How to use Styles in Microsoft Word

hi everyone my name is Kevin today I want to show you how you could use styles in Microsoft Word and is full disclosure before we jump into this I work at Microsoft as a full time employee my HR department requires me to say that now if you've never used styles before styles are a very nice way you could format your document it makes it really easy to make updates you can even insert a table of contents which are automatically updated styles give you lots and lots of benefits if you've never used them before this video will change the way you work with Word documents alright well hopefully that makes you excited why don't we jump on the PC and I'll show you how you can use styles so here I am in Microsoft Word and this is a this is the latest and greatest version that comes with Microsoft 365 and what I have here this is a travel list that I've created and every time I go on a trip I've referenced this sheet to look and make sure that I have all my bath gear to make sure I have all the right clothing that I'm bringing all the right tech along so I have lots of different content on here it's just a very basic Word document no special formatting the only thing I've done is I've added numbered lists and that's really it so with Styles what is the benefit of applying a style well let me just show a quick example of where Styles can be beneficial so in this sheet that you see here I have these different headers so in this case I have bath and then I have clothing and let's say that hey actually I want to make the header a little more prominent so maybe what I'll do is I'll highlight this and I'll make it bold maybe I increase the font size on it a little bit and maybe I make it blue so there's my new header the only problem is like you know here if I look down at clothing it's still my old style here if I go down technology that hasn't updated so what I could do is I say okay well you know I can click on this and I could redo all the formatting or what I could do is I could use the format painter to basically copy the format and then I could paste it there and apply the format and I could go through my entire sheet and do that but there are lots of different headings in this sheet so that's going to be a lot of work well this is where Styles come in and styles can really save me a lot of time so what could do with this style let me actually highlight this header and I'm gonna go through quickly and I'm just gonna highlight all my different headers here so we're gonna go ahead and select that one up front you're gonna invest some time but this will pay off as you make updates so here I've highlighted all my different headers within my document and now I'm gonna say these are all heading one that's style so to apply a style what I'm going to do is within the home pivot you have this section called styles and then you simply click on a style to apply it and what I can also do is if I click on this little drop down I could scroll through or I could just see them all at one time so I could see all the Styles I have here and so now I've applied my Styles now the neat thing is if I make a change to this style now it'll apply to all the other places that are using this style so what I mean by that is let me actually click on heading one and I'm gonna right click on it now and what I could do is I could go to modify so I'm going to click on modify and here I have all these different controls over how I want to modify heading 1 so I could change the fonts I could change the size the bolding the color I could even change things like the paragraph spacing the borders around it so there's lots of different things I could adjust for the style of this and so let's say just a really simple change maybe I want to make it red and then I'm gonna click on OK and what you'll see happen now all the headers within my document bath clothing technology all these things it's updated them automatically so as I'm working on a document any place that references that style will automatically update so the benefit of styles is as you make changes to a style it'll very quickly apply it to all places that use that style so it gives you lots of control and makes it very easy to update the look and feel of a document now one thing I can also do in Microsoft Word there is a design pivot up on top so I'm going to click there and you'll see all these different themes that exist and now these themes take advantage of styles that you've set so here I'm going to choose the shaded theme and so what it'll do now is it looks for all the heading ones and it applies a specific theme and here I could choose other themes here and it takes advantage of me defining these different styles for the different elements within my document so it makes it very easy to update the look and feel of your document here you could also apply different colors you could apply different font types and it'll very quickly go through and then update that throughout your document so that's one of the benefits of styles just being able to quickly update I also want to call out one other benefit and one reason you should also be using styles so here's what I'm going to do not only can you update the look and feel of the document but you could also offer some more utility let's say that I wanted to offer a table of contents for all this content well what I typically have to do is I'd have to type in you know here let me go back to the normal so what I typically do is I would type in bath and then I would type in what my next section is clothing so let's type in clothing and so I could go through and then I could add each one of those as a section for my table of contents and then I could look up well this is on page one this is on page two but manually trying to keep that up to date is quite difficult so what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the references tab and within references there's an option to insert a table of contents so here I could insert these automatic table of content contents or it can also create a custom date table of contents so first off let's just insert this automatic table of contents and voila it's all done all the page numbers match the page that that heading appears on and the table of contents is leveraging the fact that I put down all these headings within my document now what I what I'm also going to show you how to do I'm going to get rid of this table of contents for a moment let's go ahead and delete that and I'm gonna go back to references table of contents and I'll do a custom table of contents one thing you'll see here is with a table of contents I could have it take advantage of the heading 1 heading 2 heading 3 so as I define more styles in my document and more heading Styles the table of contents will take advantage of that so kind of a nice capability if you want to use table of contents if you want to use table of contents it's also critical that you're using styles in your document now one other thing I also want to show another benefit of applying styles so if I go here and click on the view pivot one thing you'll see here is I can also click on something called the navigate in pain so I'm gonna go ahead let's click on that and what this will do is it'll show me a quick view of my document headings and so here I'm currently on the bath view but if I want to jump down to a tropical vacation I could click there and a little throw me to that spot in the document and it's a very nice quick way I could jump around my document once again using headings that I've defined and I could do that by applying different styles so another benefit of applying styles all right well that's a quick demonstration of first off why you want to apply styles to your document and then what benefits you could get from it one of them is you could just quickly update the look and feel of your document without much effort you could also use styles if you want to insert a table of contents and you want it to be automatically generated you want to keep the page numbers up to date and then you can also use styles as a quick way to navigate throughout your document and jump to the different sections within your document if you learn something new about using styles and you think you might use styles moving forward in your documents please give this video a thumbs up once again as I always say if you want to see more videos like this in the future hit that subscribe button that way you'll get a notification anytime new content like this comes out and lastly if there are any other topics you want to see me cover in the future leave a comment down below I'll add it to my list of videos to create and hey that's all the content I had for all of you today I hope you enjoy it and hope to see you next time bye

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 85,965

Rating: 4.9499998 out of 5

Keywords: word, microsoft word, office, word 365, 365, microsoft office, styles, style, table of contents, navigate, ms word, ms, office 365, format, formatting, format painter

Id: UOVU6qQ2iOM

Length: 8min 9sec (489 seconds)

Published: Sun May 10 2020