Center For Practice Management, Document Generation, Microsoft Office, Productivity

What Styles in Microsoft Word Can Do

This image features a stylized fashion alphabet, where each letter from A to Z is paired with headless, fashionable outfits. The upper and lower case letters are drawn in a decorative, ornate style, and next to each letter is a corresponding figure dressed in distinct, stylish attire, ranging from business suits to casual and eccentric outfits. The clothing is detailed, including coats, hats, scarves, and bags, showcasing a variety of textures and patterns. The overall aesthetic blends vintage and modern styles, using vibrant colors like mustard yellow, teal, and pink. The background is a light blue, which enhances the vibrancy of both the outfits and the alphabet letters. The creative pairing of fashion with typography makes this an interesting and visually engaging design.Styles in Microsoft Word can help improve everything from formatting to editing a document. Styles can be applied to make better templates, improve navigation, generate an automatic and hyperlinked Table of Contents, and make self-updating and numbered headings painless. What are the advantages of using Styles in Microsoft Word and how do you use them?

Styles in Microsoft Word are predefined formatting settings that allow you to consistently apply and manage the structure and appearance of your legal documents. Think of Styles as a powerful organizational tool that goes beyond mere visual formatting.

Benefits

Key benefits of using Styles in legal documents include:

  1. Consistency: Styles ensure uniform formatting across your entire document, which is crucial for professional legal writing.
  2. Efficiency: Apply complex formatting with a single click, saving time when creating lengthy legal documents.
  3. Easy updates: Modify a Style once to update all instances throughout the document, eliminating the need for manual changes.
  4. Document structure: Styles create a logical hierarchy in your document, which is essential for navigating complex legal arguments or contracts.
  5. Automated table of contents: Use Heading Styles to generate and update tables of contents automatically, a common requirement in legal documents.
  6. Cross-referencing: Styles facilitate easy creation and maintenance of cross-references within your document.
  7. Accessibility: Properly structured documents using Styles are more accessible to screen readers, which can be important for compliance with accessibility laws.
  8. Version control: Styles make it easier to compare different versions of a document, as formatting changes are more clearly tracked.

Formatting

By leveraging Styles, legal professionals can create more polished, consistent, and structurally sound documents while significantly reducing the time spent on formatting.

Styles have a significant impact on automated features like numbered lists in Microsoft Word. Here’s how:

  1. Consistent numbering structure: Styles can define the numbering format, indentation, and hierarchy for lists. This ensures that all numbered lists throughout your document follow the same structure, which is crucial in legal documents where consistent numbering of clauses, subclauses, and paragraphs is essential.
  2. Automatic numbering: When you apply a numbered list style, Word automatically handles the numbering sequence. This is particularly useful in long legal documents where manual numbering would be time-consuming and error-prone.
  3. Multi-level lists: Styles can define complex multi-level list structures. This is invaluable for legal documents that often require nested numbering (e.g., 1.1, 1.1.1, 1.1.2, etc.). The style determines how each level is formatted and numbered.
  4. Continuous numbering across document sections: Styles can be set up to maintain continuous numbering across different sections of a document. This is crucial for lengthy legal documents that may be divided into multiple parts or sections.
  5. Restart numbering: Styles allow you to easily restart numbering when needed, such as in different articles of a contract or separate schedules in a legal agreement.
  6. Cross-referencing: Numbered list styles facilitate easier cross-referencing. You can refer to specific numbered items elsewhere in the document, and these references will update automatically if the numbering changes.
  7. Table of contents generation: If your numbered lists are part of the document’s main structure (e.g., main clauses in a contract), styles can ensure these are correctly included and formatted in an automatically generated table of contents.
  8. Outline view: Properly styled numbered lists contribute to a well-structured outline view, which can be invaluable for navigating and reorganizing complex legal documents.
  9. Custom numbering formats: Styles allow you to create custom numbering formats often required in legal documents, such as alternating between numbers and letters (1, a, i, etc.).
  10. Consistency across documents: By saving numbered list styles in your firm’s template, you ensure consistency not just within a document, but across all documents produced by your firm.

Using styles for numbered lists in legal documents not only saves time but also significantly reduces the risk of numbering errors, which can have serious implications in legal contexts. It allows lawyers to focus on the content of their documents rather than struggling with formatting and numbering issues.

Templates

Styles are incredibly useful when creating template documents, especially in a legal context. Their importance in template creation cannot be overstated. Here’s why:

  1. Standardization across the firm: Styles in templates ensure that all documents produced by your firm have a consistent look and feel. This standardization is crucial for maintaining a professional brand image.
  2. Efficiency in document creation: Templates with pre-defined styles allow lawyers to quickly generate new documents without spending time on formatting. This can significantly speed up the drafting process.
  3. Easy customization: While templates provide a standard starting point, styles make it easy to customize documents for specific clients or cases without disrupting the overall structure.
  4. Automated updates: If your firm decides to change its document formatting (e.g., switching from Times New Roman to Calibri), you can update the styles in the template once, and all new documents will automatically reflect this change.
  5. Simplified training: New hires or less tech-savvy lawyers can easily create properly formatted documents by simply using the template and applying the appropriate styles, reducing the learning curve.
  6. Consistent structure: Styles in templates can define the structure of common legal documents (e.g., contracts, pleadings, memos), ensuring that all required sections are included and properly formatted.
  7. Quick formatting of copied text: When text is copied from other sources into a template document, you can quickly apply the correct style to make it consistent with the rest of the document.
  8. Compatibility with document assembly software: Many document assembly tools work with styles, allowing for even greater automation in document creation.
  9. Version control: When updating templates, changes to styles can be easily tracked, allowing you to maintain version control of your firm’s document standards.
  10. Accessibility compliance: Templates with properly structured styles help ensure that all documents produced by your firm meet accessibility standards, which is increasingly important in many jurisdictions.
  11. Integration with other systems: Well-structured templates with consistent styles can integrate more smoothly with case management systems, document management systems, and other legal tech tools.

Training

If you haven’t used Styles, it will be helpful to get some training on how to use them effectively.

Affinity Learning Center

From the trainers at Affinity Consulting, you can take individual courses on advanced topics for using Microsoft Word in a legal environment or subscribe to live courses. They will also do custom training for firms. Here is a free Word Advanced Styles demonstration from Danielle DavisRoe on Microsoft Word Advanced Styles

Word for Windows Training

Microsoft provides training modules for free on many aspects of using Microsoft Word, including short modules on Styles.

LinkedIn Learning

Formerly Lynda Learning, LinkedIn has web-based training courses for all skill levels. Many of these courses are available for free, or you can subscribe to a set of courses. Many also offer certifications. There are 35 courses for Microsoft Word, including a 1 hour and 21 minute Formatting and Styles course.

YouTube

There are hundreds of videos available for free for Word training on Styles for lawyers on YouTube.