If you create a lot of documents in Word, you probably would like them to look consistent. You’ve probably seen and maybe have even used the built-in Styles in Microsoft Word, but did you know you can create your own styles that might be a better fit for your uses? Here’s how you do it.

First off, type up some text and format it exactly how you’d like. Say you have a particular font size, color, and typeface you use when you create titles for your documents. Create the text (or use existing formatted text in a document) and format accordingly. I’ve intentionally formatted this as hideously as possible so you get the idea of what can be done:

Once you’ve gotten the formatting exactly as you want it (and hopefully it’s less nauseating as the above), select the text and click on the “More” drop down arrow on the lower right corner of the Styles Gallery  and click “Create a Style”:

In the dialog that pops up, give your style a name.

The style that you created appears in the Styles gallery with the name that you gave it, ready for you to apply whenever you want text to appear awesome. Just highlight the text, click on the style, and go:

If you want to modify that style in the future, select the dialog box launcher for the styles pane, right-click on the style you want to tweak, and hit “Modify…”.

There you will be able to tweak the style accordingly for documents going forward (it won’t update existing documents that use that style – you’ll have to reopen and reapply to do that):

With Microsoft Word styles, you can make your documents much more consistent across your organization – just don’t make them as ugly as we did in our example 😊.