The ‘Heading’ styles in Microsoft Word are crucial for two reasons. First, they let you quickly apply headings in a document for a tidily formatted finish. Second, they let you automatically generate a table of contents at the click of a button.
In this post, we’ll walk you through the basics of how to use ‘Heading’ styles in Microsoft Word.
Microsoft Word offers several default heading styles so you can apply different formatting to different levels of heading (Heading 1 for chapter titles, Heading 2 for section titles, etc.). These can be accessed via the ‘Styles’ gallery in the ‘Home’ tab on the main ribbon.
If you can’t find the heading style you need in the gallery, you’ll need to open the ‘Styles’ pane:
You can then highlight the text that you want to format and click the chosen ‘Heading’ style in the gallery or the ‘Styles’ pane to apply it. Once a heading style has been applied somewhere, it will be added to the gallery if it wasn’t there before.
Of course, the default heading styles might not be what you need. This isn’t a problem, since you can quickly update any style in Microsoft Word with a few clicks. Simply:
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As well as letting you apply the new formatting as required, this will automatically update all headings in your document that already use the modified style.
In some documents, you may even want to apply numbered headings and subheadings. To do this in Microsoft Word, you need to use the ‘Multilevel List’ options:
This will then apply numbering to all the headings in your document.
In addition, it will automatically update the numbering if any headings or subheadings are added or deleted while you edit your document, which saves time and ensures continuity.
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