GUESS WHAT!

You don’t need to indent your paragraph with a tab, or separate paragraphs with a blank line, or use two spaces after a period, or retype your whole document to submit to an anthology that requires 1.5 line spacing, or indent lines of poetry with three, four, five spaces (and lose count), or …

But if you do, you’ll create extra work for yourself, and…

If you do, and you submit your work to our anthology, you’ll create extra work for us.

Plus you won’t be able to change the paragraph indentation, paragraph spacing, line spacing, and other good stuff at a touch of a keystroke.

WORD STYLES are your friends.

Start with the RIBBON

• Can you see the “ribbon” at the top of your word page?
• If there’s a block of “things” labeled “styles” you can see the ribbon.
• If not, click on the “edit” tab at the top of your page. Then the ribbon appears.
• Click on the pin at the bottom right corner of the ribbon to make it stay visible.

EDIT A STYLE

• Click inside your “normal” text.
• Click on the arrow at the bottom right of the Styles block in the ribbon
• Click on the right hand button at the bottom of the popup or the left hand styles pane that appears. This lets you edit a style.
• Click modify, format, and choose paragraph.
• Set “special” to “first line” 0.5″
• Set “spacing” “After” to 6pt.
• Now all your normal text paragraphs have half inch indents and neat small spaces afterward. You can play with these numbers. The changes you make affect all your paragraphs at once.

ADD A STYLE

What if you want quotations from a letter to be indented more than everything else?

• Click the left hand of
  those three buttons in the style window.
• Type in a new name for
  your new style (probably still based on normal). Maybe call it
  “indented.”
• Set the left and right
  indents where you set that first line indent before.

What if you want the first line unindented and the rest indented (which is how word makes the text in a list line up on second and third lines)?

• Just like before, but this time choose “hanging” instead of “first line.”

What if you want to set up indents for different lines of poetry, so you can change them to better indents when you change the page size?

• Add styles – leftpoem is maybe unindented, centerpoem 0.5″ indented, rightpoem 1″ indented
• Or have lots of different indentations – as many as you like
• Maybe set no spacing after for poetry so you don’t get big gaps between lines.

Set up a “center” style (unindented please) for centering text such as author’s notes or copyrights.

And just have fun. Create the styles that work for you.

IMPORTING STYLES WITH TEXT

When we add the contents of an old file to our new, combined file for the anthology, we might use Control A (select all), Control C (copy), then Control V (paste). Watch for the little box at the bottom right of the pasted text. You can click on the arrow and choose “keep source formatting” so all the styles in the source file get copied to the new file. Or choose “merge formatting” so all the styles that can be get merged. Or “destination” but that can produce some weird effects, like everything appearing as one enormous heading…

Just make sure you don’t click on anything else until you’re sure the copy worked the way you want it. You can scroll through, check it, then change your choice as many times as you like until you’re happy.

USE STYLES. They’re fun!