Styles in Microsoft Word
Being the web developer that I am, I can format copy with xhtml better (and faster ) than I can with Microsoft Word. That’s how much I know the application.
But I DO know styles and I’m used to formatting with them. I’m a Don’t Repeat Yourself kind of guy. So for the first time ever, I decided to use styles in Word.
Ok great, New Style, “code”. Let’s make it Courier, 12pt, bold. Perfect. I select my words and apply the style. Great. So far so good. Wait… the type size is too big. No problem, I’m using STYLES! You see thats where the beauty of styles lies, not repeating yourself. Now that my style is applied to those pieces of text, I can just change my style and everything will conform to it. Right?
Wrong. I changed my style and nothing changed with it. I had to reapply the style to every piece of text that I had already spent time styling. Thanks Microsoft.
I just tried your experiment in Word 2003 and I had no trouble doing what you described: as soon as I modified the style (in my case, I changed the font color to blue) all the words I had set to the “code” style changed to blue. Then I modified the style again to change the font size, and all the code changed as expected.
Comment by Mike Schwartz — November 17, 2005 @ 7:53 am
It might be fair to say that this was done with Microsoft Office 2004 on Os X. Also, upon further investigation, when placing the cursor on a word with a specific style, pressing “Select All…” in the Styles palette will select every word in the document with the specific style. Choosing the new style then applys it across the document. That’s still uneccessary steps.
Comment by Jon — November 17, 2005 @ 9:15 am
thats nice you can do it much better.
Comment by arzenio — November 22, 2005 @ 6:25 am