One of the most time-saving things you can do in Microsoft Word is set up custom styles and templates. Rather than manually formatting every document from scratch — adjusting fonts, heading sizes, spacing, and colours each time — you create the formatting once and apply it consistently across all your documents with a few clicks.
This guide covers how to create and manage custom styles, how to build a reusable template, and how to deploy both across your team. The techniques apply to Word as included in Office 2024 Professional Plus and earlier versions.
Understanding Styles in Word
A style in Word is a named set of formatting instructions. Instead of selecting text and manually setting the font to Calibri 11pt with 6pt spacing after each time, you apply a style called “Body Text” that does all of this automatically. Change the style definition later, and every paragraph using that style updates throughout the entire document simultaneously.
Styles are also what makes Word’s Table of Contents work correctly. Paragraphs formatted with Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3 styles are detected automatically when you generate a TOC — so getting your heading styles right from the start pays dividends for longer documents.
Creating a Custom Style
Method 1: From Existing Formatting
- Format a paragraph exactly as you want it — set the font, size, colour, spacing, and any other attributes.
- With the formatted text selected, go to the Home tab and look at the Styles gallery.
- Click the small dropdown arrow at the bottom right of the Styles gallery and select Create a Style.
- Give your style a descriptive name (e.g., “Body Text — Company”, “Sidebar Callout”, “Table Header”).
- Click OK to add it to your styles list.
Method 2: Via the Modify Style Dialogue
- Right-click any existing style in the Styles pane (open with Ctrl + Alt + Shift + S) and select Modify.
- In the Modify Style dialogue, adjust font, size, colour, paragraph spacing, line spacing, and indentation.
- Click Format at the bottom left for additional options — including paragraph, tab stops, border, and numbering settings.
- If you want the style to update automatically when you manually reformat text using it, tick Automatically update.
- Select New documents based on this template if you want the changes to apply to future documents created from this template.
- Click OK to save.
Organising Your Styles
A well-organised style set covers at minimum:
- Body Text — the default paragraph style for main content
- Heading 1, 2, 3 — for document structure and TOC
- Title and Subtitle — for document cover pages
- Caption — for image and table captions
- Block Quote — for indented quotations
- List Bullet and List Number — for bulleted and numbered lists
- Table Header and Table Body — for consistent table formatting
Using a consistent set of styles means any document you create looks polished and professionally structured without any extra effort.
Creating a Template
A template is a file that acts as a starting point for new documents. It contains your custom styles, any boilerplate content (standard headers, footers, cover page layouts), and document settings like margins and page size.
Building Your Template
- Open a blank Word document and set it up exactly as you want your template: set the page margins under Layout > Margins, set the default font under Home > Font, and set up your heading and body styles as described above.
- Add any fixed content: a company logo in the header, a document footer with page numbers and a confidentiality notice, a cover page layout.
- When you’re happy with the setup, go to File > Save As.
- In the Save As dialogue, change the Save as type to Word Template (.dotx).
- Word will automatically navigate to your Templates folder — save it there with a meaningful name like “Company Report Template” or “Proposal Template.”
Using Your Template
To create a new document based on your template, go to File > New and click Personal or Custom to see your saved templates. Double-click your template to open a new document with all your styles and settings in place.
Sharing Templates Across a Team
For teams working on Windows, the simplest approach is to save the template file to a shared network drive or SharePoint/OneDrive folder, then have each team member point Word to that location as a custom template location.
To do this, each user should go to File > Options > Advanced, scroll to the General section, and click File Locations. Change the User templates path to the shared folder location. Word will then show the shared templates in the New Document screen.
Updating Styles Across an Existing Document
One of the great powers of styles is that a single change cascades through an entire document. To update a style:
- Right-click the style in the Styles gallery or pane.
- Select Modify.
- Make your changes and click OK.
Every instance of that style in the document updates immediately. For a 50-page report with 200 body text paragraphs, this saves hours of manual reformatting.
Importing Styles from Another Document
If you’ve built a set of styles in one document and want to bring them into another, Word’s Style Organiser handles this. Go to Home > Styles > Manage Styles > Import/Export. In the Organiser window, you can copy styles between documents or templates, giving you a quick way to standardise formatting across a document set.
Building a Style Library Worth Keeping
Investing a couple of hours in setting up your styles and template properly is one of the highest-value Word skills you can develop. The return is cumulative — every document you create going forward benefits from the setup work you do once.
If you’re not yet on Office 2024, it’s worth noting that Office 2024 Professional Plus at £29.99 from GetRenewedTech includes the full Word application with all the style and template features described here, along with the rest of the Office suite. Mac users can access the same functionality through Office 2024 for Mac at £49.99.
