Microsoft Office Tutorials and References
In Depth Information
Getting a sense of style
To apply a style to your selected text, you just highlight the text, then click on
By all means have a play with the different styles and experiment with applying
them to your text. But then we need to knuckle down to the serious business of
picking the right style for your headlines.
As you learned a moment ago, styles are about teaching Word what job a
particular piece of text does – that it’s a headline, for example, or a subheading. So even
if you like the look of the Intense Emphasis style, you can’t just use it as the style
for your headlines. You have to use the style that tells Word your text is a headline,
and that style is called Heading 1. Do that now, giving both of your stories a
headline, selecting them and clicking on Heading 1. Don’t worry if it doesn’t look the
way you want for the moment – I’ll be showing you how to change that later.
You’ll notice that there are a number of different styles for headings (Heading 1,
Heading 2 and so on). These don’t just look different: they’re used to help Word
understand how your document is structured. It works like this:
• Heading 1: used for the main headline. On a story about a seaside outing, for
example, this might be: ‘Join us in sunny Clacton this July’!
• Heading 2: used for subheadings in a story that already has a Heading 1
headline. So, in the beach trip story, you might have subheadings like ‘How
to book’ and ‘What to bring’.
• Heading 3: used very rarely, for subheadings in sections that already have
a Heading 2 title. So under ‘How to book’, you might have something like
‘Where to send your form’ as a Heading 3.
• Heading 4: yes, there is a Heading 4. But it’s really not worth talking about.
Unless you’re writing a manual for a nuclear power station, you won’t need it.
In practice, for something like an A4 newsletter, you will probably only ever want
to use Heading 1 and the occasional Heading 2. If you do use more headings,
there are a couple of guidelines to beware of:
• Usually, if you use one subheading in a story, you should use at least two
subheadings of the same type in that story.