Creative Tips #7: Do It With Style

There's doing things the easy way, and there's doing things the hard way. In my experience, better than 99 percent of Word, Word Perfect or Open Office users do things the hard way, because they have never heard of, or don't use, two of the most important tools built into modern word processing programs: Styles and Templates. Both of these have a similar purpose: to automate the things that you do over and over again, leaving you free to concentrate on the content of your document. The difference is that Styles take care of the formatting of different types of heading and paragraphs, while templates store a blank "master document" that contains all the styles and formatting ready made for you.

In this issue, and perhaps a couple more, we will take up Styles.

Styles came in with one of the very earliest versions of Microsoft Word. We're going to look at Styles as your word processing program understands them, and see how they can make your life much, much easier when writing almost any kind of document longer than a short note.

What Is A Style?

What your word processor calls a "Style" is a way of saving the way your carefully-selected text formatting in a way that is easy to reuse. "Paragraph Styles" contain font, line spacing, margin and other information. "Character Styles" define a typeface and any variations, such as italics, bold, underline, etc.

Even more useful than making formatting reusable, styles make the look of your document, or a particular type of paragraph (such as quotations or a bullet-list of items) easy to change. Imagine you have a 30-page manual with hundreds of paragraphs, and you decide that you don't want to use Times Roman for the text. Rather than go through and manually change them, you go to one place, change the style definition, and every paragraph that has that style will automatically update to the new definition. The first time you do this, you will smile. I guarantee it!

Some of the standard built-in styles can also do neat tricks like allowing you to create a Table of Contents automatically with a few mouse-clicks if you used the right styles when you created the document. This can be an incredible time-saver for employee manuals, textbooks, or even that poetry book that's still languishing on your hard drive.

If you've never used them before, styles are a new adventure.

Getting Started

Open a blank document and type a few words. You can be as elaborate about this as you like, but at the very least type a half-dozen words, press the Enter key (only once!), and type a few more. You now have two paragraphs that we will use to illustrate what styles are and what they can do for you.

Click somewhere inside the first paragraph. Your text should look something like this:

On your Format menu in Word 2003 and earlier, or in Open Office, there's a selection called "Styles and Formatting" where you can make changes, but for now look on the toolbar just above the document. You will see a box with the word "Normal" in it, if you're using Word, or "Default" if you use Open Office. This is the Style box, and it's usually right beside the font and font size information. Here's what they look like:

"Normal" (or "Default") is the predefined style assigned to text by the program if nothing else has been selected. It is typically a "plain Jane" style, with some version of Times Roman set as the typeface. The default size is 12 points. There is no space between the paragraphs and the line spacing is the same as the point size. You'll want to change both of these, if you were following the earlier newsletters where we covered these points.

This time, though, we're going to take a different approach; one that will pay dividends later, when we want to add more text and a heading or two.

With your cursor still in that first paragraph, click inside the Style box and drag the mouse over the word "Normal" or "Default" so that it is completely highlighted. Type the words "Body text" in Word, or "Text body" in Open Office. Be sure to spell these correctly, because they are style names that are built into the program.

Magically, a space opens up between the two paragraphs of text, because the style "Body Text" includes a 6 point space after the paragraph. Body Text is what is called a "Paragraph Style" because it affects whole paragraphs. Character styles, which we will cover another time, affect only the appearance of the letters and numbers to which they are applied, not the whole paragraph.

Now comes the fun part: from the Format menu, select "Formatting and Styles." Depending on which version of which program you have, styles will show up in a menu or in a separate panel. Whichever it is, right-click (click with the right mouse button, or on a Mac with only a single-button mouse, hold down the Control key and click) the Body Text entry and choose "Modify." Find the Font selection (which will say "Times New Roman" or something similar) and change it to something else. I used Century Gothic, but it can be anything you want. Click OK.

Click in the second paragraph, which has not changed and still has the Normal or Default style. Click the little drop-down arrow in the Style box and choose "Body Text" from the list that appears. Now your second line of text is in the same font as the first.

Go back to the Format menu, to Styles and Formatting, and again change the font for the Body Text style. Now BOTH lines immediately change to the new font. Do you see where this is going? It doesn't matter how many paragraphs are in your document. As long as they have the "Body Text" style they will ALL change at once to whatever font you select.

But it's not just the font. Anything you can set in a character or a paragraph format can also be set in a paragraph style.

I'll leave it to you to modify the line spacing, indents, font and paragraph spacing just as we've talked about in earlier Creative Tips, but this time make your changes in the Body Text style.

There is so much you can do with styles that it's impossible to cover them in a short newsletter. Next week we'll take this a step further, and show how using styles can automate much of your document creation.

Using styles doesn't just save time and effort. It can make a huge difference to how your company is perceived by the outside world. If Joe in bookkeeping uses 1-inch margins and 10-point Arial, while Maisie in the sales office uses 12-point Book Antiqua with half-inch margins and the CEO's letters are set in 11 point Garamond with one-and-a-half inch margins, and if – as often happens – none of these fonts works with the company logo, you're going to look like an amateur no matter how professional your work is.

When I work with a client on a full corporate identity program, one of the things I do is establish what their text styles will be for correspondence, training manuals and other office documents, including margins and line spacing and all the other things we've discussed. Having these styles set up ahead of time greatly reduces confusion and ensures that all the company's communications, no matter who types them, will have the same look, a vital part of establishing a visual "brand" and a basic point of professionalism that inspires confidence with the company's various publics.

Bonus Tip

If you ever create ads for such things as the Yellow Pages, or a business directory, or if you create simple promotional flyers for your business, here's another formatting faux pas that you should avoid whenever you can, even for simple headlines.

One of the most recognizable signs of "kitchen table" document layout is that all the text is centered. Centering works for invitations (most of the time), but for almost any other purpose it sends this message: "I couldn't figure out what to do with this text, so I centered it." A centered layout is totally balanced, serene, static, unimaginative and going nowhere. That is almost never the message you want to convey! It might work for, say, a funeral parlor, but unless you're in that business, don't use it.

Centered text is also harder to read, because each line starts in a different place, so it works only for very short pieces of text such as wedding invitations. But, honest, even wedding invitations have a lot more zing when the designer avoids the centering cliché.

Happy typesetting,

Alan Gilbertson
Creative Director
G&G Creative

The Creative Tips newsletter is published by G&G Creative, Tujunga, CA. More at www.gngcreative.com or on the blog.

G&G Creative specializes in graphic design, photography and copy writing for print and the web.

Copyright © 2009 Alan Gilbertson. All Rights Reserved.