- Hi, this is Deborah Savadra
with Legal Office Guru
and in today's video we're going to go into Microsoft Word
and actually demonstrate how to make your own styles.
There a couple of different ways to do this,
one of them's a lot easier than the other one
but if you've decided
that one of the over 200 Microsoft Word styles
just isn't gonna cut it for you
in a particular application,
then this is going to teach you
how to actually create your own styles, so stay tuned.
If we've not met,
I teach lawyers and other legal professionals
how to use Microsoft Office better.
So, I'm going to share my screen now.
I'll just pause for just a moment
and switch over to my screen sharing
and while I'm doing that
if you would let me know
in the comments where you're watching from
and whether you're seeing this live
or whether you're seeing it in replay.
I suspect a lot of you are gonna be seeing it in replay
because it's kind of early
and also whether you've seen the first three videos
in this Style Series.
Okay, so you should be seeing my screen right now.
As I told you,
there are two ways to create a new style
in Microsoft Word,
from scratch which is completely, totally new
or from an example
and doing it from an example
is really the easiest way to do this.
If you can find or create an example
and the formatting you want within your document,
then you can first ask yourself the question
do I wanna replicate character
or paragraph formatting or both?
Now, here's an example of paragraph formatting.
This is actually deposition text.
If you're quoting deposition text
within the context of a pleading or brief,
you probably want to indent it on both sides,
you want to do a hanging indent,
so you've got the Q and A
kind of hanging out here
and the other stuff indented,
so I've got this text formatted
the way that I want it.
I want to select one of these paragraphs,
and then right click,
and choose Styles.
Now, just a note for you
that are still using Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010,
this menu's gonna look a little bit different.
You'll probably see it in here
rather than up here by itself
but just note that the steps are gonna be the same,
that the menu may look a little bit different.
But I'm gonna click on Styles here
and do Create a Style.
Now, you're gonna get a very simple dialog box
where you can name it
and you could always click OK here
but I'm gonna insist
that you actually click that modify button
because there are some settings
that you are probably gonna want to tweak here.
Okay, first of all, I've named it.
If you don't want this style to affect
the font formatting in future documents,
if you don't necessarily want it
to pick up Calibri in a document
that you've got formatted as Times New Roman,
then you're gonna want to change this setting,
you're gonna wanna actually make this a paragraph style type
rather than a linked style type.
That way it's only picking up the paragraph settings,
the indentation, the hanging indent,
the line spacing, the space between etc.
That's all it's going to pick up.
You can always make some other changes
in the formatting in this dialog box,
somewhere in here if it's something fairly straightforward.
If you need to go to a different dialog box,
you can do it here in that Format.
Now, if you want this style
to be available in future documents,
be sure to click this radio button
next to New Documents Based on This Template.
If you want this style to show up
in the Styles Gallery, be sure to make sure
this box here next to Add to the Styles Gallery
is checked and that way it will show up here
in the Styles Gallery.
I generally discourage people
from checking this Automatically Update box
because what that does
is it updates the style
every time you apply
or anyone else applies direct formatting
to text that's styled with this particular style.
That can be devastating to the overall structure
of your document.
That can just introduce some chaos into it
that really unless you're very, very OCD
about the way that you set up your styles.
This to me just introduces too much chaos into the mix.
Also, I forgot to go back over this.
If you want to be able to when you style
a particular paragraph with Depo Text,
and you want to be able to hit enter
and continue in that same style,
you wanna be sure that that style
is listed here, style for following paragraph.
So, that way you could continue entering
in deposition text
and then when you're ready to switch back
to normal or whatever you're using
for your paragraph style, you can do that
instead of having to go back and style
every single paragraph.
If it's going to be a situation in which
you're going to be blocking and copying something
from like a text document
and dropping it into your pleading
and then styling it as Depo Text all in one go,
that may not be necessarily so important
but just be aware of that.
I'll click OK here.
And there's my Deposition Text style.
So, that's an example of how to create
a style from an example
that you already have in your text.
You can also create a style completely from scratch
if you know exactly what you want.
Now, for example, I'm gonna create
a character-based style called Citation.
So, I'm gonna go into Styles area,
this is on the Home tab,
go to the Styles area and click this More dropdown arrow
and go down here to create a style.
Again, I could name it here
but I probably want to tweak some of these settings in here.
Again, I'm gonna choose a style type,
this time I'm going to do character
because all I want to do is italicize the text
and click italics here.
Now, you're probably asking yourself
why would she go to the trouble of doing the style
if all you want to do is italicize?
I was experimenting yesterday
with the possibility of suppressing
spell check within a style.
Wasn't quite able to get it to work
but if I do get it to work,
I may post a video on doing that
but it is supposedly possible
to suppress spell check
within certain parts of your document
based on the style,
haven't gotten it to work yet,
so that was one reason
I wanted to create a character styled called Citation.
Again, if I want to add it to the Styles Gallery,
I'd make sure that that's checked.
If I want to do this in future documents
based on this,
then I make sure I check that radio button
and I can do some other formatting type things in here
if I want to.
By the way, that suppress spell check is here.
Like I said, couldn't get that to work yesterday
when I was doing my practice run.
So, I'm going to click OK
and there's my citation format,
so if I start typing something,
and then I can select that,
and then use Citation.
So, that's it.
That's how you create a new style in Microsoft Word.
So, we're coming in under 13 minutes this morning
but that was a quick and dirty
on how to actually create styles in word.
If you will in the comments below
tell me what sort of styles questions you have,
what kinds of things that maybe you've applied
from some of the earlier lessons in this series
and are maybe having some difficulties with
or some things that you're curious about
whether or not you can actually do
those things within Styles.
Let me know what you have questions about
in the comments
and we will wrap it up here.
Let me go over here and see if
there any questions at the moment and there aren't,
so,
I'm going to wrap it up here.
It was good to see you guys this morning.
Hope this was useful.
If you do have any questions,
be sure to leave those in the comments below
and I'll dip in and see if I can answer those
but have a good Thursday
and I will check you guys next week.