How to Work with Paragraph Styles in Microsoft Word

Bill Sanders (revised July 2009)

Introduction

A style is a set of formatting characteristics that you can apply to text, tables and lists in your document to quickly change their appearance. When you apply a style, you apply a whole group of formats in one simple task.

Many errors that the CinC PDF converter detects are related to paragraph styles. As you probably already know, the Word template produced by the CinC template creator contains a set of specific styles. One of these styles should be applied to each paragraph of your paper.

You can easily view the styles applied to each of the paragraphs. If the style for a paragraph is incorrect, you can then use the Word Formatting toolbar to change it.

How to View Paragraph Styles

1. Open the View menu item and select the Normal view.
   
2. Open the Tools menu item and select Options...
   
3. Choose the View tab.
   
4. At the bottom of the dialog box, enter either 25 mm or 1 inch into the Style area width.
   
5. Click OK. You should now see something like this.
   
   

The style of each paragraph is displayed to the left of the document text. The sample shown above shows the correct style for each of the paragraphs.

Two important things to note:

• There is an empty paragraph after the abstract text. This paragraph has style Abstract Text and must be present. This is the cause of many problems.
• The title block is protected against modification.

How to Change the Style Applied to a Paragraph

1. Select the paragraph you wish to change by clicking somewhere in that paragraph. The name of the current style is displayed in the Word Formatting toolbar.
   

   In this example, the Abstract Heading paragraph style consists of the 11 point bold Times New Roman font with centered lines.

2. Click the small arrow just to the right of the name of current style. A drop-down list of styles will appear.
   
   Paragraph styles have a paragraph symbol (¶) on the right side.
3. Choose a new paragraph style by clicking on its name.
   
4. The new paragraph style will be applied to the paragraph.
   

Hint: When assigning or changing paragraph styles, you can select more than one paragraph by clicking and dragging.

Modifying Styles

You must be sure that the CinC styles are not modified. In Word 2000, the styles are locked and cannot be modified. However, in Word 2003 and 2007, the CinC styles are not locked and are at risk.

1. Please don't modify any of the CinC styles.
2. Be sure that the Add to template and the Automatically update boxes are not checked in the Modify Style dialog box.
   
   
   

What happened to the style when Automatically update was checked: