Applying Styles in Word 6 through Word 2000

Styles will do you no good if you cannot apply them to your text. There are three ways you can apply styles. The first way to apply styles depends on your use of the toolbars. The left-most side of the Formatting toolbar indicates the style of the current paragraph. You can change the style of the current paragraph (in the case of paragraph styles) or the characters you have selected (for character styles) by pulling down the list and selecting a different style.

The second method of applying styles uses the menus. You can follow these steps to apply a style:

1. Position the insertion point in the paragraph to which you want to apply a paragraph style, or select the characters to which you want to apply a character style.
2. Choose Style from the Format menu. You will see the Style dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.)
3. In the Styles box, select the name of the style you want to apply.
4. Click on Apply.

The final method assumes you have assigned your styles to specific shortcut keys. If you have, then you can position the insertion pointer in the paragraph to which you want to apply the style, and then use the shortcut key.