View and edit styles quickly in Word 2010

If you create your own custom styles or just want a quick way to view and modify existing ones, you should turn on the style area pane in Microsoft Word.

The option is tucked away: Go to File, Options, Advanced, and then scroll down to the Display section. Now enter a value in the text box next to Style area pane width in Draft and Outline views. Just enter "1 in" for starters; you can always make it larger or smaller later:

Now go to the View tab and click Draft to enable a view where this pane is visible. (You could use Outline, but Draft looks more like your final document - which is helpful when applying styles.)

You can double-click a style to open the Style dialog box, where you can quickly change between pre-set styles - say to No Spacing if you want to turn off default line skips between paragraphs:

Click the Modify button if you want to edit a style and apply the change to all content that uses it throughout the document:

There's a lot of power in this feature, but if it ever gets in your way you can simply grab the vertical line that separates the style area from your content and drag it left to make it go away.

Suzanne

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2011
  thank you!!! you just shave at least an hour off my editing tonight!!

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2012
  But... I don't want to have to work in Draft or Outline view just in order to see my styles.  I want to be able to author in print layout view and still see them.  On the right hand side of my screen as it was in all previous versions and as the gods intended!

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 25, 2013
  I'm finding Word 2010 very frustrating in many areas, including styles. I agree with ceiswyn and jkimball, but I don't know what jkimball means by the "style menu section" and Ctrl-Alt-S just divides my document into two panes, showing no styles...

• Anonymous
  November 01, 2013
  JH, I think you forgot the Shift in that combo.