I’ve just cut and pasted a whole load of text from a web page into a Word document. The webpage had the option to print the pages. I viewed a preview of the print and then cut and pasted the text I wanted. However it does not look particularly pretty in the Word document of course.
The answer to this is to use Styles, something every well-structured Word document should have anyway.
Probably your text will have some kind of heading and body text format. First of all, make sure you can see the Formatting Palette and particularly the Styles palette within that. (>View >Toolbars will probably find it).
Highlight the first instance of a heading in the document. In the Styles palette you will see that it has registered the characteristics of that heading: Times, 14pt, bold, for example. Just under the text description is a button that says “Select all”. Click on that, and it will select all the text with the same formatting throughout the document.
Then click “New style” (next to the Select all button). Give your new style a name you will recognise. I recommend something other than the usual “Heading 1″ which will muddle it with the styles Word uses automatically. I was working on a Drupal document so I’ve called it “Drupal Head 1″.
Press OK on the bottom of the style box. Don’t click anything else yet! At this stage, all the text with the same formatting is still selected and you have named a style. But you need to apply that style to the text. So scroll down in the box where it says “Pick a style to apply” and apply your new style to all the currently selected text.
Continue this through the document, selecting all the different types of text formatting you can find.
Once you think you have covered all the different formats, then you can start modifying the styles. If you use a different font to the original, then you will see any text formats that you have missed. And you will have a properly styled document that is much easier to manage and update.
And once you have set up the styles like this, you can easily create a table of contents (>Insert >Index and Tables…).
