In technical writing there’s usually more than one way to accomplish any given task.
Let’s say you’re given a Microsoft Word document and there are a lot of different paragraph styles in that document. What will you do when you are asked to right-indent all section headers AT THE SAME TIME by one tab stop and then to also change their colors to RED?
Find-and-Replace is a great functionality but we cannot use it here. You can use the search function to find a particular paragraph style but you need to use a search word or phrase to accomplish that. After you find all the headers that fit a certain paragraph style you’ll find out that you cannot select them all simultaneously for a global edit.
To locate all the headers in the Table of Contents and then select them all at the same time would be impossible.
There is a very easy method to accomplish that in a hurry.
First display the Styles and Formatting pane of your document by selecting Format > Styles and Formatting from your main menu.
From the list of paragraph styles, select one. There will be a dark blue box around it.
Hover your cursor over the style name to display the drop-down menu arrow.
Click the arrow to display the following options:
Select All X Instance(s)
Modify…
Delete…
Update to match the Selection
Select the “Select All X Instance(s)” option to highlight every piece of text in your document which has that paragraph style.
After that, go to your toolbar and click on the right-indent button. Your headers will shift to right by one tab space.
Go to your Toolbar; click the Font Color button and then select the RED color. All your headers will be converted to red.
And you are done! Congratulations.
You can do a much more thorough edit by again selecting all instances of a paragraph style.
But instead of changing the style through the tool-bar buttons, you can display the Modify Style dialog box by selecting “Modify” from the drop-down list of the paragraph style listed in the Styles and Formatting pane.
Every time that paragraph style is used it will display the changes you’ve made in that dialog box.
CAUTION: If you select the “Add to template” check box and then click OK, you’ll make the changes a permanent part of your style sheet.
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