How important are Word's default styles?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Scott Meyers
  • Start date Start date
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Scott Meyers

I'm moving to Word 2002 from FrameMaker, and I find Word's default paragraph
style names unintuitive. I'm used to choosing my own names for paragraph
styles. I don't know much about Word yet, but I assume I can ignore Word's
default styles, and perhaps I can get rid of them entirely by replacing or
modifying normal.dot. However, I recently also started using PowerPoint 2002,
and in migrating some materials from FrameMaker to PowerPoint via Word, I found
that PowerPoint correctly formatted the material only if it used the default
Word style names. There also seem to be predefined keyboard shortcuts for five
of the default Word styles. These two things suggest that Word's default
paragraph styles are "special" and that trying to avoid them is likely to lead
to trouble down the road.

Should I force myself to live with Word's default styles (or at least default
style names), or would it be equally reasonable to get rid of them and use my
own style names?

Thanks,

Scott
 
I'd say that there are two categories of built-in styles. Some are
automatically applied by Word in specific circumstances. For example,
when you create a table of contents, Word uses the TOC series of
styles for the various TOC levels. Similarly, when you insert a
footnote, Word applies the Footnote Text paragraph style to the
footnote text, and formats the footnote number with the Footnote
Reference character style. These automatically applied built-in styles
are quite useful. Note that you can modify them to suit your needs.

The other category of built-in styles include styles that you can
choose to make use of. By default, the Normal style is applied to the
empty paragraph in a blank document. Note that since this style is the
"parent" style for most other styles in Word, modifying it may cause
unwanted side-effects. I'd say: Don't use the Normal style. You can
use it to change properties that should be changed in all (or almost
all) other styles; for example, the font name and size, but there is
usually no need to actually apply it to document text.

In contrast, the built-in headings should be used. For reasons why,
see
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/numbering/UseBuiltInHeadingStyles.html.

The other built-in styles (Body Text, Body Text 2, First Line Indent,
etc.) in this category can be used -- or not. It is completely up to
you.

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP


in message
news:[email protected]...
 
Stefan has pretty much summed it up (and I also recommend Shauna's article
on heading styles). One further note, however: you can add your own name to
a style as an "alias." For example, you can't change the name of Heading 1
to "Chapter Title," but you can change it to "Heading 1, Chapter Title."

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

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