Styles And Formating - Save Yourself From Insanity

  25 Jun 2007 by Vyoma

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.

Document Example

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.

Document Example - Version 2

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:

Document Example - Version 3

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.

Styles And Formatting

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.

16 Responses so far

  1. mik June 25, 2007 7:05 pm

    I’ve been using these a while, particularly because they remind me of CSS styles lol.

    You are correct about the OpenOffice one.

    –mik (aka Twitch)

  2. Bush Mackel June 25, 2007 7:49 pm

    Until the very end of this article, I thought it would be about CSS. You can imagine my disappointment.

  3. Vyoma June 25, 2007 8:42 pm

    Ah Bush!

    Aren’t CSS analogus to what we have in the web for the ‘Styles And Formatting’ in the docuemnts?

    In both we define what each part of the content is, and have a separate place to specify how then need to be rendered.

  4. Bush Mackel June 26, 2007 1:23 am

    Absolutely Vyoma, I guess I just led myself down a different road!

  5. benedict herold June 26, 2007 4:24 am

    I’m a kid again :-)

  6. Vyoma June 26, 2007 4:26 am

    How come, banedict?

  7. Shankar Ganesh June 26, 2007 1:30 pm

    :O Hehe.. Nice tip

  8. Vyoma June 26, 2007 1:30 pm

    Thank you Shankar. :)

  9. vaibhav June 26, 2007 2:28 pm

    nice one, but its better to create an html page as you can create links as well, and personally, i know a much of coding, i would prefer to present a doc in html format. creating css and scripts…

  10. Vyoma June 26, 2007 4:29 pm

    On my freelancing projects, I deliver documents as PDF - I can do that because I am at liberty of choosing. But when you are at a job, most of the times, you will not be having a choice.

    But yes, where you have choice, HTML is a good choice. (I bet it will be a lot less bulkier :P ).

  11. Nirmal June 26, 2007 5:35 pm

    Nice tip. Although I have not worked with a document 200 pages and above, will try it out next time. :-)

  12. Vyoma June 26, 2007 6:09 pm

    Yes Nirmal.

    Do not bother with it, if you are having only a long stream of text (all paragraph) and one heading.

    This tip will help if there are a lot of elements and the number of pages is anywhere above four or five pages. (That seems to be the critical point - at least for me).

  13. Bush Mackel June 26, 2007 9:04 pm

    Yeah, hard to tell if this would be a comment event in most main stream web design since usually having huge long pages of text is usually considered a no no.

  14. Vyoma June 27, 2007 2:24 am

    Yes Bush. The offline documents and the online articles serve different purposes and audiences.

    The online readers are info hungry and would want to digest as much information as possible in as little time. It is better to aim for lists, and short paragraphs.

    Then, there are the other among the breed. Voracious reader - they would want as much information as possible in one document itself.

  15. benedict herold June 27, 2007 8:30 pm

    Vyoma, Since now I have someone teaching me Word :-) Its been a while since revised word :-) Good one!1

  16. Vyoma June 27, 2007 9:29 pm

    o.O

    :) You are welcome benedict.

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