My favorite style is sensible. And I'm not talking about fashion here,
I'm referring to the feature that is found in word processing
applications like Word and InDesign. Why are styles sensible? They save
time and help you produce better looking documents. A style is a basket
for a group of formatting commands. If you decide to make your chapter
titles 37 pt Bold Dark Teal Verdana on chapter 1 you may not recall
exactly what you did by chapter 13. Styles would save the day! You can
name your 37 pt Bold Dark Teal Verdana text "Chapter titles" and then
apply the "Chapter titles" style wherever you like, without remembering
all of the details. Another sensible trait of styles is the ease with
which you can change your formatting. Down the road, around chapter 32
of your book, you decide you want the chapter titles to be purple and
small caps. Styles save the day again. Instead of selecting and changing
each of your 32 titles individually (hello, time-consuming!) you can
modify your "Chapter titles" style and every instance of it will be
updated.
If styles only assist in making things look pretty they wouldn't be
supergirl-in-disguise-worthy. Add functionality to styles and now we're talking.
Remember the days of typing out your table of contents only to have more
edits come in. The edits change the pages and the table of contents you
carefully typed is useless.
Those days are over. Let's go back
to your 32 chapter book. Because you used "Chapter titles" for every
chapter tile in the book you don't have to retype anything. Instead you
will insert a dynamic table of contents based on your style. The table
can be updated to reflect edits to your document without retyping or
counting pages. [In Word Help keyword search "Table of Contents" to
learn more.]
Using styles can seem complex at first. Don't give up, supergirl, they're
worth learning. Begin with the built-in styles in Word. Apply them,
modify them, see just how many different options you have. When you're
getting the hang of things look for an online tutorial to teach you
more. Let's see where sensible styles take you.
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