Consistency in document presentation is something that has come up several times recently, alongside using document templates.

One way of ensuring that documents we produce have the same consistent approach is to use styled templates in Word.

What are the advantages of using styles?

By agreeing to use styled templates we can ensure that we are consistent in presentation. When styled documents are converted into PDFs, the software uses the styles as a way to generate indexes, bookmarks etc that have a cascading hierarchy. This makes navigating longer documents easier for the reader, and for screenreaders.

• You can auto-generate a table of contents.
• You can move pages and numbered paragraphs around within a document and the page and paragraph numbers change automagically saving you time and frustration.
• You can move well formatted text easily between Word, PowerPoint, Excel and even websites.
• If you receive a styled document and want to take content from it into another document, using the paste and match styles function in word makes it match the rest of your document beautifully.

Mastering styles is worth doing as it will save you a lot of time in future.

Your task

There is a good online tutorial from FMS on using styles effectively in Word.

Work through it, and then think about whether or not a styled set of LTDS templates would be useful or not, and why or why not.  Add a comment to this post with your thoughts, and as Mrs Merton might say “Let’s have a heated debate…”