Up until now, you’ve been learning about how to create documents and implement formatting bit by bit. In other words, you create a document and changes you make are typically localized. In this lesson, we step back a bit and show you how styles can take the work out of creating a consistent look and feel that you can control from a central location rather than having to needlessly apply changes to each and every part.
Styles are very useful for generating a table of contents but that is but only one use for them.
The main function for styles is to allow you to quickly set titles, subheadings, section headings apart from one another by giving them unique fonts, font characteristics, and sizes. By grouping these characteristics into styles, you can create documents that have a consistent look without having to manually format each section header. Instead you set the style and you can control every heading set as that style from central location.
With styles you can:
Apply a consistent look across the whole document instead of having to format each section individually.
Automatically number section headers.
Apply same font to the entire text body.
Apply the same font to header sections.
Use a consistent paragraph spacing.
Pick a default color scheme for SmartArt, charts, and shapes.
Pick from a number of pre-designed styles use them as your own and modify them.
Let’s go over some examples to give you a better idea of what some of these mean. First, note the “Styles” section on the “Home” tab.