Make stylish docs with Microsoft Word

Word styles and themes are often overlooked but are a great asset especially when you are regularly publishing a newsletter and want consistency of the look to your documents. Much is made of templates and jolly useful they are too if you want to make the layout of the document the same every time that you use it.

What is a style?

A style is a set of rules that you can apply to text for consistency

e.g. the main body text of your document might be like this

FONT                Calibri, 10pt, italic, green
ALIGNMENT   Left
PARAGRAPH   single line

What is a theme?

A theme is a collection of styles that you can save to use on multiple documents like a template file but for text only.

I can just use the format painter, why use a theme?

The format painter is great but themes can be adjusted globally. In other words any change of theme or style will affect all instances of the text across the document. So if your editor wishes to change the font for the newsletter from Century Gothic to Creeper for a Halloween feel then changing the font  in the theme has an instant effect On the design menu pick the Fonts drop down and choose customize fonts from the bottom of the menu.

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