Microsoft Office Tutorial: How to Use Styles and Themes in MS Word

This Microsoft Office tutorial walks through how to utilize MS Word’s various built in styles and themes to give documents a professional look and feel.

In this tutorial we’re going to review how to add some great style and elements to your Microsoft Word document. You can see right here I have just a very plain looking document this has a title and then five paragraphs of Latin text right below it. So you can see how everything looks. This is as you can see extremely plain looking. There’s not a lot of there’s really no style elements associated with it at all and it’s not exactly something that looks the most professional. So we’re going to add some style to it give it a little bit better look and feel the very first thing that you can do is write in the home ribbon. You can select the text that you want to change and then come up to your style elements here and then pick something that gives a little bit more of the look and feel you’re looking for. So I could come up to say like intense quote right here click that and that gives it a different type of title I’ll hit controls to undo it and go up and do something else. I’ll do this time. This one this intense one. That one looks good. You obviously can change the colors or anything like that. The heading one is something that I personally use quite a bit. Go back on that and if you ever say that you like one component of something but you want to alter a little bit that’s no problem. So say I could do heading one right here and then but say I like the color red or green or something like that just come up over to font color and then select green for it. And you can see now it’s been switched over to green. So just because it gives you blue in that style document doesn’t mean that you need to keep it that way. So that’s adding a heading. And now you can even do things like ADD subheadings or they have them Lissa’s like heading to which will have the same type of style but a little bit different so we’ll say Magri subheading right here and just select it.

You can select it by clicking and dragging or clicking at the end hitting shift and then clicking at the front to select it come over to heading to and click that you can see it’s slightly smaller than up here and I’ll click that and change this to green as well so that it matches the other thing you’ll notice is when you give your document a heading one of these style headings.

Now when you hover over it you can see a little arrow gets placed by it. And so you can come over especially for the subheadings and if you click on it it will bring all of that up into one. So we can do another one right here.

My great extra spending highlight highlighted all and give it heading to.

And then we will change this one to green as well. And then you can see right here.

Now everything below that gets included and here if you click it now it only has this one paragraph. So this is a great way that you can organize your document and be able to shrink things down if you don’t want to see them all at one time gives you a lot different options like that.

Now we’re going to come over here in the lead up and remove the style so we can remove it by just clicking normal. And now we’re back to where we started from. The next thing we’re going to do is walk through how to use the design tool. So come up to the ribbon where it says design click on it and now you can see you can actually style your entire document with these document formatting options so you can well highlight everything right here click more and you can see right here you have a list of all these different things that you can pick from. So we’re going to first just so you can see how it works I’m going to add another subheading right here. We’ll say this is the intro and then this is the body.

And the last one is going to be a summary. And we’ll come back here and highlight it.

This works great for like a five paragraph essay that kind of thing whether this is for school or for work.

And we’re going to come up here and just select one of these document formats. So click that and you can see that it formats a little bit differently for you. You can come over and pick this one. You can see this one also formats it differently. Same thing here. If you just hover over it it will change the format which also changes things like the font. And one thing you will notice though is that even though the sample me look like this is not actually changing any of the colors. So we’ll pick they will pick this one right here. Now to change the theme or anything like that.

What you have to do is come up to this theme’s box click that and then you can come and swap out different font styles and it changes the font and some of the spacing for the entire document as you’ll see as you hover over it just a few little things change.

These are very subtle changes. So you’re still going to have to do some work yourself. So let’s give it this I believe it’s pronounced in Damascus and now you can see it’s changed a little bit and kind of has this almost like a courier type font and then you can come up to colors and if you feel like you want any of these changed you can click on say this green and yellow one right here. It doesn’t actually change any of it for you but it pre loads it as some of the standard colors that you’d use in your document. And then you can come back home and then pick out some of these items and then apply different styles to them. So if you click heading now you can see that this Style’s box has now completely changed. And so you can click on intro for heading to body for heading to.

And then same thing down here and there you go.

Now you can see you have a completely differently design document. Looks a lot more professional much more unique than when when we started out and all you did was play around with some of the styles and the themes and Microsoft Word did all the rest of the work for you. So if you follow along great job congratulations you now know how to use themes and styles in word and please let me know if you have any questions on how to do it.