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Understanding Styles

Grasshopper:
"Master, why doesn't my paragraph appear with the style I specified?"
Master:
"You have come to the right page Grasshopper; read on ..."

What is a style in Word?

Documents communicate better when like elements are formatted consistently. To achieve that consistency, professional document designers develop a style sheet which defines the document element types and specifies how each should be formatted. For example, perhaps body paragraphs are to be set in 9 pt Times Roman with a line height of 11 pt, justified flush left, ragged right. When these specifications are applied to each of the elements of the document, a consistent and polished look is achieved.

A style in Word is such a set of specifications that may be applied, all at once, to a document element. Word has paragraph styles, character styles, table styles, and numbering definitions. These are applied to a paragraph, a span of text, a table, and a list, respectively.

Experienced programmers will recognize styles as a level of indirection. The great thing about those is it allows you to define something once, then apply that definition many times. This saves the work of defining the same thing over an over; but more importantly it allows you to change it the definition and have that change reflected in all the places you originally applied it.

Why doesn't the style I applied show up?

This is likely to show up quite a bit until I can add some fancier features to work around it, so here it is up top.

  1. When you're working in Word, there are all these styles you can apply to things, pretty good looking ones that look all the better because you don't have to make them yourself. Most folks never look further than the built-in styles.
  2. Although those styles show up in the UI, they're not actually in the document you're creating, at least not until you use it for the first time. That's kind of a good thing. They take up room and there's a lot of them. The file would get a little bloated if it contained all the style definitions you could use but haven't.
  3. If you apply a style that's not defined in your file (in the styles.xml part if you're curious), Word just ignores it. It doesn't complain, it just doesn't change how things are formatted. I'm sure there's a good reason for this. But it can present as a bit of a puzzle if you don't understand how Word works that way.
  4. When you use a style, Word adds it to the file. Once there, it stays. I imagine there's a way to get rid of it, but you have to work at it. If you apply a style, delete the content you applied it to, and then save the document; the style definition stays in the saved file.

All this adds up to the following: If you want to use a style in a document you create with |docx|, the document you start with must contain the style definition. Otherwise it just won't work. It won't raise an exception, it just won't work.

If you use the "default" template document, it contains the styles listed below, most of the ones you're likely to want if you're not designing your own. If you're using your own starting document, you need to use each of the styles you want at least once in it. You don't have to keep the content, but you need to apply the style to something at least once before saving the document. Creating a one-word paragraph, applying five styles to it in succession and then deleting the paragraph works fine. That's how I got the ones below into the default template :).

Paragraph styles in default template

  • Normal
  • BodyText
  • BodyText2
  • BodyText3
  • Caption
  • Heading1
  • Heading2
  • Heading3
  • Heading4
  • Heading5
  • Heading6
  • Heading7
  • Heading8
  • Heading9
  • IntenseQuote
  • List
  • List2
  • List3
  • ListBullet
  • ListBullet2
  • ListBullet3
  • ListContinue
  • ListContinue2
  • ListContinue3
  • ListNumber
  • ListNumber2
  • ListNumber3
  • ListParagraph
  • MacroText
  • NoSpacing
  • Quote
  • Subtitle
  • TOCHeading
  • Title

Table styles in default template

  • TableNormal
  • ColorfulGrid
  • ColorfulGrid-Accent1
  • ColorfulGrid-Accent2
  • ColorfulGrid-Accent3
  • ColorfulGrid-Accent4
  • ColorfulGrid-Accent5
  • ColorfulGrid-Accent6
  • ColorfulList
  • ColorfulList-Accent1
  • ColorfulList-Accent2
  • ColorfulList-Accent3
  • ColorfulList-Accent4
  • ColorfulList-Accent5
  • ColorfulList-Accent6
  • ColorfulShading
  • ColorfulShading-Accent1
  • ColorfulShading-Accent2
  • ColorfulShading-Accent3
  • ColorfulShading-Accent4
  • ColorfulShading-Accent5
  • ColorfulShading-Accent6
  • DarkList
  • DarkList-Accent1
  • DarkList-Accent2
  • DarkList-Accent3
  • DarkList-Accent4
  • DarkList-Accent5
  • DarkList-Accent6
  • LightGrid
  • LightGrid-Accent1
  • LightGrid-Accent2
  • LightGrid-Accent3
  • LightGrid-Accent4
  • LightGrid-Accent5
  • LightGrid-Accent6
  • LightList
  • LightList-Accent1
  • LightList-Accent2
  • LightList-Accent3
  • LightList-Accent4
  • LightList-Accent5
  • LightList-Accent6
  • LightShading
  • LightShading-Accent1
  • LightShading-Accent2
  • LightShading-Accent3
  • LightShading-Accent4
  • LightShading-Accent5
  • LightShading-Accent6
  • MediumGrid1
  • MediumGrid1-Accent1
  • MediumGrid1-Accent2
  • MediumGrid1-Accent3
  • MediumGrid1-Accent4
  • MediumGrid1-Accent5
  • MediumGrid1-Accent6
  • MediumGrid2
  • MediumGrid2-Accent1
  • MediumGrid2-Accent2
  • MediumGrid2-Accent3
  • MediumGrid2-Accent4
  • MediumGrid2-Accent5
  • MediumGrid2-Accent6
  • MediumGrid3
  • MediumGrid3-Accent1
  • MediumGrid3-Accent2
  • MediumGrid3-Accent3
  • MediumGrid3-Accent4
  • MediumGrid3-Accent5
  • MediumGrid3-Accent6
  • MediumList1
  • MediumList1-Accent1
  • MediumList1-Accent2
  • MediumList1-Accent3
  • MediumList1-Accent4
  • MediumList1-Accent5
  • MediumList1-Accent6
  • MediumList2
  • MediumList2-Accent1
  • MediumList2-Accent2
  • MediumList2-Accent3
  • MediumList2-Accent4
  • MediumList2-Accent5
  • MediumList2-Accent6
  • MediumShading1
  • MediumShading1-Accent1
  • MediumShading1-Accent2
  • MediumShading1-Accent3
  • MediumShading1-Accent4
  • MediumShading1-Accent5
  • MediumShading1-Accent6
  • MediumShading2
  • MediumShading2-Accent1
  • MediumShading2-Accent2
  • MediumShading2-Accent3
  • MediumShading2-Accent4
  • MediumShading2-Accent5
  • MediumShading2-Accent6
  • TableGrid

Character styles in default template

  • BodyText2Char
  • BodyText3Char
  • BodyTextChar
  • BookTitle
  • DefaultParagraphFont
  • Emphasis
  • Heading1Char
  • Heading2Char
  • Heading3Char
  • Heading4Char
  • Heading5Char
  • Heading6Char
  • Heading7Char
  • Heading8Char
  • Heading9Char
  • IntenseEmphasis
  • IntenseQuoteChar
  • IntenseReference
  • MacroTextChar
  • QuoteChar
  • Strong
  • SubtitleChar
  • SubtleEmphasis
  • SubtleReference
  • TitleChar