Working with Word Heading Styles

One of the most powerful features supported by Microsoft Word is the concept of styles. A style is essentially a formatting "shortcut;" it is a way to give a name to a group of formatting attributes such as font name and size, paragraph formatting, etc.

Once you have defined a style, you can quickly format text simply by applying the style—without the need to individually format the font, color, paragraph spacing etc. Styles save a lot of time and help insure consistency in your documents. If you are not familiar with Word styles, you can find out more by search Word's online help for "styles."

Microsoft Word allows you to define your own styles and also ships with a number of built-in styles. Among the most important built-in styles are the standard heading styles: Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc. The heading styles are intended to help create a consistent hierarchy in your documents. For example, you might use Heading 1 for chapter headings, Heading 2 for major sections within chapters, etc.

Word's heading styles make it faster and easier to format headings in your documents, and they also have a number of other important features. For example, Word can automatically create a table of contents based on your headings, and you can use headings to define cross-references.

WordToWeb uses the standard heading styles in order to create a table of contents for your HTML publication. For this reason, documents which use the standard headings are the easiest to use with WordToWeb.

If you have existing documents which do not use these styles, you can either modify the source documents to use the standard headings, or you can have WordToWeb translate particular font formatting into a heading style for you. This is described in the next section.

1. Place the cursor on the line which will become a heading.
2. Drop down the style list on the Word toolbar and choose the heading style you want to apply.

See Also:

Wizard Panel 5