For example, most heading styles have Normal as the style for the following paragraph—when you type a heading and press Enter, you usually want the next paragraph to be Normal. If you set up a style called Illustration, for example, you might want its Style for Following Paragraph setting to be Caption. And you might want the Style for Following Paragraph setting on Caption to run back to Normal. That way, you can format a paragraph as Illustration, insert the illustration, press Enter, type the caption, and then press Enter again to return to Normal.
Caution
The Style for Following Paragraph setting kicks in only if the insertion point is immediately in front of a paragraph mark when you press Enter. If you leave even a single space between the insertion point and the paragraph mark when you press Enter, Word gives you a new paragraph with the same formatting and style as the current paragraph.
If you leave the Add to Template box unchecked, the new style appears only in this particular document. If the Add to Template box is checked, however, the style is added to the document's template. That way, it's available to the current document and to any other document based on the template.
Caution
In almost all circumstances, Automatically Update is a disaster waiting to happen. Say you have a document and it includes dozens of paragraphs formatted with the ProductName style. If you accidentally select the paragraph mark at the end of any ProductName paragraph, and format the paragraph mark as bold, all the text in all the ProductName paragraphs immediately turns bold…even if you can't see the paragraph mark!
After you've waded through all the options in the New Style dialog box, choose the formatting you want to associate with the style. More complex formatting requires you to burrow through the Format button. For character styles, you can select Font (which brings up a dialog box identical to the one that appears when you choose Format, Font), Border (same as choosing Format, Borders and Shading), and Language (same as choosing Tools, Language, Set Language). For paragraph styles, you can also choose Paragraph (same as choosing Format, Paragraph), Tabs (same as choosing Format, Tabs), Frame (for old-fashioned frames that earlier versions of Word used to wrap text around pictures), and Numbering (same as Format, Bullets and Numbering). You can also pick a shortcut key from this direction, just as you would in the Customize Keyboard dialog box (choose Tools, Customize, Keyboard to get there) mentioned earlier in this chapter.
Tip from 
You can just type a new name into the Name box on the formatting toolbar and press Enter, to create a new paragraph style based on a selected paragraph's attributes.
If you want to modify a Style's definition, click the drop-down button next to the style's name in the Styles and Formatting task pane, and then choose Modify. You'll have all the foregoing formatting options at your disposal.
Tip from 
WOPR, the Office add-in package that comes on this book's companion CD, includes a routine that allows you to duplicate styles—a feat that's time-consuming if attempted manually.
→ Que's Special Edition WOPR XP/2002 Pack is packed with tools to help maximize your productivity and enjoyment with Office; see "WOPR XP/2002—Woody's Office POWER Pack," see p.1007.
If your custom styles disappear when you open a document, see
"Automatically Updating Styles"
in the
"Troubleshooting"
section at the end of this chapter.