Understanding Styles in MS Office 2010

I thought I understood styles until a recent essay had a style breakdown when I tried to make a change. When I tried to undo the problem it went from bad to worse. So I thought that before I start on my thesis in earnest I should try to get to grips with styles in an effort to avoid a last minute catastrophe!

I found, whist trying to sort out this problem a website which seemed to be the answer to my prayer. I was convinced when I read the paragraph:-

If you're concerned about whether or not you need to learn styles, we can put it rather simply: you do. Styles are the architecture upon which Word is based. Just about everything in Word is style-driven. In fact, many people in the industry refer to Word as a "style-driven" program.

The site which has the strange name addbalance.com seems to have originally been compiled for the use of the legal profession, who I suspect more than most need faultless document. This post is to signpost the source, I shall be making further posts when I have researched the style issue a little further and will return with my experiences.

To get started follow this link. 

Interestingly there was a link on this site to another site which I had bumped into on a previous search but had lost the link (hence this post to make sure I don't lose these links again). The site is called Shauna Kelly - Making the most of Word in your business. I have to say a much more professional looking site than the other one. There is a particularly good beginners section on styles here. The site covers all aspects of Word and rather than try to explain the layout and approach of the site I would suggest you have a look yourself starting with the Basic Concepts. If there is a problem with this site it would seem that many of the basic guidelines refer to versions of word prior to 2010.

You can go straight to the style section by following this link.

This is also an excellent website that I have referred to on previous occasions The Word MVP Site this is the link.

MS Word Document - Adding a Version No

An important aspect of writing for a PhD is keeping track of the paper, particularly revisions and versions. To date I have been adding version numbers to my essays manually. As I am a bit lazy and very forgetful they are often not updated and chaos sets in. So I decided to explore the possibility of adding a "Version No" field to my headers along with the file name and date created which are already there. Typically there is not a default "Version No" field option in Word 2010. However, I Googled "Word 2010 revision number" and this revealed a number of helpful sources of info. The one I chose to follow was on the MPV website, an article titled -
"How can I get Word to automatically display the document version number in the Header & Footer?" by Dave Rado

Dave warns about using the obvious option -

If you use Versions (File + Versions) to store multiple versions of a document within a single file, then it will only be a matter of time before your document corrupts and you lose all your work. Avoid this feature like the plague - and like Fast Save and Master Documents, which are similarly broken – unless the document is of no importance to you. Taking backups won't necessarily help, because the corruption may creep up on you gradually, and by the time you realise you have a corruption you may have to go back to a very old file to get a clean document.

The article offers the alternative solution of creating a custom Document Property to store  the "Version No". You can find the full article here