How to Format your book using style gallery in word

Having a finished book has got to be the most rewarding feeling for an author.

My first tutorial on YouTube was on how I format my book utilizing gallery styles. Word has some preset styles already, but every author knows basic formatting doesn’t cut it. Customizing your style gallery will allow you to quickly format paragraphs so that you can focus on writing and tackling what I consider the worst and most daunting task of all… editing. If you don’t know where the style gallery is, it is the predefined settings on the Home tab.

To see all the available styles, use the double arrow pointing down.

These are all the recommended styles that Word suggests. Your gallery would not have all of these options, at least not the ones on the very top, because those are my custom styles. You can either modify a style or choose to create your own.

To create your own style…

Open the style gallery and select Create a Style.

Select Modify

(You will rename in the next step)

In the popup, you will rename Style and set your font.

Under Format, you have the Font option, or you can select it from the current screen under Formatting. The biggest difference is that the Font in the Format tab offers a few more options, such as adding effects.

After you select your font, you will go back to the setup screen. If you have no further customizations, you are done.

To add customized paragraphs, go back to Format, then choose Paragraphs.

From here, you can add preset indentations and line spacing, choose the alignment, and decide if you want double spacing between your sentences. Under the Special box in the Indentation section, use the option: First line to set the indention for the first line of each paragraph.

You can see that every window has a preview at the bottom so that you can see the changes instantly. Hit OK, and you will go back to the original setup screen.

Modify a style that has already been created…

Right-click on your predefined style, and then hit modify

You can decide to rename it, remove it from the gallery, or Modify…, which will change the format as if you were creating a new style.

You can change the settings just as you did when creating a new style. Once you are done making changes, make sure to select Automatically update so that the current setting will sync with any part of your document that was utilizing that particular style.

For more in-depth information, check out my YouTube video. There is more content on how to find previously created styles from other documents, as well as how to see what format any particular text has. I briefly discuss page breaks and how to see the hidden characters in your document.