What are styles? Why use them?
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.
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Tip
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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
(see Figure 32). Press F11
to close the Styles and Formatting window when you do not need
it.
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Tip
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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.
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Presentation
styles
Presentation
styles affect three elements of a slide master: the background,
background objects (such as icons, decorative lines, and text
frames), and the text placed on the slide. Text styles are further
divided into Notes,
Outline 1 through Outline
9,
Subtitle, and Title.
The outline styles are used for the different levels of the outline
to which they belong. For example, Outline 2 is used for the
subpoints of Outline 1, and Outline 3 is used for the subpoints of
Outline 2.
As
described earlier, the pre-packaged presentation styles can be
modified, but new presentation styles cannot be created.
Graphic
styles
Graphic
styles affect many of the elements of a slide. Notice that text
styles exist in both the presentation and graphic style selections.
What styles to use and when to use them is described later in this
chapter.
There
are 15 pre-packaged graphic styles to choose from. You can create
additional styles or modify the pre-packaged styles.
