Keep Formatting Consistent With Word’s Styles Pane

When Word documents get edited by multiple people, the end result is often an unholy mess, since most people still tend to make direct formatting changes (such as adding bold and italics) rather than using Word’s Styles feature for consistency. The Microsoft Word Team blog gives a useful overview of how you can rescue a format-challenged document by using the Styles pane to identify all the formatting used in a document, and replace ad-hoc formatting with properly defined styles. This useful feature is less than obvious in Word 2007, since the option to launch the actual styles list is a ridiculously tiny arrow under Change Styles and the default is to show only ‘recommended’ styles rather than what’s actually in use, but it’s still there.