Office XP Tips: Style and Formatting Tricks

Word 2002 adds fast formatting for stylin' documents.

Jim Welp

If you use a lot of different formatting in your Word documents, you've probably had occasion to take advantage of Word's style features. A "style" in Word is simply a collection of formatting attributes. For instance, Word has several built-in styles that let you automatically format headings, body text, lists, tables, and so on. The Heading 2 style, for example, formats your paragraph with Arial, 14-point, bold, italic text (among other things). When you assign a style to a paragraph, you format that paragraph with all of the style's attributes in one fell swoop. So instead of formatting each subheading in your document manually with Arial, 14-point bold, italic text, you can just apply the Heading 2 style with a couple of clicks.

Along with its built-in styles, Word lets you create styles of your own. You can use your own custom styles to bring consistency to your documents and quickly apply various formatting features to any block of text. To make this process even easier, Word 2002 provides a new feature called "Keep track of formatting" that automatically records any special formatting you've made to your document, without forcing you to create styles.

Keep Track of Formatting

By default, the "Keep track of formatting" option is turned on in Word. (If yours isn't, you can turn it on by selecting Tools, Options, clicking the Edit tab, and clicking the "Keep track of formatting" option.) And where does Word keep track of your formatting? Why, that magic happens in the Styles and Formatting task pane. To view it, choose Format, Styles and Formatting or click the Styles and Formatting button on the Formatting toolbar. The button looks like an A riding piggyback on an underlined A. (If you prefer to access tracked formatting and styles from a toolbar, right-click any toolbar and choose Formatting from the menu that appears.)

In the Styles and Formatting task pane you'll find a list of all the manual formatting changes you've made to your document, along with available styles, inside a window called "Pick formatting to apply." You can apply tracked formatting (or a style) to any text by selecting the text and clicking one of the tracked formats or style names. Let's, shall we?

With the task pane open, type There she was, just a walkin' down the street, singin'. Press Enter twice and type Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do. Now select the first sentence and press Ctrl-B-I to apply bold and italic formatting. When you do, Word displays a new entry called Bold, Italic in the Styles and Formatting task pane's "Pick formatting to apply" list. Now you can use that entry just as if it were a style to apply its formatting to any text in your document. Next select "Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do" and click the Bold, Italic entry in the task pane. Presto, change-o: All the style, with 90 percent less hassle.

The Catch

There's always a catch, right? In the case of tracked formatting changes, the catch is that they're much less powerful than styles are, and not as useful. First, styles have clear, descriptive names that allow you to use them without thinking much--a feature I admire in any tool. Also, you can save styles in templates, which makes them easy to apply across multiple documents. Alas, you can use tracked formats only in the document in which they were created. Finally, styles offer some powerful capabilities that tracked formats don't--a topic I'll address next week in a Very Special Office XP Tips Newsletter you won't want to miss. The bottom line is if you plan to use a saved format frequently, you're better off creating a full-fledged style. But for quick and dirty stylin', you can't beat the task pane's ability to track formatting changes.

The Format Painter Has Feelings Too

Now, before you fall head over heels in love with Word's new ability to track formats, don't abandon your old flame, Format Painter. If you've got text on screen that has formatting you want to apply somewhere else in the document, you can do it without the task pane. Click anywhere inside the text with the format that you want to copy, then click the Format Painter button on the Standard toolbar. (This button looks like a paintbrush.) Then select the text you want to "paint" and Word formats that selection according to the source text's style or formatting. The Format Painter is handy if your source text is on screen and you have only one or two formatting changes to make, whereas the task pane will let you make a quick formatting change no matter how remote the source text is in your document.

Select All Text With the Same Style or Formatting

Here's another tip for you one-fell-swoopers: The Styles and Formatting task pane lets you select all of a document's text with the same style or formatting. This can be handy for changing or removing formatting across a document.

First, select any text with the formatting that you want to capture. Now click the Select All button in the Styles and Formatting task pane. If you don't have a paragraph on screen with the formatting you want to select, find the formatting or style in the "Pick formatting to apply" list, right-click it, and choose "Select All x Instance(s)," where x is the number of instances of that formatting in the document.

Two Bonus Tips

Want to remove all the formatting from some text and restore it to the Normal style? Select the entire paragraph or paragraphs and choose Edit, Clear, Formats or click Clear Formatting in the Styles and Formatting task pane. Want to remove manual formatting from text within a paragraph that includes a style--without removing the paragraph's style? For instance, you might have applied italics to a word in a heading and now you want to remove the italics but keep the heading style. Select the text with the format you want to remove and press Ctrl-Spacebar.