Word's Character Styles

I got into a deep discussion recently with a user in one of my tech groups. We thought we were having a heated discussion about character styles...until he clarified that he was simply using a paragraph style called "character." He was writing a play. Well, that put a whole new spin on the conversation!<smile>

But our discussion made me realize that people may not understand or appreciate character styles. And since most style articles concentrate on paragraph styles, this article will try to clear up confusion about character (char) styles.

Character styles are like any type of style from web Cascading Style Sheets to Word paragraph styles...it is a name for a group of attributes that, when applied to text, will apply all the set formatting to the selected text. Styles of any type can not only save you gobs of time when you need to change formatting, because you can make a couple quick changes to the style itself and all text applied with that style will change. But styles are also important for helping you to create consistent, professional looking documents. If you need to stick to a set of styles, you'll be much less likely to go off applying all types of formatting that may not be consistent with other similar items in a document.

I won't get into a whole conversation about paragraph styles or using styles in general. If you need help getting started, see this article: Getting Started with Styles. Be sure to check along the right panel of that article for links to several other, related articles.

We'll assume you understand paragraph styles in Word. You create a style, you apply it and start typing, or you apply it after you've typed text by selecting a paragraph and drop that para style onto the selected paragraph in order to display the type of formatting contained within that style. Great!

So what's a character style? Simple, it's the same as a paragraph style, except it is applied to a character, or set of characters...a word or two...versus an entire paragraph. If you have ever applied bold or italic to text, you have essentially applied a character style to a word. You've applied Word's formatting for individual words. But changing that type of preset formatting in Word can be more complicated than using a character style. You can't easily change that bold to say underlined without using Search/Replace to actually find all the bold text and replace it with underlining. Otherwise, you'd have to go through your document and make the changes manually!

However, if you created a bold style and applied that character style each time you wanted to bold a word, should you need to change that formatting, including changing the font face or size, you can easily do that by just modifying the character style.

Create a Character Style

Creating a character style is as easy as creating a paragraph style. You can simply click Format > Style. Then click the New Style button. In the image below, I have created a new character style. I've added all the formatting, just as I would for a paragraph style, except notice that the Style Type says Character versus the default Paragraph. I clicked the drop down arrow and selected Character for this style.

As you can see in the image above, I called the style much the same name as the attributes I've applied...Arial, 14pt, bold. As an afterthought, I added Plum coloring. I could modify the name, but I won't bother because the color will be obvious when I use it.

Also notice that I have clicked Add to Template. This means that this style will be sent back to my Normal.dot (master template) for safe keeping so that it will then be available in the future for other documents that I create from my Normal.dot.

Now also note that the reason it will go to the Normal.dot is because that is the current template attached to this document. If I had selected some other template, say a master template for a book called MyBookMaster.dot, then this character style would be sent back to that template and would not be available to other documents created from the normal.dot. The "template" referred to in this checkbox is whatever template you are attached to at the time you check that box!

Using Char Styles

Okay, so I've created a character style. How can I use it?

Well, you can add it to a shortcut key and then hit that key combo whenever you wanted to use it. But that would probably only make sense if this is a style that you are going to use quite often. For normal use, clicking it from the Style Pane is fairly easy. As you can see below, it now displays in my list of styles. Also notice the tiny, underlined a next to the style. That indicates that this is a character style. And see that the other styles in the list show a paragraph marker rather than an A. Yup, those are paragraph styles.

You might also want to create a special style menu or toolbar and add all the custom styles for this document to that. I generally do this. I also often add two character styles called Emphasis01 and Emphasis02. Then I design up the formatting, which may be as simple as bold for the first and italic for the second. However, should I later decide to change things, I can easily modify the styles to a different type of emphasis formatting.

I start typing a paragraph. When I want to use my character style within the paragraph, I apply it and type away. When I want to stop using it, I can just hit Ctrl + Spacebar and the style will disengage from that point forward.

Note that if you have text that has character styles or direct formatting applied, Ctrl + Spacebar will also remove that formatting from the selected text.

So now I have the sample above. Some content has the char style applied and some doesn't, all within the same paragraph. You can think of this as some special emphasis formatting created to draw attention to the reader, including bold. I've obviously exaggerated the formatting to allow you to easily see what's what.

Modifying My Style

Now the boss comes along and tells me she wants the emphasis to look less strict and more subtle...so I'll change the color and make it italic rather than bold.

Without a character style, I would have to either do a Search/Replace, which could be difficult, or worse...go through the document selecting and reformatting the specific text! Ewwww! What horrible time wasters!

Having the foresight to just create/apply a char style, I can go into the style and just change the entire document in a matter of seconds.

I find the style in the list, right click and choose Modify.

This opens the original creation dialog box where I can now make any needed changes.

I make the needed changes, including leaving it bold since I decide the color looks a bit washed out if left unbold.

And, of course, I make sure to again check the Add to template checkbox to ensure that this change is committed back to the master template.

A Few Tips

• If you have difficulty understanding the relationship between a character styles and paragraph styles, do what I do and visualize them. Think of a paragraph style as being related to the entire paragraph and then here comes a character style and lays itself on top of just some of the words within that paragraph. The character style is just sitting within the para style, or rather...on top of a few words within the paragraph.
  
  
• Also, I've heard people complain about creating styles saying that they have so many character or paragraph styles to create in a document. Realize that that fact in itself might be a good tip that maybe you are going overboard with your styles. People have a tendancy to assume they need to change a look in each section. But your document will look much more professional, as well as be easier for the reader to decipher, if you keep the number of formatting changes and pargraph styles to a minimum.
  
  I've created long, complex reports and books, using just a handful of styles. If you find that you're using 20+ styles in one document, particularly if it's not huge and very complex, I'd recommend that you reassess your formatting. Chances are it's too complicated to make sense!
  
  
• Here's a big tip that is rarely documented. If you have inserted a field and notice that the entire text is not looking as it should, i.e., maybe you wanted the entire resulting text from a field to display in bold, but only some of the words are coming out bold and some are still unbold, you can fix this by using the charformat option in the field.
  
  You've most likely seen this type of field code in a Word doc...
  

        { REF BookmarkName \* MERGEFORMAT }
  
  If your formatting isn't coming out as you'd planned, change the code to this...
  
       { REF BookmarkName \* CHARFORMAT }
  
  This will force the character style into the formatting and should fix the problem.

• Finally, Word 2003 attempted to help you out with your character formatting by creating assumed character styles for you. But it got a bit carried away. When you applied direct formatting, you'd get a style that ended with CHAR. As you reformatted the same content, the style would pile on the CHAR word, so you'd end up with something like MyStyle CHAR CHAR CHAR CHAR.

At first, support folks tried to justify this by assuming it was showing how many changes had been applied. I know that's the rationale I came up with. But as it turned out, it was a bug! So make sure you have applied the latest updates to Office 2003 in order to correct this problem.