In search of resources to learn Advanced Microsoft Word styles. 2024 Ed.

February 22, 2024 12:16 PM

I've got the basics, but I want to completely and utterly understand Styles and how they interact with normal.dotm and embedded templates with paragraph numbering, fonts, in Word 365 for Windows desktop. I want to become a styles maven who can troubleshoot any problem that arises with my gajillion highly formatted documents of different vintages.

Looking for courses, videos, or books (etc) that can transform me into a bone fide power user - Google is only offering me basic stuff. Paid is fine. Or a consultant I could pay to answer questions would be good too.

All my documents were created using a customized normal.dotm with paragraph numbering on a Mac, and now that I've switched to PC, getting them sorted isn't going so smoothly.

For example, the problems I'm trying to fix are things like:

"My old document that was created on a Mac has a different style set and font list attached than I'm currently using, so the styles contain the wrong font and I have to manually change it every single time".

Or "Aptos font doesn't show as available in the fonts drop down list, and Microsoft says this is because normal.dotm may have been customized, but I don't understand the explanation enough to fix it."

Or, "After I open and edit one of these old files, and then close Word, Word is asking me whether or not I want to save the changes I just made to normal.dotm, and I don't understand exactly which changes is it wanting to make so I can decide whether to allow it".

Thanks for any ideas!

posted by bluesky78987 to Technology (4 answers total)

Best answer: With the caveat that I haven't used it for learning Word, I've found that LinkedIn Learning is generally of a higher level of teaching than random youtube videos. Bonus: you may have a free sign-in from your local library.
posted by hydra77 at 12:48 PM on February 22 [1 favorite]

Best answer: my work paid for this training for me, but i haven't taken it yet. i subscribe to the maker's newsletter and sometimes it's basic but sometimes it gets really into the weeds, so i figured i'd take a chance.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 1:28 PM on February 22

You can teach yourself a lot by just testing, create some simple templates containing new styles, create documents based on those styles and then try changing things around - Edit the template, rename the templates, delete the styles and see what happens at each stage. This document has a walkthrough of changing the template attached to a document. Until you understand how all the parts affect each other you will probably want to turn off dynamic style updating.

Two important keyboard shortcuts to memorise:

Ctrl + Q will reset all paragraph formatting of the selected text so that it reverts to the style definition.
Ctrl + Spacebar reset all character formatting of the selected text so that it reverts to the style definition.

The Styles toolbar displays the most recent style that was applied to the selected text. This is not a guarantee that the text has not been manually changed to be different in some way, as soon as you edit any properties, you break the connection with the underlying style until one or both of those style resets are done.

The style definition is normally held in the original template, if it still exists. You can replace the template with another file containing different style definitions, if the style names match then you can Select everything in a document based on that template and press Ctrl + Q and Ctrl + Spacebar to instantly reformat the complete document with the new styles from the new template.
posted by Lanark at 4:00 PM on February 22 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Posting here in case anybody else is searching in the future. I took the class that misanthropicsarah linked and it was fabulous. Just enough about all the basics, and a few of the more advanced things. Highly recommend.
posted by bluesky78987 at 5:32 PM on September 9 [1 favorite]