If you’re creating documents (which, as a public servant, you …probably do often), one of the most important things you can do is to use real headings. You’ll often see documents that are divided up by bolded or capitalized or underlined or slightly larger text, done by hand. That’s very 90’s. It’s very gauche. If you want to make great documents, please use headings.
Headings – real headings – are important because they tell people what the structure of your document is. Pretend headings (bolded or resized text) don’t include the information that tells your word processor where new sections of a document are. Using real headings means that people using screen readers or other accessibility tools can easily navigate and jump through your document. It also means that if your document is ever converted into a webpage or some other kind of format, it will already be properly structured and ready to go.
The other benefit of headings is that they let you format your document really consistently. You can make changes to the style of the headings you use, and instantly update them throughout your entire document. It’s a game-changer – once you start using them, you’ll never go back.
Adding headings in Word
These examples are for Word 2013 on Windows, for other versions see Microsoft’s documentation here.
To add a heading in Word, place your text cursor on the line you’d like to make into a heading. Then, click on the small arrow in the “Styles” panel and choose the heading you’d like.
Once you get used to it, you can do this much faster by using keyboard shortcuts. To add a “Heading 2”, for example, hold down “Control” and “Alt” on your keyboard then push “2”. For a “Heading 3”, it’s “Control + Alt + 3” and so on.
To change a line of text back from a heading to a normal paragraph, the keyboard shortcut is “Control + Shift + N”.
Customizing how your headings look
Let’s be real, the default Microsoft Word headings aren’t great. They’re blue and weird and would look out of place in any government document. It makes you wonder if whoever made these styles the default may have accidentally set back Word accessibility by a decade.
Fortunately, you can change them! The most reliable way of doing this is:
- Set your heading text to the desired heading number (e.g. “Heading 2”), and briefly hold your tongue while it’s blue and weird
- Change the font colour back to black, change the size (as needed), and make it bold, italic, etc. as you see fit
- In the styles panel, right-click on the same heading number (“Heading 2” in this case) and click “Update Heading 2 to Match Selection”
That’s all you need! Then, repeat the same steps for other heading numbers (Heading 1, Heading 3, etc.). You can customize these even more by right-clicking on the heading number again and clicking “Modify” (which brings up a screen with more options) but you’re good to go with just the steps above.
Using these steps (setting the text to the heading you want first, then modifying the font styles and so forth) helps make sure that you don’t accidentally lose any extra information about where the heading fits into the overall structure of the document (accidentally turning a Heading 3 into a Heading 2, for example).
What’s great is that you can use these same steps to change each heading style down the road, and Word will automatically update all the headings throughout your document.
Saving your heading styles in a Word template
Once you’ve got headings that you’re really happy with, you can save them to a Word template file. That way, you don’t need to create or customize them over and over again.
My approach to this is the following:
- Create a new, empty Word document
- Customize all the headings I use (typically from Heading 1 to Heading 4), by making sample lines of text for each heading
- Customize paragraph text (and update the style using the same steps as above), add page numbers to the footer at the bottom, and do any other page formatting changes
- Delete all the sample text from the document (except for the page numbers)
- Make the first line of the 