Stylesheets in Microsoft Word

Office anthropology™ Go Premium The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

BOY are you ever going to thank the JC for this. Here is how to format a document in Microsoft Word so you never need to worry about it again.

“Body” styles and “Headings” styles

In any document, a text is either body text, like you are reading now, or heading text, like the previous heading. In the lovely JC, body text is always Georgia — of course — because not only is Georgia an elegant serif font and freely available on the web and in all good word processing programmes, it is also called Georgia, and that is important — and headings are in Helvetica: a stylish and relaxing sans serif font you often see in airports and other places where not stressing people out is important.

Having sans serif for headings and serif fonts for body text often looks good: it delineates what is heading and what is not without the need for ugly underlining or bold.

In any case, at a deep level, Word understands this fundamental distinction between Headings and Body, and lets you designate your Headings and Body fonts. You do that in Design/Fonts/Customise fonts...

A dialogue box will pop up and let you choose a Heading and Body font, and save this as a “Theme”. Do this now. (You will see Word has lots of its own, too: feel free to take one of those).

Paragraph styles

Right. Now as you should know, every line you type into a Word document has its own “character” and “paragraph” properties. A lot of people don’t know you can standardise and save these into “paragraph styles” and easily assign them to paragraphs from the “Style pane”. (You can also create character styles and list styles: we will get on to these.)

What is more you can set similar styles to inherit properties from each other: If you want a level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, each the same only each indented from the last, you set up level 1, and then say level 2 is based on level 1, only with a different left-hand margin. Then if you change any other features of level 1 other than the left-hand margin, level 2 (et seq.) update automatically. This saves a LOT of time.

You should try to limit the number of paragraph styles, but for a legal contract, you will need quite a few: four or five levels of heading, as many as eight levels of numbering, as many as eight levels of “flush text” and some weird extra ones like headers, footers, page numbers, addresses and the various bits of an execution block.

You should create an organised set of paragraph styles and save them in the “Styles” pane in Word.

Start with Word’s built-in “Normal” style, and set the basic paragraph parameters for body text — font size, justification, margins, space before and space after — there. This will be the underlying model for your document. All your other paragraph types will diverge from it in certain respects, but inherit it in others.

JC suggests:

Alignment: Left
Outline level: Body Text
Indentation: 0cm left and right; special (none);
Spacing: Before 0pt after 4pt and leave the “don’t add space between paragraphs of the same style” unchecked.
Line Spacing: At least 12pt

Also set font parameters. For the font, do not choose “Georgia” or “Garamond” or “Arial” or whatever. This is important. Scroll right up to the top of font dialog dropdown and choose +Body. This means your “Normal” font will take whatever you have specified as your Theme “Body” font. And it also means you can change your theme fonts without having to faff around with all the stylesheets.

Font: +Body
Font style: Regular
Size: 10pt

Now repeat this process for all your body paragraph levels.

See also

• Microsoft Word