If your company creates a lot of documents, forms, white-papers, etc it’s very handy to have a specific Word style set that matches the rest of your company branding so all your documents are consistent. In this post I will go through the steps on creating your own style set and deploying it through your organization using Word 2007. If you are using a different version of Word, the process will be very similar, but the clicks might be slightly different.
If you don’t know what styles are in Word, chances are you’re wasting a lot of time formatting your documents. Styles basically allow you to name certain types of text and apply that formatting over and over again. It also allows you to change the formatting of the style and it will apply it to all instances of that style throughout the document. Oh, and if you’re still creating headings by just increasing the font size and changing the color of normal text, then for the sake of anyone who has to edit your document in the future, learn to use the styles feature.
Creating your own style set in Word 2007
You can create your own style set in Word by simply modifying the normal styles and setting your new ones as the default. To modify the styles, simply download this document (.docx | .doc) which contains most of the different styles you’ll need to modify. To modify each style, simply right click on the style in the ribbon snd click modify.
Once you’ve modified all the styles and you’re happy with it, simply click the “Change Styles” button and select “Set as Default”. From now on each new document you create will have all those styles available by default.
Making sure everyone in your organization is using the same style set.
Now that you’ve got a nice style set to use, you’ll want to make sure everyone else in your organization is working from the same style. Simply send them a copy of the styles document that you created (based on the downloadable template above) and ask them to:
- Open the document and make sure they’re looking at the new styles
- Save the style as a new Quick Style Set by clicking Change Styles> Style Set> Save as Quick Style Set.... Choose a nice name for the style (e.g. Schoonzie) and from now on this style set will be available to apply to any Word document you open. Just click Change Styles> Style Set and choose the style set you just saved in the step above.
- Make that style the default style set that Word uses by clicking Change Style> Set as Default so each new document you open will use that style.
That’s it, you’re all done. If you’ve got some nice styles that you have created in Word, I’d love to see them, just email nick at schoonzie dot com.
