Stylesheets in Microsoft Word

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MY GOD are you 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 clearly delineates what is heading and what is not without the need for ugly underlining and bold.

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

A dialogue box will pop up and let you choose a Heading font and a 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. Every line you type into a Word document: be it a heading, body text, an address line in a letter, the text in a cell, a numbered subparagraph, or a page number on a footer — every line has its own character and paragraph properties. You can save these into a “paragraph styles” that you can quicly access from the Style window. You can also create character styles and list styles: we will get on to these. The Style window is a really important concept to get your head around.

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