4: Adding styles

The final section of the document, “Bibliography,” looks pretty messy. Rather than tweak each paragraph's formatting until it's fixed, it would be nice to have a consistent format that we could apply throughout that section. What we need is a new “Bibliography Entry” style.

Suppose that we wanted all of the bibliography to look just like the first paragraph:

To make a new style based on this paragraph, select all of the text in this paragraph and click the “New Style” button in the styles pane:

Something like the following window will open:

Type the name of the new style into the “Name” field, and click the OK button:

You have just created a new style called "Bibliography Entry," and Word has copied all of the characteristics of the selected paragraph into it—the font, the paragraph layout, the margins, the line spacing, etc.

All that remains now is to apply the new style to the entire "Bibliography" section. To do this, select all the paragraphs in the section and click on the new "Bibliography Entry" style in the style pane. Keep in mind that even though you set up the first paragraph as the "Bibliography Entry" style, Word doesn't actually apply the new style to it. This is one of Word's “little quirks”—of if you prefer, “features.”

The bibliography should now look like this, more or less: