If your documents vary in font color, size, emphasis, paragraph spacing, and formatting, and even such choices as widow and orphan control, working with styles can save you loads of time. Word styles make consistent formatting painless in creating the original document, especially if you need to reformat it later.

Styles appear on the Word 2007 Ribbon under the Home tab. In fact, by default the Styles area takes up roughly 40 percent of the main Ribbon's real estate, which I'd call a clear indication that Microsoft has placed styles front and center in the new Worduniverse.

Five styles display by default in the ribbon bar, but clicking the down arrow reveals more, and clicking the bottom arrow reveals all of them. In either case, when you hover over any of the styles, the currently selected text in Word or the paragraph at the current cursor location temporarily changes to that style to show you what it would look like. Further, clicking the small arrow on the far right-hand side of the Styles area opens the Styles dialog box, where you can select from a list of styles.

Saving StylesSaving styles
You can create as many styles as you want, but, more important, you can create different groups of styles and save them as "style sets" for later reuse. Once you have the styles you want for a particular type of document, click the Change Styles icon on the ribbon bar and choose Style Set | Save As Quick Style Set.

Get Your Style On
There are two main ways to use styles. First, when creating text, choose a style and then type; the text takes on the attributes of the style. Second (and much more significant), when editing or reformatting, click inside a paragraph and choose a style to have the entire paragraph take on that style's attributes.

Change Your StyleChange your style
The real magic comes when you want to change all instances of a style within a document. Say you have a 40-page proposal all ready, and you decide to alter the color of the third-level headings, or the spacing immediately below the captions. Instead of going through all those instances, change the styles for "Heading 3" or "Caption" and-presto! all of them change. (Mind you, this magic works only if you've actually assigned a style to those elements in the first place, so you'll need to start creating Word docs with styles in mind.)

PreviewPreview Your ModificationsAlter styles by right-clicking on the style name and choosing Modify. You have control over all elements of the style, including font types and color, size and emphasis, justification, paragraph spacing, indents, and more. The Format button at the bottom of the dialog gives you access to even more detailed formatting dialog boxes, letting you modify the style with precision very important for professional-looking documents. Once you've modified the style and accept the modification by clicking OK, all text blocks within that document that have been assigned to that particular style take on the modified attributes. Not only does this save a great deal of time, it also gives you perfect consistency.