Word’s Styles: Using ‘Heading’ styles
Video transcript– Video Duration: 9.51mins
The purpose of the chapters, sections and subsections within your document are to provide a clear structure for your content, and they need to be clearly indicated through the use of headings.
Heading styles are visible in the Styles gallery on the Home tab. Word actually provides up to nine levels of heading styles to help you to create a hierarchical structure, but most dissertations/theses don’t exceed three or four heading levels.
So, the first three heading styles are visible in the Styles gallery on the Home tab: Heading 1, 2 and 3.
For Heading 1, you would typically apply this style for the highest level of heading in your document – it’s the equivalent of Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc.
For Heading 2, you would apply this style for sub-headings.
For Heading 3, you would apply this style if your document’s sub-headings have further sub-headings.
Let’s take a look at seeing heading styles in action.
So, I have some headings in my document. If I click into the word ‘Introduction’, I can see that the style selected is still ‘Normal’, so this means that I’ve used the ‘Normal’style and manually applied ‘Bold’ and ‘18pts’. So that looks fine, however, I won’t be able to generate an automatic Table of Contents using this method, and I won’t be able to use the Navigation Pane. I’ll just show you the Navigation Pane now. I’ll click on the View tab, click on NavigationPane and as you can see here there are no entries at present because I haven’t actually started using heading styles. When I use heading styles for my headings this area here will become populated with those headings and can use this panel as a way of very quickly navigating around my document; which is especially useful when your document starts reaching 200, 300 pages in length.
So, I click back on the Home tab, and here for the word ‘Introduction’ – this is my equivalent of Chapter One, so I’m going to click on the Heading 1 style. As you can see it changes the font type and the font size, but at this point that doesn’t matter. The key thing is to apply the correct heading style to the headings in my document. So, I’m going to scroll through for ‘Literature review’ and I’m also going to make this a Heading 1. And ‘Methodology’ I’ll also make that a Heading 1. For ‘Results’ – Heading 1 and ‘Summary and conclusions’ – that’s also now a Heading 1. And as you can see in the Navigation Pane I now have those entries. And if I click on ‘Methodology’ in the pane, it takes me to the ‘Methodology’ part of the document. So, as you can see, it’s a great way of moving around the document. So, for example, if we wanted to insert a heading here called ‘Background’ - and this is going to be a sub-heading within ‘Literature review’ – I would make that a Heading 2. As you can see this also changes colour, and font, etc. and if we have a look at the Navigation Pane we can see that it is listed within the ‘Literature review’ section, and it is indented indicating that it is a sub-level within ‘Literature review’. So, now if I click on ‘Methodology’, for example,and just type some more text here – ‘Method One’ – this is going to be a sub-heading within the ‘Methodology’chapter, so I shall make that a Heading 2. And here I’m going to add another sub-heading ‘Method Two’, and make that a Heading 2 as well. And again, as you can see, in the ‘Methodology’ chapter, we have ‘Method One’ and ‘Method Two’ underneath each other but indented clearly indicating that they are sub-headings with in the larger heading of ‘Methodology’.
For a Heading three this would relate to creating a sub-heading within, for example, ‘Method One’. So, again if I type some text – we can make that a Heading 3, so you should be able to see now the hierarchy here that is building. It is reflected at this point by the decreasing font size of the headings from 1 to 3, and over on the Navigation Pane. You can see the indentation which reflects the hierarchical structure.
So far I have applied heading styles to the headings in my document. Now it’s time to modify those styles so that they reflect the font type that I need for the document.
So, to do this I will go up to the Styles group and right-click on the Heading 1 button and choose Modify. I shall change the font type to Times New Roman, 18pts and Black, and I shall also make the text Bold. So, all of these changes relate to the Heading 1 style. And I then click on OK. So here we can see that ‘Introduction’ has changed in its appearance. If I click on the heading for ‘Methodology’, it takes me to that part of the document and I can see that the changes to the Heading 1 style have applied to all of my heading 1s in the document. So, that’s modifying the Heading 1 style.
If I navigate now to a Heading 2 style in my document, I’m going to click on ‘Background’ from the Navigation Pane. To change the attributes of Heading 2 I can right-click on the Heading 2 button in the Styles group and choose Modify, and make the relevant changes. So, I am choosing Times New Roman, 16pts Bold and Automatic Black. And click on OK, and there we can see the change.
So, I am now going to click on a Heading 3 within my document. There is an example of a heading 3, if I click into it and look up at the Styles group I can see that it is selected. So, I could right-click on the Heading 3 button and choose Modify, but I’ll just remind you about the Dialog Box Launcher over here on the right- hand side. If I click on that it gives me the Styles pane, which I can move around if I wish. So, here’s my Heading 3 – if I click on the arrow for it, I’ve got the Modify option. And again, I can make the relevant changes, so I am selecting Times New Roman, 14pts, Bold and Black. And click on OK, and there we can have our modified Heading 3.
Now something that I haven’t mentioned in this video, but you can apply it to your document is to introduce some Paragraph Spacing. So, for example, Heading 1… if I decide I would like to introduce more space beneath my Heading 1 style to have this kind of effect then instead of using the Enter key on my keyboard I would actually useParagraph Spacing. I shall just delete that space. Up on the Styles pane, for Heading 1 I shall click on the Modify option. I need to click on the Format button and choose Paragraph. We have 12pts of space ‘Before’ the paragraph or in this case it’s actually before the heading, and 1.5 line spacing. So, I can change that to Single Line spacing – so that just in case you’ve got a very long heading, if it wraps down to a second line you won’t be incorporating 1.5 line spacing. If you decide that your ‘chapter 1’ equivalent, or Heading 1 styles, are always going to be positioned at the top of a new page then you don’t need any paragraph spacing above it. To introduce more space beneath a Heading 1 style, I’m going to choose 24pt of space just so that you can see an obvious change. Click on OK, and click on OK again to save the changes for all of our Heading 1s occurrences in our document.
Now watch the video on Multilevel Lists.