Creating Templates & Styles in Microsoft Word

Save yourself time by creating templates for course projects. When you read through the course syllabus, you probably will find submission guidelines for at least some of the projects, guidelines such as use 11 point serif font, set your spacing at 1.5, and save as an rtf file. Rather than having to create a file according to those directions each time you submit a project, create a template.

You may also be directed to use first- and second-level headings. Or you may be preparing an annotated bibliography or an evaluative essay that includes block quotes (only a few, of course) and bibliography page. For these items, you need to know how to create styles.

This tutorial is based on work completed by Melissa Place in English 5770: Advanced Editing.

To begin, for all styles, open a new document in Microsoft Word.

Creating bibliographical entry style . . .

If you're like me, you've always tried to make your bibliographies look right by doing a hard return after the first line and using the tab key to indent the following lines. The problem with this method -- if you accidentally omit some of the information and have to go back and insert it, your spacing is thrown all off. Well, you'll never have that problem again if you create a bibliography style. Here's how!

[You can access this tutorial with screen captures as an rtf file, if you click here. If you are accessing the file using a modem, be prepared for access to be very slow.]
 
 

[Note the paragraph preview box and character preview box which provide a preview of the style being created. Also note the "modify" button for changing a style that you have created.]

4.  At the bottom of the window, click ‘Format’ and select ‘Paragraph’.

[Refer to the screen capture for step 5. Use "spacing" to create space before and after each bibliographical entry. Then you don't have to double space between entries.]

[If you've also set the spacing before and after the text, you'll see that change.]

11. Click ‘Apply’.

[If you used spacing to determine the spacing before and after the text for the bibliographical entry, then you do NOT have to double space. Neat!

Now type a few lines to see your new bib style at work. Notice that the word 'bib' appears in the box at the left of your screen just above the ruler. [The menu or box used for styles appears in various places depending upon version of Word and may not appear if you don't have the tool bar with it showing.] If you click on the arrow, you'll see your bib style listed there along with styles for heading 1, heading 2, etc.

Creating style for quotations . . .

To create a style for quotes, begin exactly as you did to create your bib style. In step 5, name your quote style 'quote'. Omit steps 8 and 9. Instead, simply set the appropriate indentations for your quote style using the arrows next to the boxes labeled 'left' and 'right' under 'Indentation'. Look at the text in the preview box to see how your quote will look.

Creating a template . . .

You may find it useful to create templates for the types of documents you submit in your classes. You could save a lot of time.

Templates are very useful when several writers are contributing to a single document, such as an anthology. If all of the writers use the template, the anthology will be consistent in style, and look more professional than if it contained several different styles. Templates would also save writers and editors time, because they wouldn't have to figure out what style is appropriate for the anthology. Perhaps templates would help to prevent problems between writers and editors. A template may not solve the debate about whether to use a comma before the final item in a series, but it would certainly do away with many potential conflicts over appropriateness of style.

The Society for Technical Communication uses a template for the papers submitted by conference presenters for publication in The Proceedings of the conference. You can check out this template by clicking here. Once you've opened the template in Microsoft Word, put cursor in passages in different "styles" and note how the label in the style box changes. At the end of the document, you can also type in a phrase, highlight, apply a style, and see the results.