Successfully formatting documents in Word 7: Part 2: Exercise Instructions

Video 2: Creating styles and applying them to text

These are the exercise instructions that accompany thesecondvideo in the series of ‘Successfully formatting documents in Word 7’.

Watch the video first, so I can talk you through these exercises, so that you can understand more easily what is being asked.

Then work through the exercises below, using the training document to apply the techniques, where indicated.

The exercises that video 1 covered were:

Exercise 1: Applying Styles to headings

Exercise 2: Modifying styles

Exercise 3: Modifying the default style

You need to be able to do the above, to be able to understand these next exercises

The exercises covered in Video 2 are:

Exercise 4: Creating a new ‘body text’ style

Exercise 5: Applying the new style to text with similar formatting

Exercise 6: Creating a ‘reference’ style

Exercise 7: Tidying up the formatting

Exercise 8: Creating an ‘indented quote’ style

Exercise 4: Creating a new style

  1. Click thedrop down menu shown by arrow (1) and select the apply styles dialog box – it opens an Apply Stylesbox. Click the AA button, as indicated by arrow (2). Then click the left hand AAbutton in the Styles box (arrow 3) to open up a Create New Style from Formattingdialog box.

This is a screenshot of part of the New Styles dialog box you will use to create a new style.

For the purpose of the training exercise, let’s create a new style with the following properties. In your training document, create a new style with the following properties:

Name- Dissertation body text

Style based on – Normal

Style for following paragraph – Dissertation Body text(as shown below)

Paragraph Alignment – Fully justified (using either or thenParagraph option)

Paragraph spacing –before 12pt & after 12pt

Line Spacing - 1.5

Line and page breaks – Widow and orphan

Click on ‘automatically update’ box and click OK to save

If you also tick the ‘Add to Quick Style list’, then it will add this as another style you can choose from in the style list.

You will see that the body text in that paragraph has been formatted to the new style.

Exercise 5: Applying the new body text style to all body text

From the formatting you have done, Word now recognises that you have headers, and you have one paragraph of body text, but all the rest of the body text is still in the ‘normal style’. You can go through the document and apply the new style a paragraph at a time. However, here is a shortcut on how to do it very quickly.

Here is how to apply the Dissertation Body textwe created in the previous taskto ALL text which is currently formatted in the Normal style.

  1. In the training document, put the cursor in (click on) any text that is in normal style
  1. Now on the Home tab go to the ‘Editing’ section on the right hand side of the ribbon and drop down the Select menu and click on Select text with similar formatting
  1. Observe that all normal text has been selected. Choose the Dissertation Body text from the list of styles displayed to apply it to the selected text.
  1. Note that all of the body text has now been updated to be in the new Dissertation Body text style.


Exercise 6: Creating a reference style

We want to create a reference style that is based on the Dissertation Body Text style, but has slightly different formatting.

  1. Create a new style called reference style based on the dissertation body text but with the following attributes:

Justification - Left justified

Spacing - Single spacing

Style for following paragraph – reference style

Make sure that automatic updates is ticked and press OK to save.

  1. This time if you ‘select all text with similar formatting’ it will select all ‘dissertation body text’, which you don’t want, so you have to highlight all the references with your mouse and then apply the reference style.
  1. Save the changes to your document.

Exercise 7: Tidying up your formatting

  1. Click on the Show/Hide formatting button in the home tab to display the formatting in your document.

You will see in places that there is unwanted

formatting, as shown in the box on the right: here:

Therefore:

  1. Go through the document and tidy it up and remove any unnecessary formatting
  2. Save the changes to your document.

Exercise 8: Inserting an ‘indented quote’ style

About half way down page 2 of the training document you will see this long quote (starting ‘We have a system…’). Any long quote (approximately 40+ words) should really be presented on its own and indented (not centred).

Therefore, we are going to set up a new style for an ‘indented quote’.

As we did with the reference style, we are going to base it on the Dissertation body text style, but we will just make the following changes. The numbers indicate the steps below:

  1. Open up the dialog box for creating a new style (see exercise 4 for how to do that) and type in the new style ‘indented quote
  2. Style type: will be based on a paragraph format
  3. Style based on: Dissertation Body Text
  4. Style for following paragraph: Dissertation body text
  5. Single line spacing
  6. Indent button – this will indent the paragraph by 1.27cm
  7. This shows the preview of the indented quote

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Dr Shuna Marr, May 2014