Organize your document with style: Here's how to use styles in Word

  • Styles in Word allow you to quickly and consistently apply formatting throughout your document.
  • Customizing, creating, and modifying styles saves time and ensures visual consistency.
  • The Quick Styles gallery makes it easy to manage and access your most frequently used styles.
  • Mastering styles improves the presentation, navigation, and structure of any document.

Microsoft Word styles

Daily work in Word can be much more efficient and organized if we know how to take advantage of the tools offered by the word processor itself. One of those essential tools, especially for those looking for professionalism and speed when drafting documents, are the Word styles.

In reality, the application's true potential is discovered when we begin to properly use the built-in and custom styles. Spending a few minutes understanding how they work and how they can help us can save hours of work editing and formatting complex documents.

What are styles in Word?

In Word, a style is a predefined set of formatting options that you can apply to different parts of your document, such as headings, subheadings, body text, lists, and more. These styles group together elements such as font type and size, color, line spacing, alignment, borders, and other attributes related to the appearance of the text. Thanks to them, you can Transform the appearance of an entire document with just one click and maintain a consistent presentation at all times.

A key aspect of styles is their ability to save timeInstead of having to select each heading or paragraph separately and manually apply the same formatting, you can define the formatting once and reuse it throughout your document. Even better, if you decide to change any aspect (for example, the font in your headings), simply modify the corresponding style, and the change will be automatically reflected everywhere that style has been applied.

By default, Word includes several pre-designed styles, such as "Heading 1," "Heading 2," "Normal," "Emphasis," and many others. These styles can be easily found on the "Headings" tab. Home, within the group Styles, where you'll see them represented as a visual gallery so you can identify them at a glance and apply them intuitively.

styles in Word

Advantages of using styles in Word

Using styles in Word is not only a matter of aesthetics, but also of productivity and flexibilityLet's take a look at the main benefits!

  • visual uniformity: Ensures that all similar elements in the document (headings, subheadings, body text) have the same format.
  • Time saving: Allows you to quickly apply global changes by directly modifying a style and seeing how all its instances are updated.
  • Ease of navigation: Styles structure your document, making it easier to create automatic tables of contents, navigate with the Navigation Pane, and maintain order.
  • Professional preparation: Well-structured, styled documents look better and are recommended for academic, business, and desktop publishing environments.
  • Portability: By using styles, long documents can be quickly adapted to different corporate or publishing templates.

How to Apply Styles in Word

The basic process for applying a style is very simple and the same in virtually all versions of Word (desktop and online):

  1. select the text that you want to format (it can be a paragraph, a title, a list, etc.).
  2. In the Home, look for the group StylesYou will see a gallery of visual styles.
  3. Click on the style that you want to apply (for example, “Heading 1” for a main heading).

The selected text will instantly adopt all the characteristics of the chosen style. You can quickly change from the formatting of normal headings, subheadings, or paragraphs to lists, quotes, or any other element with an assigned style.

Some extra tips:

  • You can preview how the text would look by simply hovering over the styles, even before clicking.
  • If you click the arrow in the lower right corner of the styles gallery, you'll access a more complete list of styles available in your document.

word styles

Customizing and modifying styles

One of the great advantages of Word is the possibility of modify existing styles to adapt them to your preferences or the needs of your company, institution, or academic work. There are two main ways to change an integrated style:

1. Modify a style from already formatted text

  1. select the text that already has the style you want to modify (for example, a title with the style “Heading 1”).
  2. Change the format directly (for example: size, font, color, spacing).
  3. In the Home, right-click on the style in the gallery and select Update to match selection.

This way, all instances of that style in the document will automatically update to reflect the new formatting. This is extremely useful when you need a quick, global update.

2. Modify a style directly from the gallery

  1. In the Home, right-click on the style you want to change and select Modify.
  2. A window will open where you can update any aspect of the formatting: font, size, color, line spacing, indentation, alignment, borders, etc.
  3. You can decide whether the changes will apply only to the current document or will be saved for future documents based on that template.

Customizing styles in this way helps greatly in maintaining the visual coherence already align with corporate or academic style guides.

Create new custom styles

If the default styles don't cover your needs, Word allows you to create custom stylesThis procedure is useful for defining unique formats that fit your organization's visual identity or the type of document you want to create.

  1. select the text from the document that you have already formatted as desired.
  2. Right click on that selection and choose Styles > Create a style.
  3. In the dialog box Create new style from format, enter an identifying name for the style and press Accept.
  4. The new style will immediately appear in the Styles gallery, ready for you to use whenever you want, throughout your document.

This allows you, for example, to create styles to highlight recommendations, notices, examples, proper names, or any other element that you need to highlight frequently in your texts.

Word Launcher on PC

Advanced Management: Quick Styles Gallery

La Quick Styles Gallery It is the visual panel from which you can quickly apply styles and manage which ones are usually displayed so you always have them at hand.

Add styles to the gallery

  1. In the Home, click the group dialog box launcher Styles to open the styles panel.
  2. At the bottom right of the panel, select Options.
  3. Choose All styles on the menu Select styles to display.
  4. Select the text with the style you want to add and click the style in the panel. It will automatically appear in the quick gallery.

Remove styles from the gallery

  1. in the same tab Home, right-click on the style you want to remove from the gallery and select Remove from style gallery.

Managing which styles appear in the gallery helps you work faster and avoid visual confusion when selecting formats.

Modify and update existing styles

If after applying a style you want to make global changes, Word makes it easy. For example, if you notice that the "Heading 1" style needs a larger font size to be more noticeable, you can:

  1. Right-click on the style in the gallery and select Modify.
  2. In the pop-up window, update the attributes (font color, size, spacing, etc.).
  3. press Accept and watch as all headings with that style automatically change in the document.

This method allows you fine-tune design details and ensure that your document looks the way you need it, without having to reformat each part separately.

Styles in Word for the Web

Work with Word for the Web follows the same philosophy, although with some peculiarities. There, the group Styles continues to be present in the tab Home and allows you to apply styles with a single click. All styles are coordinated to work well together, allowing you to easily maintain visual consistency, just like on the desktop version.

The main difference is that advanced style customization is limited in the web version. If you need to create, modify, or manage styles in a complex way, it's recommended to open the document in the desktop app using the option. Open in desktop appThis way, you can use all the advanced features and then return to the web version if you need to.

Therefore, although Word Online is very functional for basic tasks and collaborative editing, for in-depth style management it's always better to use the version installed on your computer.

Case studies and additional recommendations

Having custom styles is especially useful when working on long documents like theses, manuals, reports, commercial proposals, books or academic projectsIts usefulness increases if you need to deliver customized versions of the same file to different recipients or change the corporate design in a single step. To expand your knowledge of text organization, you can consult this Article on structuring and organizing text in Word.

Furthermore, the use of styles greatly facilitates conversion to different formats (PDF, EPUB, etc.) and improves the accessibility of the text, since screen readers and automatic systems recognize the structure of the document and can extract the information in an orderly manner.

Mastering the use of styles in Word It helps you create higher-quality documents that are better presented, easier to edit, and look more professional. It also optimizes your time and prevents errors or inconsistencies caused by manual formatting. Take a moment to customize your style gallery and you'll notice how it improves your daily workflow—the difference will be obvious!


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