The Basics of Using Styles in MS Word

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PG says if you’re formatting your own books for self-publishing or if you would like to minimize the likelihood of your ebook and/or CreateSpace formatting services from making mistakes that adversely impact your manuscript, Word Styles are your friend.

Styles are not difficult to use when you’re writing your book. Once you have a style sheet you like for your drafts, you can reuse that style sheet over and over for each new manuscript you create.

If you need to convert your manuscript into a different format, Word Styles typically convert along with the rest of the text. (PG can’t think of a text-oriented format that won’t preserve Word Styles, although the styles may not look exactly the same as they did in Word. Differences in font designs in various formats are often the culprit.)

Following is a 15-minute webinar that shows the basics about how to use Word Styles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuxqF3sydgU

3 thoughts on “The Basics of Using Styles in MS Word”

  1. There is also a way to easily preserve formatting and convert it to Styles using Find & Replace.

    Short version: turn on Wildcards in F&R. Search for your formatting (say, italics) and the string (lesser-than)(*)(greater-than) (Find a word with italics, put the word in variable 1). Replace with #(\1)# (Put hashtags around the words you found.)

    Then F&R hashtag-space-hashtag and replace with just a space.

    Copy the entire text to Notepad. Save. Close Word. Open Word. Open the Notepad file you just made.

    Turn on Wildcards in F&R. Find #(*)# and replace with the Style you want (in this example, Emphasis) and \1, which replaces just the text found, and not the hashtags.

    All italics converted to Styles, with no other formatting in the document!

  2. I’ve been using styles and navigation for ages, but I refuse to learn the ribbon. My document resides in the center of the screen, the document map (as navigation used to be known) on the left, the styles list on the right. Not relying on the ribbons puts ME in the driver’s seat instead of letting Microsoft dictate what they think is good for me.

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