if you use Word, use Styles

Microsoft Word is … not my favorite … for a wide variety of reasons. However, the reality is that it’s also industry standard, and many many writers find themselves working in it during some (or all) stages of their process from idea to published work.
 
If you use Word, especially for longer documents (like, say, a draft of your novel), I urge you: Take advantage of its Styles tools.

What are Styles?

In Word, applying a Style assigns a role (such as Heading 1, Heading 2, List Paragraph, or Quote) to a particular bit of text.
 
Having assigned a Style, you can change a bunch of style and formatting features for all text in that role at once, simply by modifying that Style. So if you want your chapter titles to be bigger, or in a different font or color, or to have more or less space from the following line of text, you can make that change once rather than one at a time. This way, you also won’t accidentally miss a random chapter title along the way.
 
So, Styles can help you create and maintain a consistent appearance across a document. But using Styles also makes global changes easier—and lets you just as easily change things back if you decide you don’t like the change, or if you’ve modified the appearance to suit someone else’s requirements or for some other temporary reason (for example, to get some distance from the text while self-editing by making it look unfamiliar).

navigating with Styles

My big argument for applying Styles, however, is actually about finding your way around a big, complex document. Styles ease navigation within your manuscript for you and for anyone else you send it to—such as an editor. That’s because of how they interact with the Navigation Pane.
 
You can get to the Navigation Pane quite a few different ways; one is by clicking on the View tab and then clicking Navigation Pane. Once you’re there, any headings you’ve created using Styles will show up as a sort of outline in the Document Map. Clicking on one of them will take you to the corresponding spot in the document.
 
Side note: In Word for Windows, the Document Map allows for drag-and-drop rearranging, letting writers move whole chapters or sections from that convenient sidebar view. (On a Mac, you have to go to the separate Outline View—also accessible through the View tab—to get this functionality.)
 
But the star of the show is how Styles and the Navigation Pane can help you get around the document as you revise!
 
At the very least, I encourage you to apply the Header 1 style to chapter titles or numbers so that those will show up in the Navigation pane. This is typically the first thing I do if I receive a manuscript and find the Navigation pane empty—especially if I’m offering story-level editing on the piece. Being able to move between chunks of text efficiently as you revise is definitely worth the few minutes of setup.
 
Resources to consult if you’re interested but need instructions or further details:

• Customize or create new styles, Microsoft support
• How to Organize a Story In Microsoft Word with Styles and a Table of Contents: A Step-by-Step Tutorial for Writers, Tori Fry
  

Happy writing and revising! Make those tech tools work for you!