There are lots of reasons to spend time styling your document – you may be trying to follow a publishing requirement, to make your document stand out, or just make it easier to read. In Word 2013, we’ve made it easier than ever for you to quickly change the look of your entire document until you have it just right.  While the styles gallery has been available on the Word home tab since Word 2007, some people just assume styles are meant for people who want big blue text.  As it turns out, that’s not true. I’m here to tell you that Styles are handy, and if you use them to format your text as your write your document, you’ll be able to take full advantage of the improvements in Word 2013.

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Last week, we took a look at printing envelopes. But often people want to print labels--and then put the labels on envelopes, shipping boxes, CDs, file folders, jars of apricot jam, or whatever can be labeled.

How you make your labels depends on what kind of label you want to make...

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Update: Links updated to v1.0 version of the tool [12.4.08 5pm PST] As someone who cares a lot about programmability in Word, I'm always looking for ways to showcase how powerful our object model is, and how it can be used to build really great solutions. With that in mind, I've been looking into ways to create a Word 2007 version of the Word 2003 Redaction Add-In , as we know that it's been an issue for some of our users that this add-in isn't available for Word 2007. To that end, I'm really excited...

At the basic level, a template means a document that is used as a starting point for another document. The term refers to the fact that just the framework of the document is being used, not the specific content (thought part of the framework may include portions of content such as headings). So when you open last month's report and edit just the information that's changed in the last thirty days, you've used that old report as the template for your new report. Using a document as a template Word...

Hi everyone. My name is Leslie Cole and I write help content for Word. This is my first blog entry, and it was prompted by a number of customer questions about the subject of widows and orphans. Let me know if I answered your question; I look forward to hearing from you. Many Word customers are concerned with the fate of widows and orphans—both the human and document-related ones. Document-related widows and orphans are the first or last lines of a paragraph that end up all by themselves at the bottom...

Often, all you need to do to get your numbering to work the way you want is to type the number value followed by the punctuation you want for the numbering and press the Spacebar. Word goes ahead and starts a list for you using the value and format you've provided. So if you type 1) and a space, you have a new numbered list with that format. For example, typing 1.<space> gives you the start of a numbered list (as would 1) or A. or a variety of other combinations.) But what if you want more...

Another post, another Word Program Manager… My name is Tristan Davis and over the last 3 years as a Program Manager (or PM if you want to use Microsoft-speak) on the Word team, I've focused on three things: Losing 60 pounds, joining the Ecma TC45 Technical Committee as the WordprocessingML expert and helping develop it through to the recent final draft , and as a result, gaining back 80 (sigh) Planning my upcoming wedding to another Word PM (December 18 th – two months two days and counting) Thinking...

I don't post here often, so I'll remind you who I am. My name is Roxanne Kenison, and I'm on the team that publishes Word-related content on Office Online . When you first booted up Word 2007 and started working on documents, you probably noticed that Word 2007's default layout is to space lines a little looser on the page than in previous versions. In general, this makes for documents that are easier on the eye because there's more white space. It's better document design, and one of the design...

One of my favorite bits of user feedback about the Word 2003 styles UI was that some users (not many but some) thought that the control at the far left of the toolbar just reported the "health" of the document. "Why, yes, Doctor, this document is perfectly Normal." That control actually was one of the most important in Word and was used to apply styles. Styles in 2007 In the ideal world, styles are applied based on the meaning of the text. For instance, in many documents, text is used as headings...

We’ve all received PDF files with content that we wanted to reuse. This means that most of us have been disappointed by the difficulty of getting good content out of a PDF. For example, if you try to copy and paste table rows from a PDF viewer into Word, you frequently end up with a collapsed single line of text.  Most existing PDF viewers, in essence, limit people who use PDF’s to a “look but don’t touch” experience.  PDF Reflow, a new feature in the upcoming release of Word, changes the landscape by letting you convert PDFs into editable Word documents.

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