der 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 document a “Title” or “Heading 1” style, with no text in it
- Click “File > Save as…” and save the file as a “Word Template (.dotx)” file, in the default templates folder (on my computer, it’s “Documents / Custom Office Templates”). Give it a name you’ll recognize, like “Sean’s template” (replace that with your name, of course!) Don’t forget to change the type to “Word Template”:
To create a document using your new template, click “File > New” and you’ll see the template in the list on the right beside “Blank document”. Choose your new template and you’re good to go!
You can create custom templates for different kinds of projects you work on, and each one can have different styles.
What headings do I use?
When you’re new to headings, it’s hard to know which ones to use. The main thing is to be consistent, and to use headings in a way that shows the structure or hierarchy of the information in your document. Wright State University has a really helpful backgrounder on headings, and uses the following example:
- A Guide to the Babel Fish (Heading 1)
- What is a Babel Fish? (Heading 2)
- Physical Appearance (Heading 3)
- Decoding Mechanism (Heading 3)
- The Babel Fish in Philosophical Arguments (Heading 2)
- Oolon Colluphid’s Arguments (Heading 3)
- Argument for (Heading 4)
- Argument against (Heading 4)
- Agrajag’s Argument (Heading 3)
You can see how the headings are structured in a sensible, nested way. (You could think of a Christmas tree, or Babushka dolls, or a series of triangles – whatever metaphor works for you!) You wouldn’t have a Heading 2 “inside” of a Heading 3, for example.
Sometimes people tend to choose headings because of how they look – they want the particular font size or style associated with it. Don’t do that; think about the structure you want instead, use the headings that match that structure, and then change the font size or style of the headings to suit your needs using the steps above.
One of the big questions is whether your document should start with a “Title” or with a “Heading 1”. He