Styles are how professional-looking documents stay consistent without hours of manual formatting. By the end of this page you will understand why headings built with Styles are far more useful than text you have simply made bold and bigger by hand.
A style is a saved bundle of formatting choices - a font, a size, a colour, some spacing - that you can apply to text in one click, rather than setting each of those things by hand every time. Word comes with a ready-made set of styles, visible in the Styles gallery on the Home tab, including Heading 1, Heading 2 and Normal.
The Styles gallery sits in the middle of the Home tab, showing boxes labelled Normal, Heading 1, Heading 2 and others, each box previewing roughly how that style looks. Heading 1 is meant for your main section titles, Heading 2 for the sub-sections underneath them, and so on down the levels.
- The Styles gallery
- For main section titles
- For sub-sections
Try it yourself
Click into a line of text that is a main title in your document, without needing to select the whole line.
Styles apply to the whole paragraph your cursor is in, so you do not need to select every character - just be somewhere inside that line.
Click Heading 1 in the Styles gallery.
Word instantly applies its built-in heading formatting, and just as importantly, marks that line as a genuine heading, not just large bold text.
Click into a sub-section title and apply Heading 2.
This creates a level below Heading 1, giving your document a proper structure of main sections and sub-sections.
Go to the View tab and tick Navigation Pane.
A panel opens down the left showing every heading in your document as a clickable list, letting you jump straight to any section - this only works because you used real heading styles.
Click one of the headings in that panel.
Word jumps straight to that point in the document, which is far quicker than scrolling through a long document by hand.
Words people use
Once a document uses real heading styles throughout, Word can do useful things with it automatically: build a table of contents, show a navigation outline, and let you change the whole look of every heading at once by editing the style rather than hunting through the document. It is a small habit that pays off the moment a document grows past a page or two.
Check yourself
If you can say yes to each of these, you are ready for the next lesson.
- I can apply Heading 1 and Heading 2 from the Styles gallery
- I know why a real heading style is better than manually bolded, bigger text
- I can open the navigation pane and jump to a heading
- I understand that an automatic contents page relies on heading styles being used correctly