Any of the resources that Suzanne and I pointed to will help with
understanding Word 2002 styles. Have fun getting up to speed! Most long-term
WP users I know who make the move to Word *never* fully adjust. It's an
entirely different mindset. But, there are a few things that can help with
the transition.
WordPerfect is like a stream of formatting. Do something here, and it
remains in effect until you turn it off later. XyWrite was like that, as
were many if not most of the early word processors.
Word, on the other hand, is object oriented. You format different chunks or
objects: a character, a selection of characters, a word, a line, a sentence,
a paragraph, a section, a document, a graphic, a table, etc.
If you go at those using direct formatting--by clicking on Bold (Ctrl+B),
making a paragraph formatting change, etc., that's called Direct formatting.
You have no leverage that way. If you've formatted every title as Bold,
Italic, then you don't really have a good way to change your title
formatting in one fell swoop, particularly if you've used Bold and Italic
formatting elsewhere.
If you use a style for each distinct type of formatting, then you can do
massive amounts of reformatting by editing the style, rather than having to
look to see where formatting was applied. Using styles gives you lots of
leverage. To complete the above example, if you have a style named Title
that you've used for every title, and a manager suddenly says that all
titles have to be all caps, underlined, and orange, it's a simple change,
regardless of how long your document is. (This leaves you lots of extra time
for helping such managers get therapy.)
Using Heading 1 through Heading 9 styles gives you additional leverage, in
the form of organizational power in using outlining mode to organize and
reorganize documents. This also feeds into automatic tables of contents.
It's a hard change from WordPerfect, but if you can make the adjustment,
you'll find that a number of chores become easier and less repetitive. Of
course, you'll get frustrated along the way, too, since you know where
everything is in WP, and some WP things don't have Word equivalents.
But, it's things like this that help our brains stay young... right? ;-)
--
Herb Tyson MS MVP
Author of the Word 2007 Bible
Blog:
http://word2007bible.herbtyson.com
Web:
http://www.herbtyson.com