Hands on: Use Word for long projects

Although you can use the supplied styles, it makes sense to create new ones. You can either base them on existing styles or start from scratch, but in either case, you can give them distinctive names.

We’ll keep things simple for now with just three styles, which we’ll call ‘Chapter title’, ‘Subheading’ and ‘Standard body’. Later you’ll probably want to add other styles for captions, footnotes, running headers and so on, but this can wait.

Word 2003 and 2007 don’t provide direct access to the Styles dialogue ­ in the former, you have to right-click on an entry in the Styles Task pane to change it and in the latter right-click on the entry in the Styles palette.

If you want to get the previous Style dialogue back, which allows you to modify any style or create new ones without having to close and re-open the dialogue, then this is possible in 2003. Go to Tools Customise, Commands. In the left pane, select Format, and in the right, drag ‘Style…’ (not ‘Style:’ or ‘Styles and Formatting’) on to the Format menu or any toolbar that takes your fancy.

Having got at the dialogue, create a new style named ‘Standard body’ based on Normal, or (no style) if you prefer to start from scratch. In the first dialogue, check that the style type is Paragraph and that the style following is also Standard body.

You should see below that the text is left-aligned, single-spaced and 12-point Times New Roman. You can change any of this ­ you might, for example, want to have straight left and right margins, in which case simply click the Justify button.

Don’t worry too much about what this will look like in print ­ concentrate on getting something easily readable and comfortable to work with on screen. One of the beauties of styles is that you can change them ­ and all existing instances of text in that style ­ with a few clicks.