A style is a set of formats that you can apply to selected items in your presentation to quickly change their appearance. When you apply a style, you apply a whole group of formats at the same time. For example, a style defines the font, type size, indents and spacing, tab stops, and other characteristics of text; and the area fill and line style of a frame or other object.

Using styles gives you more control over the entire presentation. Although you can manually change each slide one element at a time, any manual changes you make apply only to that one slide. If you have several slides with the same elements, you would have to change those elements of each slide if you wanted your slides to have a consistent appearance. When you do this manually, how can you be sure you changed every slide that needs to be changed?

However, if you assign a style to each of the elements you add to your slides, changing the style for that element changes all the slides containing it. Thus, by using styles, you can eliminate most of the work required for changing manually created slides.

Press F11 to open the Styles and Formatting window. You can dock or undock this window by holding down the Control key while double-clicking the top of the window between the icons. Press F11 to close the Styles and Formatting window when you do not need it.

Styles and Formatting window

At the bottom of the Styles and Formatting window is a drop-down list. You can choose to show all styles or other groups of styles, for example applied styles or (in the case of Graphics styles), custom styles.