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March 18

Microsoft Word Styles

Microsoft Word gives me the ability to define styles, a useful feature, and the ability to identify them as character styles or paragraph styles, a distinction that I do not understand. I think that character styles work in a way that is counter-intuitive, but that I cannot explain. Can someone explain to me briefly what the difference is, and whether there are any advantages and disadvantages to each type of style? Robert McClenon (talk) 16:22, 18 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There are a couple of differences: the scope they're applied to, and the settings which they control. (NB - I'm not a current Word user, I've switched to LibreOffice, so there may have been some changes in user interfaces)

You can apply a character style to a range of characters, fairly freely. This can be as small as a single character. You highlight that range, then apply the style. A paragraph style though only applies to a paragraph - use Ctrl-F10 to turn on 'Show formatting' and look for where the pilcrow ¶ markers are. You place the caret anywhere within the para, then that whole para is styled.

You can set fonts and colours from both types of style. I think you can set anything for a character style from a paragraph style too. But there are many more formatting settings which are only applicable to paragraphs (and so to paragraph styles): text flowing, margins and indents, tabs, treatment of para styles by the outliner. You can also make para styles look less like separate paragraphs, without whitespace between them, but for Word (unlike HTML / CSS) I don't think you can make paras flow as inline elements: they always need at least a line break between them.

If it makes sense to apply it to characters, one by one, and it has no meaning for an overall para, then define it as a character style.

If it only makes sense applied consistently to a whole para (even if overridden for a few characters within that), then make it a para style.

Other editors also extend this model to have groups of "frame styles", "page styles" and "list styles" too. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:44, 18 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]