[Martin at GDC]

I want to find a help page that explains the Modify Style dialog in Word.
What I really want is a help resource that explains all dialogs for all
products. But I'll settle for Modify Style for now. Every help resource
I've found at Microsoft is question based, such as "How do I do ..." and the
answer is "click this, select that, ..." What I want is to start with a
given dialog and then have every option, button, control, etc on it explained
as to what it is and how the feature it controls works. Other tools from
other vendors have this kind of help, surely Microsoft must have it as well.

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I guess Microsoft thinks the dialog is pretty self-explanatory. The box
allows you to change some style attributes directly (font, font size, line
spacing, alignment); for the rest, you click Format and access the
appropriate dialog (Paragraph, Tabs, Frame, Borders and Shading), etc. Often
the easiest way to modify a style is to update it by example, as explained
in http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/styl...ifyAStyle.html. That is, you
format a paragraph to be the way you want a style to look, then select that
style in the Styles and Formatting task pane and choose "Update to match
selection."

There are two check boxes that are important: "Add to template" writes your
changes back to the template so that all new documents based on that
template will have the modified style. "Update automatically" should usually
be avoided but can be helpful temporarily when you're still figuring out how
you want your style to look. When that box is checked, any change you make
to a paragraph in that style will be made to the style itself and will be
propagated to other paragraphs in that style except when the change
conflicts with any direct formatting that has already been applied to those
paragraphs.

The "Style based on" and "Style for following paragraph" boxes can be
important. If a style is based on Normal (as many of them are), then any
change you make to the Normal style will be reflected in the given style.
Although the following style is usually the same style, it can be very
useful to choose a different style; for example, the following style for all
the built-in heading styles is Normal (I usually change this to Body Text).
It's important to understand this if you get something unexpected when you
press Enter at the end of a paragraph: you may have invoked an entirely
different style.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

"Martin at GDC" Martin at wrote in message
...
I want to find a help page that explains the Modify Style dialog in Word.
What I really want is a help resource that explains all dialogs for all
products. But I'll settle for Modify Style for now. Every help resource
I've found at Microsoft is question based, such as "How do I do ..." and
the
answer is "click this, select that, ..." What I want is to start with a
given dialog and then have every option, button, control, etc on it
explained
as to what it is and how the feature it controls works. Other tools from
other vendors have this kind of help, surely Microsoft must have it as
well.