Creating your Own Text Style

The Home tab contains the Styles panel, which is quite large. Styles refer to the font and formatting options that you can use to quickly change some text on your page. Some In built ones are Heading1, Heading2, Normal, and Title.

What you'll do is to create your own styles, one for the titles of the handbook and one for the body text.

You will set up a style for the titles first.

Create a Title Style

Highlight the first title of the handbook, I. Overview. To highlight the text drag over the text while holding down the left mouse button. Select the font and font size Verdana, 16 points, bold, and left aligned.

Your page should then look like this: (Make sure you don't deselect your heading.)

From the Styles panel click the bottom arrow on the list of styles, outlined in red below:

When you click the arrow, you should see a list appear. Select the item that says "Save selection as a new quick style":

You should then see a dialogue box appear. Type the name Handbook_Titles for your style.

Click OK and your style will be added to the list:

The point about creating a style of your own is that you can then highlight some text and choose it from the list. Your selected text will then be formatted to match the style you set up.

Apply Handbook Title Style to All Titles in Document

Apply the Handbook Titles to the rest of the titles in your document; II Equal Opportunity Employment, III. Policy Against Workplace Harassment, IV. Hours of Work, Attendance, and Punctuality, and V. Reimbursement of Expenses.

Click anywhere in your document to deselect the heading.

Adapting an In Built Style

You can also adapt a style that has already been set up. You will adapt the Normal style, shown on the list above, the second item on the top row. The Normal style refers to all of the body text. In other words, all the text that is not a title.

To adapt a style, click with your right mouse button on the style you want to change. In your case you will choose the Normal style. From the menu that appears, select Modify.

When you click Modify, you'll see a dialogue box appear.

The Name of the style you're modifying is at the top, Normal. Under the Formatting heading, you'll see a font dropdown box, along with a size option. You can also use the Bold, Underline, Italics, and alignment buttons. Choose the font Century Gothic and size of 12 points. Before you click OK, make sure to select the option in the bottom left that says "Only in this document". In other words, you only want to change the Normal style for this particular document, and not for every document you create.

Click OK and the body text of all of your pages of the Employee Handbook will change.

Make sure that you check to see if that your two blank pages still appear at the beginning of the document. You may to adjust them, making sure that your 3rd page, the page with the I. Overview starts on the very first line of the third page.