Using Styles and Templates to Manage Formats
Word's formatting behavior can be confusing, even to expert users. To understand formatting, it's important that you grasp several key concepts.
Word allows you to apply multiple formatting settings at one time by using styles. You gather the settings together and give them a name. Then when you want to use all the formatting at once, you apply the style. For example, you could tell Word that you want the ProductName style to consist of centered paragraphs, with Arial 18-point, italic blue characters. Then, every time you apply the style ProductName to a paragraph, Word formats it as centered, Arial 18 point, italic blue.
Think of styles as an easy and fast way to organize the format settings you see on the Styles and Formatting task pane. Although you can scroll through the task pane's Pick Formatting to Apply list, and ultimately find the Arial 18-point, italic blue entry, it's generally simpler to find a style called ProductName. Styles also tie parts of your document together, to ensure the formatting is consistent: If you decide to change formatting for all your ProductNames to Arial 18 point, bold blue, it's easy to change the style and have the change ripple through your document. Looking for the old formatting and replacing it by hand is a tedious, cumbersome, error-prone task.
The behavior of styles is tied closely to templates, the cookie-cutter prototypes for documents found in the New dialog box (choose File, New to get there). When you create a new document, you must base it on a template. Word dutifully copies all the text that resides in the template into the new documentif the template contains only a single paragraph mark—before it presents the document to you for editing.
Behind every document sits an associated template. Unless you've taken steps to change it, a document's template is the same one you used to create the document in the first place. Choose Tools, Templates and Add-Ins, and you see the name of the associated template in the Document Template box (see Figure 18.1).
Figure 18.1. Word tells you the name of the template attached to the current document, as well as the names of any "global" templates that were loaded when Word started. Normal.dot is always loaded, and thus doesn't appear here.
Note
A global template is a template that's available to all open documents. Specifying a global template gives you access to special-purpose macros and AutoText entries throughout Word, without having to change the template for a given document. Because the Normal document template (Normal.dot) is always loaded and made global each time Word starts, it's always available to every open document. You'll hear Normal.dot called "the" global template, but it isn't really: There can be many global templates available at any given moment.
Now say that you apply the style ProductName to a paragraph. Word first checks the document to see whether it includes a style by that name. If the style isn't there, Word looks in the document's template. If the style isn't in the template, Word looks in a special template, called Normal, which is always available.
The Normal document template includes dozens of predefined styles, including the ubiquitous "Heading 1," "Heading 2," "Heading 3" styles, the "Normal" paragraph style, and a plethora of styles used for formatting table of contents entries, footnotes, bulleted and numbered lists, index entries, tables, and more.
To make matters even more confusing, sometimes Word takes it upon itself to automatically apply a style to text you've typed. These automated escapades are discussed at various points throughout this chapter, but here are the major culprits:
If you find Word is applying a Heading style to your short sentences or sentence fragments, choose Tools, AutoCorrect Options, and on the AutoFormat As You Type tab, clear the Built-in Heading Styles box.
If you find Word is changing the properties of styles when you use the Style drop-down box, choose Tools, AutoCorrect Options, and on the AutoFormat As You Type tab, clear the Define Styles Based on Your Formatting box.
If Word insists on changing text you've typed into hyperlinks—say, http://www.mcp.com turns blue and underlined—choose Tools, AutoCorrect, and on the AutoFormat As You Type tab, clear the Internet and Network Paths with Hyperlinks box.
Word, like PowerPoint and FrontPage, supports themes, which are prepackaged sets of background colors, graphical bullets, and other design elements, suitable only for Web pages. Themes originated with FrontPage, and aren't so much integrated with Word as they are tacked on—you can't create or change a theme using Word. If you want to create or modify a theme, you must use FrontPage. In general, themes can cause behavior that many experienced Word users will find perplexing. (Themes aren't stored in templates—they're in *.inf and *.elm files; they don't print.)
→ To learn how to modify your FrontPage themes, see "Applying Styles, Colors, and Images with a Theme".