Learn About Word’s Built-In Styles

Style is the set of formatting conventions used to group together text and other formatting information in a document. You use styles to align the different formatting objects in your document so that the result looks best when you display it on a computer screen. There are literally thousands of different style types, and learning how to use them effectively can help you write better and more professional documents. Style allows you to express yourself visually, as well as using words such as paragraph, sentence, page, or page number. In this article, I will describe various styles, and discuss how they can be used to help you format documents.

Style

The majority of Word (the program that Word is based on) come with built-in styles. These styles allow you to format documents with some basic color and font choices. This means that if you know the basics about how to use Word, then you should be able to easily edit any document that uses Word, as long as you know the basic formatting conventions. Here are the major built-in styles used with Word: Styles tab, Page tab, Outline tab, Target tab, Prefs tab, Properties tab, Browsing toolbar, Font tab, Magic Metrics and Style list.

A style is a set of formatting rules that determine how a document is displayed. These rules may be based on the spelling of a word, their contextual relationship and the nature of the document, or an aspect of the document’s layout or content. Most commonly, though, a style is related to the typeface chosen for the document, the default styling of Word that is determined by the writer, or the use of special formatting features such as italics, underlined text, or code fonts. The precise formatting format for a document is determined by the Word style or text style that is currently active.