From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

Applying Quick Styles to text - Microsoft Word Tutorial

From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

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Applying Quick Styles to text

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If you're like most people, when it comes to formatting text in your documents, you're probably selecting it, going up into the Font group, maybe, of the ribbon, bolding, italics, maybe changing the color, the size, even the font itself, and if you're doing that, and let's say you do have headings, like we have in this document, you're doing it multiple times. And then if you want to change the look of the document, you're changing multiple times. You can save yourself a lot of time and hassle by simply using quick styles, which we're going to talk about right now, as we continue working with our Company Bio document. If you need to get caught up, go to the Chapter5 folder, and open up Company Bio2. We're going to click right in Company Bio at the top of page 1. When we do that, and we look at the Font group, notice, you don't see Bold selected, you don't see a green color selected for the font color; all of that is actually part of a quick style, and if we move over to the Styles section of our ribbon, we see some quick styles, and one of them is highlighted or selected, and that is Title. So, the formatting that comes with Title in this particular style set is a large font, and you can see, it's a dark greenish color, using Garamond, 40 points. Okay, great. If we change style sets, and the title is formatted differently, in that other style set, it's automatically applied to our title. Same thing for these headings that are repeated throughout our document. When we click there, we don't see any formatting up here. It's all done over here under Heading 1 in our quick styles. So, as we scroll through our document, if we see something that needs to be formatted, maybe No Obstacles Clothing, we can click just left of it, and in this case, it looks like it's actually part of something bigger. So, let's click inside, and sure enough, it's a text box. That's okay. We can click and drag over the text, and apply a quick style. Notice that Bold and Italics is highlighted here, so somebody formatted this manually. We can turn that off by clicking them again. How about we apply a Heading 2 this time? If we hover over Heading 2, you can see what that looks like. Not bad, but it doesn't seem to fit properly. Maybe if we click the dropdown, we'll see something better. Maybe Strong would be a better choice. So we select that. It looks like it's been bolded, but it's not, really. It's only using the Strong style. And it's quick style, because we can access it quickly from our Styles section on the ribbon. All right. Let's just click a little further down in the document. Applying quick styles is as simple as selecting them from the ribbon. Well, what if we have a document that's been formatted manually? Let's switch to another document simply called Company Bio. Now, in this case, if we click in Company Bio, the title, it looks different from the rest of our body text, but if we look up at the Styles section, it looks like Normal has been selected. And as we move over into the Font section, Bold has been applied, and a dark green color has been applied. All of this has been done manually. What if we go to Mission Statement? It too is Normal text, but it does have some formatting that's been applied; same thing for Company Description. So, no matter where we click in this document, it's all Normal style that's been applied, but we have some individual formatting that needs to be taken care of. So, one thing we might want to do is change our Company Bio here to an actual quick style; same thing for our headings. I'm going to start with the headings. If we click anywhere in Mission Statement, and we realize, we don't want to have to select these, and then take out the formatting, and then apply a quick style, what we can do is select everything that's formatted this way by going to our Select dropdown, and choose Select All Text with similar formatting. You can see, we have multiple headings that have been selected. Now what we can do is remove or clear formatting, and apply a quick style. To remove the formatting, we go up to this little guy, it kind of looks like a Band-Aid over text, and it's actually an eraser I think. We click it, and it clears all the formatting. Yet, everything is still selected; everything that is considered to be a heading is still highlighted. That's great, because now we can go to Heading 1, for example, and select that. Let's go to the very top of our document, Ctrl+Home, to see what that looks like. Okay, so far so good. Let's go next to Company Bio in the left margin, click there, and clear formatting as well. And go to, in this case, Title, and select it; beautiful. All right. So, that was a lot quicker than manually making those changes. And now, what's even faster is if we decide to change the look by choosing a different style set, everything is going to be updated for us automatically. Let's go to the Design tab, where we do have a number of style sets showing up here in the Document Formatting section of our ribbon, and the first one is selected. As we hover over it, you can see that that is This Document's Style Set. But, we have a number of other ones to choose from, and as we hover over them, we're going to see changes in our document. Look at Company Bio, and our headings; you can see how they change. Let's go to this one called Centered, and select it. Great! Everything has been updated, and we didn't have to touch a thing, except go to the ribbon, and choose a different style set. Same thing for colors; because we're using the style set colors, if we change the color scheme, maybe down to something like green, for example, that's closer to what we want, as you hover over these, you can see how they're all being updated, whereas individually formatted pieces of text would not be updated like this. Let's go to green-yellow, and select it. You can probably see the huge advantage there is to using styles and style sets, as opposed to manually formatting your text on the fly. Consider this the next time you create a Word document. Maybe even consider going back to some of your older documents, clearing the formatting, and replacing them with quick styles, and style sets.

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