Subject: Re: Upcoming releases
From: Randy Kramer (rhkramer@fast.net)
Date: Tue Feb 13 2001 - 10:11:18 CST
> That's because I don't understand what styles are meant to do and have
> never found the need to use them.
Pierre gave a brief but accurate answer (AFAIK), but I thought I'd
expand just a little. In many ways this is like features that exist in
many other text formatting programs. You may want different parts of
your document formatted in different ways. You can define a style which
is not indented, is 11 point Arial, single spaced, an extra blank line
after (and/or before) the paragraph, etc. You may have different styles
for each level of heading, for footnotes, lines (paragraphs) in the ToC,
etc. Now you just turn on that style and type (or after typing, go back
and select the desired paragraphs and apply the desired style).
Word also lets you create stylesheets (that's what they were called
before the Windows versions of Word -- now the equivalent is templates,
although a template is a little more and slightly different). Anyway,
the point here is that if you have the same named styles on several
different stylesheets, you can change the entire appearance of a
document by displaying a different style sheet.
Word lets you assign keyboard shortcuts to styles so you can easily
switch / apply them while you are typing.
On Word's standard toolbar, they include a drop down menu (combo box).
It normally displays the current style (name) at the location of the
cursor. If text comprising several different styles is selected, this
is shown blank. You can drop down the menu to apply a different style
to the selected text (or for text that you are about to type).
Word allows you to create named paragraph and character styles. I
should explain how they interact, but I will have to think about that.
Maybe someone else can quickly explain that.
On a slightly different point, within a paragraph with a named style,
you can apply extra style attributes, like applying bold or italic to a
specific word or phrase. This text still has the underlying named style
that the original paragraph has, so that is the named style that is
shown in the drop down menu even if, for example, the entire paragraph
is selected.
And, this makes me realize that the drop down menu only shows paragraph
styles, not character styles (I think).
Hope this helps! Maybe someone else can clarify the fuzzy points, or I
can after some more thought.
Randy Kramer
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Feb 13 2001 - 10:13:30 CST