Styles And Formating – Save Yourself From Insanity
You are a freelancer, or you work for some one, or you are a student, you would have by now created documents – large documents. As every writer knows, we need to organize the document into proper paragraphs under proper headings and sub-headings. And when you want to change the formating, if you had not planned for it, it will drive you insane by the sheer amount of repetitive work.
Let us take an example document. Note that it is not large, but it is sufficient for illustrating the problem.
Just assume that the document is large with several pages as opposed to the short one shown in the example. Now, the person reviewing it, or you yourself, needs to change the font of all the text – one font for the paragraph, and one for the headings and subheadings.
You go about selecting and chaning them all. After you are done with it, and feel you can finally take a break, another request may crop up:
I hope you understand now, when I say it can drive you insane.
So, here is a tip that you save you all the trouble.
When you begin drafting, use the ‘Styles And Formatting’ section to indicated the type of text. Do not worry about the typeface and sizes in the begining.
As you type, denote it to be headings (heading 1, heading 2, and so on) or paragraph, or list. Once you are done, it will be simple to change the property of each of them. When you do so, the change would be reflected through out the document – be it five pages, or 200 pages, or more.
To change a particular element’s formating, in Microsoft Word, choose Format -> Styles and Formatting.
In OpenOffice.org Writer, I think it is under the same menu. You may also access it using the [F11] hotkey.
The resulting panels are intutive enough and pretty straight forward.
PS: To find more posts by Vyoma, visit Splat and KalaaLog.
Other Important Articles
