Office XP Tips: Create a Custom Style Template

Save time on formatting with Word 2002's new features.

Jim Welp

Word makes it easy to format text in your documents. Between the Styles and Formatting task pane and the various formatting buttons on Word's toolbars, you can quickly spit-shine your letters, reports, memos, publications, and other documents in no time flat. However, if you routinely create the same types of documents--with the same formatting--over and over, you can greatly simplify your life by taking advantage of Word's style features.

One of the great features of styles is their ability to define not only the format of the current paragraph, but also the paragraph that follows. When you create a series of styles that take advantage of this, you can save a ton of formatting time.

For instance, suppose you write a highly popular, award-winning Office XP Newsletter that's published weekly for thousands of adoring (not to mention charming and attractive) fans. The newsletter always takes the same format. There's a title, a subtitle, a byline, and body text, all with their unique formatting. You could create Word styles to take care of all that formatting, so you'd never have to do it again. Even better, you could save those styles in a Word template that you could use each week when you write your newsletter. Better still, you could take advantage of the ability for one style to determine the following paragraph's style so that each time you pressed Enter, Word would automatically know which style to change to next!

That's truly the best of all possible worlds. This week, to illustrate, I'll present a recipe for a series of styles that roughly mimics the formatting for this newsletter. However, this recipe has thousands of applications. I hope you'll modify it to take some of the drudgery out of your daily formatting chores.

Setting Up the Template

A template is a Word document that serves as the basis for new Word documents. Once you've set up your style template, you can use it whenever you want to take advantage of those styles. To create the template, choose File, New to open the New Document task pane. Next, in the section called "New from template," click General Templates. In the Templates dialog box, click the General tab and click Template in the lower-right corner of the dialog box. Now, double-click Blank Document to open a new, blank template. Now you're ready to create your styles.

Creating the Styles

In this example, we'll create four styles, using the following formatting:

• My Body Text--Verdana, 10 point
• My Byline--Verdana, 8 point, bold
• My Subtitle--Verdana, 12 point, bold
• My Title--Verdana, 14 point, bold, light blue

To implement the automatically-switch-styles-when-I-press-Enter feature, we'll create the styles in the reverse order they'll appear in the document. We'll use the Styles and Formatting task pane to create them, so open it now by selecting Format, Styles and Formatting or clicking the Styles and Formatting button on the Formatting toolbar.

Let's get this party started. Since these steps are kind of monotonous and repetitive and redundant and tend to repeat themselves, I'll speed things up by slipping into this phone booth and change from mild-mannered Prose Guy into--ta da!--Numbered List Man!

Create My Body Text:
1. In the Styles and Formatting task pane, click the New Style button.
2. In the New Style dialog box, type My Body Text in the Name text box.
3. Under Formatting, in the font pick list, choose Verdana.
4. Under Formatting, in the font size list, choose 10.
5. Click OK.

Create My Byline:
1. In the Styles and Formatting task pane, click the New Style button.
2. In the New Style dialog box, type My Byline in the Name text box.
3. In the "Style based on" list, choose My Body Text.
4. In the "Style for following paragraph" list, choose My Body Text.
5. In the font size list, choose 8.
6. Click the "B" or Bold button.
7. Click OK.

Create My Subtitle:
1. In the Styles and Formatting task pane, click the New Style button.
2. In the New Style dialog box, type My Subtitle in the Name text box.
3. In the "Style based on" list, choose My Body Text.
4. In the "Style for following paragraph" list, choose My Byline.
5. In the font size list, choose 12.
6. Click the "B" or Bold button.
7. Click OK.

Create My Title:
1. In the Styles and Formatting task pane, click the New Style button.
2. In the New Style dialog box, type My Title in the Name text box.
3. In the "Style based on" list, choose My Body Text.
4. In the "Style for following paragraph" list, choose My Subtitle.
5. In the font size list, choose 14.
6. Click the Bold button.
7. In the color list (click the little down arrow next the underline letter "A"), choose Light Blue.
8. Click OK.

Note that we based each style on My Body Text. That means that if you later want to make a global change to all the styles--say, change the font--you need only modify the My Body Text style and the change will show up in all the styles (but only for new documents, not ones you created before the change).

Now that you've created your styles, there's one more step before you save and close the template: assigning the My Title style to the template's one and only paragraph. Without entering any text at all in the template, choose the My Title style from the Styles and Formatting task pane or the Formatting toolbar. Finally, click the Save icon or select File, Save. Type My Style Template.dot in the "File name" box, click Save, and close the template.

Taking the New Template for a Spin

Ready to try out your groovy new template? Choose File, New to open the New Document task pane. In the section called "New from template," click "My Style Template.dot." Word opens a new document based on the template, with the My Title style active. Next, type Wow! It's a Big Ol' Blue Title and press Enter. Word will automatically switch to the My Subtitle style. Type Can it be? Why, yes, it's a subtitle! and press Enter. Word automatically switches to the My Byline style. Type By Me and press Enter. Word switches to the My Body Text style. Now, type the Gettysburg Address--or not. It's up to you.

If your template later gets bumped from the New Document task pane's "New from template" list, click General Templates to open it from the Templates dialog box. You'll find it on the General tab.

Personalizing the Template

Whether you subscribe to the HTML version of this newsletter or the text version, or read it on the Web site, you'll notice the template I described above doesn't look exactly like the formatting for this column. That's because it would take too much space here to exactly replicate this column's formatting in all its versions, especially considering that you probably don't want to own a template that formats this newsletter. Instead, I hope you'll use the steps to create a document that meets your peculiar formatting needs. (Not that your needs are peculiar.)

The New Style dialog box offers every formatting option under the sun. For instance, you might include a first-line indent in your body text style or tinker with the line-spacing options to fine-tune your white space. Heck, click around to explore the options the New Style dialog box's Format button offers. Go crazy!

Finally, keep in mind that you can apply any style at any time just by clicking its name in the Styles and Formatting task pane. Just because you can automatically format a document from start to finish as you type (beginning with the title in this example) doesn't mean you have to.