WordPress Blog 4:
Sometimes, document design and editing involves formatting documents so that they can be filtered easily into another program, such as InDesign, or so that they’ll display properly when being published to online spaces. To practice with this, you’re going to open a Word document and format it by applying styles.
- Create your document in draft mode with the style panel open in the left-side panel to see what styles are being applied to your text. Open the style pane on the right side to select new styles.
- How to open the style pane on the right:
- Windows: you can open the Styles task pane from the Home tab [it can also be opened with the keyboard shortcut Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S];
- MAC16: you can access the Styles pane at the right of the Home toolbar.
- How to open the style panel on the left-side panel:
- Windows: click on the following from the main ribbon above: File > Options > Advanced > Display > Style area pane width in Draft and Outline views. Set the style area width (1–1.5″ is a good starting value.);
- MAC: go to the “View” menu and select “Draft”; then go to the “Word” menu and select “Preferences” and then “View,” under the “Window” section insert “1.5” inches under the style area width.
- How to open the style pane on the right:
- Highlight a section that you want to designate with a certain style, and then select the appropriate style from the list. To view which style is being used in any part of this document, place your cursor on your text and look at the “Current style” field in the Styles pane.
- Copy and paste one heading and three body paragraphs of dummy text into your Word document.
- Format the Word document with three styles.
- Style 1: Head1 (for the heading)
- Style 2: PostHeadPara (for body paragraph 1)
- Style 3: Para (for body paragraph 2)
- Save the Word document and upload it as a file to your Blog post, along with 100 words on the following: What kind of experience do you have with the tools and features of Microsoft Word for formatting text (applying styles, adjusting spacing between lines, adjusting paragraph spacing, using the ruler for indentation instead of tab, etc.)
My experience with this document and project slightly confusing. The instructions were slightly confusing, for one, but it still was relatively fun, even to work with. As the instructions were only so specific, I took some interpretative liberties with the main goal being to become more familiar with the styles tool and features of Microsoft Word. I conducted my user manual on the character styles feature in Adobe InDesign, this project seemed much like an extension of that experience and getting to know the usefulness of styles features. The styles features in Word Document is definitely rather different, but in some sense seemed to have more options than InDesign’s. I use Microsoft Word quite often, but don’t actually have much experience with applying styles, but instead do have considerable experience and familiarity with other formatting tools, both at the letter/font level and to the paragraph or even document level. This experience also reminded me of the many things I still don’t know and could get to know to better utilize Microsoft Word.