A style tripped me up

[harrodsyd]

In that case, maybe you should save your money and stick with Wordpad or Notepad. In any event, you cannot use Word without using at least one Style. Not using them in documents you share with others in a work environment, especially if they're using them, is just plain rude and lazy.

I find this moderator's response a bit rude (round here we misuse the word 'ignorant' but I refrain). Notepad is far more primitive than a Style-free Word would be. A fairer suggestion might have been to use Works Word Processor.

But isn't Thomasja's problem far more fundamental? Wouldn't Amazon be doing a better job by accepting input in RTF, in PDF, or one version of Word without doing any tampering? Kindle is profitable enough to pay for a bit more coding.

I haven't afforded upgrades since Word 97, and one of the reasons is that I dislike Word's implementation of Styles. I have 20 home-grown templates which do generally stick to their assigned Styles, but Normal.dot, used for miscellaneous writings, doesn't seem able to hold fast to the changes I "add to template". And as for setting tabs .... But I will study those three references: now that we have an open file format they might convince me to upgrade.

[Vincenzo]

What would be the advantage in choosing the style "strong" as opposed to directly formatting by clicking the Bold button?

Thanks

[PamCaswell]

What would be the advantage in choosing the style "strong" as opposed to directly formatting by clicking the Bold button?

Thanks

If more than 50% of paragraph text is bold and you select the paragraph and change its style, the bold formatting is removed when the new style is applied. That's a nice advantage. Other than that, I don't see an advantage for using strong or emphasis.

Pam

[macropod]

Using Styles also makes for a smaller file size and a document that requires less processing for Word to render.

[PamCaswell]

Hi, Paul,

I've read that what you say is true. Yet it's hard to imagine that the file size from using the bold button would be that much bigger than one using Strong--particularly if less than 5% of the text has direct formatting.


Pam

[macropod]

Hi Pam,

The larger the document and the more direct formatting that is used (especially if there's a lot of format-changing), the larger the file increase due to the direct formatting will be and the longer it will take Word to render the document. On a small file with only minor direct formatting, the effects will probably be insignificant.

[Vincenzo]

OK thanks for the info. While I have a working knowledge of styles, I do still only go out of my way to use them on a few documents. And even on docs where I am using styles a lot, I use keyboard shortcuts for Bold and Italic and font color. But I am "style curious" to learn what I don't know about the advantages of styles.