Using styles

What are styles?

'Formatting' is the way text looks – the font, size, bold, italic and so on. Styles are a way of applying more than 1 type of formatting with a single click, for example changing normal text to a heading by making it 14 point, bold and italic, adding numbering and altering the spacing above and below. They are easy to use, make sure NICE documents are consistent and mean that you don't have to remember what each type of heading, paragraph and bullet looks like in NICE house style.

How to apply styles

To apply a style to a piece of text, put your cursor within the text then choose the style you want from the style menu in the Home tab. You don't have to select the whole paragraph – the style will be applied to all the text in the paragraph in which your cursor lies.

If you are formatting a lot of text, it may be easier to keep the pop-up menu of styles open rather than scrolling through the ones on the Home tab. To do this, go to the 'Home' tab and click on the arrow at the bottom right-hand side of the 'Style' group. Use this in the same way, simply place your cursor in the text, then click on the style you want to use from the menu.