Word - Styles "Content is King".... but the Emperor also needs clothes. In Word, dressing up the content means using styles. By "styles" I don't mean setting font and size and color by clicking on Word's crazy quilt toolbar buttons - I mean the styles you find in the far-left window of the toolbar, the one that shows a tooltip "Style" when you park the cursor over it. When you first open Word, with no previous document in it, the new blank document has only five styles in the dropdown list: Default Paragraph Font, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and Normal. If you look at the style dialog (menubar: Format > Style...), and click on List: All Styles (left side, near the bottom of the dialog), you get a very extensive list of default styles - 99 of them in fact. That's about 80 more than you will ever need. The overkill is Microsoft's way of showing you Who's Boss. To apply a style to a paragraph, type some text (or park the cursor in an existing paragraph), go to the Style box, click on the arrow to open the box, and click on the style you want to apply. You can select several paragraphs, and style them all with one click. The beauty of using styles instead of local overrides (selecting Font, Size, Color, etc. to change formatting directly) is that you can change styled paragraphs throughout a document instantly just by changing the properties of the style itself. For instance, if you decide that all your headings should be Arial instead of Times New Roman, and you've got 35 headings in a document, all set individually by local overrides for Times New Roman, you have to go through the document to select and change the font and size for each heading, one at a time. With a properly styled document, you only have to open the style dialog, change the font for the base heading style to Arial, and you're done - instantly. Even better, you can change the style of everything in the document - paragraphs, tables, headings, special text (like product names), margins, lists - all at once, by attaching a different template to the document. The power of that function is that you can copy paragraphs and pages and tables from a document formatted one way, paste them into a document formatted differently, then simply click a style to update the old formatting of the pasted items to match the formatting of their new home! No click, drag, select, font, click choose, size, click, choose... over and over again. Here's the problem, and why I make a big deal about styles - of all the templates I have seen provided by The Powers That Be to the folks who have to do the writing work in my 17 years of association with big corporations, I have never seen a properly structured and styled template. Since you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, we've got thousands of "little piggy" documents to revise and maintain and update and re-use by click, drag, select, font, click choose, size, click, choose... over and over again. Next topic - How to make a silk purse with Word.