Importance of Styles in Microsoft Word

Last edited by Charles Kenyon on Thursday 02 January 2025 - an exerpt from Understanding Styles in Microsoft Word

(this guide table of contents) ------- (MS Word New Users FAQ)

Styles Overview

Styles are arguably the most important feature in Microsoft Word. Why? Because everything that you do in Word has a style attached. The definition of a style is two-fold. First, you can think of a style as a set of pre-defined formatting instructions that you can use repeatedly throughout the document. Let's say each heading in a document must be centered, uppercase, bold, and a slightly larger font size. Each time you need to apply formatting to the heading, you have to go through the entire process to get the text the way you want it. If you store the formatting commands in a style, you can apply that style any time you need it without having to do all of the reformatting.

Possibly more important however is that styles are used to "tag" or identify parts of a document. An example of this is whether text is part of a heading, a footnote, a hyperlink, or body text. These are all examples of styles in Word.

If you're concerned about whether or not you need to learn styles, we can put it rather simply: you do. Styles are the architecture upon which Word is based. Just about everything in Word is style-driven. In fact, many people in the industry refer to Word as a "style-driven" program.

Allen Wyatt uses an elegant metaphor about styles:

"Styles are nothing more than a named definition of how text should appear. You can best understand this by comparing your text to water (this is your content). The appearance of the water depends on the attributes of the container in which it is placed. If you place it in a glass it will look one way; if you place it in a pitcher, it looks a different way. The relationship between text and styles is no different; if you change the style that has been applied to text, then the appearance of the text automatically changes."  Understanding Styles

Styles allow for quick formatting modifications throughout the document and can be tied into numbering to make working with outline numbered lists easier. See Outline View in Microsoft Word

"While the [quick] styles gallery has been available on the Word home tab since Word 2007, some people just assume styles are meant for people who want big blue text.

"As it turns out, that’s not true. I’m here to tell you that Styles are handy, and if you use them to format your text as you write your document, you’ll be able to take full advantage of the improvements in Word 2013 that we’ve outlined below."

-- Caitlin Ashley-Rollman, Microsoft Program Manager for Word 2013 in blog on using styles

The dialog drop-down arrow on the bottom-right corner of the [Quick] Styles Gallery will launch the legacy Styles Pane. See more on the Styles Task Pane.

Yet Another "Use Styles" Verbal Beating! by Dian Chapman, MVP
Getting Started with Styles by Dian Chapman, MVP - Word 97-2003

Why Use Styles? - Lynda.com (4.5 min. video that may save you months of work.)

Styles are an essential part of Microsoft Word. In fact, everything you type into a document has a style attached to it, whether you design the style or not.

When you start Microsoft Word, the new blank document is based on the Normal template, and text that you type uses the Normal style. This means that when you start typing, Word uses the font name, font size, line spacing, indentation, text alignment, and other formats currently defined for the Normal style. The Normal style is the base style for the Normal template, meaning that it's a building block for other styles in the template. Whenever you start typing in a new document, unless you specify otherwise, you are typing in the Normal style.

The above was an excerpt from the much larger chapter Understanding Styles in Microsoft Word. That chapter goes into styles in more depth and has a plethora of links to other resources.

Additional Web Resources