You can spend a lot of time formatting a Word or Excel document to get the look you want, or you can create a custom style set and click on an option. You will choose the latter once you try.
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Most of us spend at least a little time forming a document before doing so. It may take a little time and doing it for each new document is tedious, especially if you are applying the same set of formats. Creating and applying a template is a possibility, but users find it difficult to apply them unless they receive adequate training. As an alternative to a template, you can create a custom theme or set of styles. New documents can be formatted with a simple click. Nothing could be simpler.
In this article, I'll show you how to use the built-in design settings to quickly format a complete document with a quick click. Although the article focuses on Word, you can also apply and customize themes in Excel and PowerPoint.
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I am using Office 365 on a Windows 10 64 system, but most functions will work on previous (tape) versions. You can work with your own document or download the .docx demo file to follow it. This article is not applicable to the online version.
What is already at work
By clicking anywhere in a document, you can know what style is in use. Figure A shows that the paragraph text has a Normal style (do not confuse the default Normal style with the default template of the same name). Now, click on the Design tab and see the thumbnails of Document Format. As you can see in Figure B the default theme is on the far left. The theme contains format for the entire document, not just a source or paragraph.
Figure A
Figure B
At At this point, the predefined centered topic is still intact and has a new "theme" that you can apply to get all the attributes of Centering, plus the color, font and line spacing settings modified. To do so, select Centered Plus in the gallery ( Figure F ).
Figure F
http://www.techrepak.com] Save the modified theme
In the last section, you created a new set of styles, or theme depending on the modifications made to the predefined centered theme. Now you have two themes from the Center: the original Centered and the modified one that you named Centrado Plus. You can save the changes in Centered instead of creating a Centered-based theme like we just did, although I do not recommend that you do it because you will lose Centered (out of the box), but, to be complete, you should know that you can. To do so, choose Save the current theme in the Theme drop-down menu. In the resulting dialog box, click Save without changing the theme name (which I do not recommend). If you change the theme name, the custom theme will appear in the list of custom themes in the Themes drop-down menu.
SEE: 30 things you should never do in Microsoft Office (Free PDF) (TechRepublic)
Save time
Customizing the topics makes more sense than Start from scratch with each document, and it's easier than creating and implementing a template. Find a topic that is close to what you want, modify the few things you should do and then apply the set of styles or custom theme. You can create several custom style sets to meet your needs.
If you use custom style sets, help other readers by sharing some of their tips in the comments section.
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