PBB Help: Consistent Outline Display

Well, first you need to start by making the Word document consistent throughout in terms of styles and numbering. The key, I've discovered, is not necessarily the Heading level of each paragraph, but it's Outline level, which is a property of the Heading styles:

Turns out you can set a paragraph's outline level without it being a Heading style paragraph, and Logos will still pay attention to it for Table of Contents processing, for example.

Not all your paragraphs were formatting using styles. Also, you had some paragraph numbering that didn't quite match up to your intent, I think.

I've fixed it up here: 8081.Sample.docx

Even so, Logos appears to be buggy in how it interprets outline levels.

LOGOS: Take notice of bug report! This is happening to me in 4.5b Beta 6.

Garret, as a workaround if you manually put in the numbering instead of using Word's built-in automatic paragraph numbering feature, and manually apply or turn off character formatting where needed (e.g., the italics for II. , you should be able to get it to work right in Logos. Might take some tweaking. Word wants to turn every paragraph you started with a number into an automatically numbered paragraph, so you just have to press Ctrl+Z (undo) immediately after it does that, and it will let you go on your merry way doing it manually.

Here's another try with it fixed up manually so that it works in Logos: 1754.Sample2.docx

That is helpful, but I'm also interested in a mark-up workflow. For styles, how do you organize and apply them? Do you have different styles on a per-document basis, or use a starting template for all PBB files? Have you made keyboard shortcuts for commonly used styles?

No, I don't use keyboard shortcuts. I usually apply them by clicking on the style name on the ribbon:

However, there's a little known trick that I used to use (and haven't been using anymore since applying styles became so easy through the newly designed ribbon in Word 2007). If you like to be mostly a keyboard user (which I used to insist was faster for me), you can create an alias for the stylename by renaming the built-in styles (which can't otherwise be renamed) to have a short 2-character alias separated from the stylename by a comma, for example h1 for Heading 1 and so on.

Then you can use the (relatively short) keystroke sequence Ctrl+Shift+S (Apply style), h4, Enter to apply the style Heading 4 to the current paragraph. I don't like the fact that in Word 2007 this actually changes the visible name of the style to its alias on the ribbon:

It used to be in older versions that the stylename would show up with its alias after it in the Style dropdown on the ribbon.

I have my most commonly used Heading style formatting in my Normal.dotm, which is the template that all my documents start from. I don't use a separate PBB template. But I do sometimes adjust the style formatting on a per-document basis. It doesn't take long. I format a paragraph as that style, and then I override the style formatting by applying manual formatting to make it look like I want that style to look. Then I right click on the style name on the ribbon and choose "Update <stylename> to Match Selection". Then I can go ahead and use that style to apply to other paragraphs that I want to look the same.

edit: One thing I noticed, which might be throwing it off, is that I had my styles set to "auto-update."

Oh yes, you definitely want that turned off!

And don't try to standardize the formatting before applying styles. That's a waste of time, as it's irrelevant. Styles are the way to standardize formatting.  That's the whole point of them. When you apply a style, the formatting that's in the style definition overrides all the manually applied formatting of the paragraph. Styles were invented as a shorthand way of applying a set of paragraph (and character) formatting properties to a paragraph, which you could then repeat throughout your document for all paragraphs that you wanted to look consistent with that first one.

Also, the best thin about styles is that when you change the style properties, all the paragraphs that have that style applied will change immediately in tandem. So it's a quick way to change formatting throughout a document if your style guidelines change. Say you decide that instead of 1" indents on all your block quotes you only want 1/2" indents. The old way (before styles) would be a pain in the neck to go update them all. With styles, if you've properly applied one consistent style (e.g., the built in style "Block Text" which you can redefine to your heart's content; or create your own new one called, say "Quote") to all your block quotes, then all you have to do is change the paragraph formatting in the style and voila! All your block quotes get reformatted properly.

To change the properties of a style, bring up the Modify Style dialog for the style in question. There are several ways to go about this:

1) Right-click on the style name in the ribbon and choose Modify...

2) Press Ctrl+Shift+S, select the style name from the dropdown, and click Modify...

3) Open the Styles window (Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S), click the Manage Styles button (third one from the left on the bottom), select the style name in the list box (you can now see a preview of this style and a list of all its current properties, both paragraph and character properties -- this is a useful thing to know about if you didn't already), and from here you can click Modify...

Here's the Modify Style dialog:

From here, if you want to you can turn on or off the checkbox for "Add to Quick Style list" (which will make it show up in the Ribbon, which you want to do if it's a style you use often; by default any new style you create and apply in the document you're working in will be added to the Quick Style list).

But the main thing to do here is click the Format button and choose Font or Paragraph (or any of the others, but Font and Paragraph are by far the most common ones you'll need) and change the character or paragraph formatting as you desire.

Once you're done with the Font formatting, click OK, then do the same for Paragraph, then click OK and again OK out of the main Modify Style dialog and you're done.

A side note: the field called "Style based on" is where you control property inheritance of styles. Most styles are and should remain based on "Normal" which is the baseline paragraph style. There are a few cases where it makes sense to set up one master style (based on Normal) with several child styles that inherit their properties from that master style and have minor variations. If you explore Word's Style Manager (which I've got assigned to Alt+Shift+S using Word Options > Customize, since it's so useful), you will see how some of the built-in styles use this feature. But you probably won't need to do that. I'd just base all your styles on Normal.

Another thing that is sometimes confusing is that there are different types of styles: the main ones are paragraph styles and character styles. Paragraph styles apply a set of both character and paragraph properties to an entire paragraph (e.g., the whole paragraph will be bold and centered), whereas character styles only apply a set of character properties to a selected range of characters (e.g., a footnote reference mark will always be smaller and superscripted; this is achieved using the character style "Footnote Reference"). You can tell what type of style you're dealing with by the icon preceding the stylename in the Manage Styles dialog box.

There are also three other style types: Linked styles (both character and paragraph properties; not quite sure what's different between these and paragraph styles which can also have character and paragraph properties), Table styles, and List styles.

Incidentally, I recommend using the Alphabetic sort order, so you can more easily find the style you're looking for; and also turn off the "Show recommended styles only" checkbox so you can see all the styles in the list.

Another useful couple of things to know about managing styles:

The Style Inspector (you can bring this up from the Styles window by clicking on the second icon from the left on the bottom):

Here's how you make use of the Style Inspector. Bring it up and let it hang around as a floating window:

Then as you click around in various places in your document, the Style Inspector will show you what formatting is there: the base paragraph style that is applied (in this case "Heading 1") and any additional formatting that is applied on top of (and thus overriding) the style properties (in this case <none>), the base character style ("Default Paragraph Font" means the character properties come from the font formatting that's in base paragraph style), and any additional formatting that overrides that (in this case <none>).

You can also click on the button "Reveal Formatting" (leftmost one on the bottom) which brings up the incredibly useful Reveal Formatting window:

Again, with this up, as you click around in your document, you'll be able to see precisely what formatting is already applied, and make sure you've got everything consistent. (A quick way to bring the Reveal Formatting window up at any time is Shift+F1.)

One final useful way to see what styles are in use in your document:

Turn on the Style Area Pane (for Draft and Outline views) by assigning it a non-zero width in Word Options > Advanced:

When you have this on, and you go into Draft View or Outline View (which you can do from the View tab: ),

you will see the stylen ames of all your paragraphs listed next to them in a pane to the left hand side:

Outline View is a handy mode in which to do some work adjusting the Heading levels and organizing your document:

Whew! I had no idea how much I'd been taking for granted. It looks like I really ought to write a tutorial for using styles in Word. You see, I've been using them for 27 years, since I started working on the Word Development team, so they are second nature to me now. And the program has added so many new style features since back then, it's pretty mind-boggling. I've been trying to keep up with it all. But even I don't know everything, and I see that I need to do some more study to figure out the different style types so I can explain them better.

Thank you for continuing to ask questions and giving me the opportunity to get this all down in a thread. I can point people to this thread later when they want an explanation of how styles work in Word.

Let me know if anything is unclear.