How to Make the Formatting in Your Document Consistent

Note: This post is an extended reply to Ilya's comment on my last post

If you've ever worked document with more than one person, then you've likely had to deal with this type of nonsense: Sally likes to emphasize text by making it 13 point and bold, Sam prefers to change the font and italicize it, Billy used Emphasis Style, and on, and on. Because of this, not only do you have to work to make the language in your co-authored document consistent, but you've got to deal with formatting inconsistencies as well.

If you've experienced this, you know it's painful. What you may not know is that Word:

• Keeps track of every type of formatting used in your documents
• Provides a nifty pane that exposes this info
• Can be a great help in the inconsistent formatting scenario

This goodness is exposed via the Styles Pane…which is the focus of the rest of this post.

By default, when you show the Styles Pane in Word 2007, we show a set of Recommended Styles (you can change which Styles are Recommended by click on the Mange Styles button and then on the Recommended tab). Using the Styles Pane Options dialog (surface this by clicking the Options link at the bottom right of the Styles Pane) you can show every Style used in the document (first drop down) as well as every type of direct formatting used in your document (first three checkboxes).

Let's talk about showing and working with direct formatting since this is the most common source for formatting inconsistency.

Note: These boxes were checked by default in previous versions of Word. That's why the Styles Pane may look simpler in Word 2007 by default.

Step 1: check the aforementioned boxes

Once they are checked, the Styles Pane will show you every type of direct formatting in your document. For example let's say you have a document that contains the following content:

Here's the…

If you look at the top of the panes, you'll note that showing paragraph and font formatting added new entries correspond with the direct formatting in the document (you can tell they are direct formatting because they do not have an icon on the far right of the pane like the Styles do).

Step 2: Right Click

Now for the glorious part. If you right click on any of the direct formatting, you can select all instances of that type of formatting…and…wait for it…change them all at once. This is really handy if you have something like the document above that has three very similar types of formatting—Italic Calibri, Italic Arial, Italic Verdana—that need to be made consistent.

To do this you just the following in the Styles Pane:

• Right click on the direct formatting you'd like to change
• Click Select All
• Click on the direct formatting you'd like to apply

With this you can make all Italic Arial text into Italic Verdana text…and then all the Italic Verdana text into Italic Calibri text…and have fixed that formatting inconsistency throughout your document.

Note: When you change all instances of a type of direct formatting to another type of direct formatting, the former will disappear from the Styles Pane because it is not in the document anymore.

Step 3: Stylize

Now if you really want to flex your Word muscles and use Styles instead of direct formatting, you have a couple of options:

• Proactively try to prevent the use of direct formatting instead of similar Styles
• Turn direct formatting into a new Style
• Convert direct formatting into a existing Style

Let's go bottom up…

To convert direct formatting into an existing Style, right click on it in the Styles Pane, click on Select All Instances, and choose a Style.

To turn direct formatting into a new Style, right click on it in the Styles Pane, click on Select All Instances, and define a new Quick Style.

To proactively try to prevent the use of direct formatting instead of Styles, check the checkbox next to "Mark formatting inconsistencies" in "Advanced" under "Word Options".

Now you will see a blue squiggle under any direct formatting that looks enough like a Style. If you right click it, you can convert it to the similar Style. For example, here's the previously mentioned document with the option on and me right clicking on squiggled content:

The Italic Arial and Italic Calibri directly formatted text was squiggled because it is a lot like the Quote Style. The Italic, Calibri, Accent 1, and the Italic, Calibri, Bold, and Expanded by 0.45 pt directly formatted text got squiggled was squiggled because it looks a lot like the Subtitle Emphasis Style and Book Title Styles, respectively.

While this post certainly won't take away the pain caused formatting inconsistencies, I hope that it does provide some relief.

-Jonathan Bailor