If you're going to do this, you need to base Heading 1 on 'No Style' because Word has 9 levels of Headings, and only accepts 9 generations of styles. This allows you to make radical changes to your document very easily.
It's a good idea to set up your heading styles so that Heading 2 is based on Heading 1, Heading 3 is based on Heading 2, and so on. Cascading formatting and headings Base heading styles on the previous heading level style Similarly, if you changed 'Body Text' to have 11pt space after each paragraph, then its children and grand-children styles would inherit that formatting, and they would have 11pt space after each paragraph.īut if you then changed style 'Table Text' to have 6pt space after each paragraph, the change would affect only 'Table Text' and 'Table Text Indent'. In the document from which Figure 1 was drawn, if you changed style 'Body Text' to be Times New Roman, then Body Text, Body Text Indent, Table Text and Table Text Indent would all change to Times New Roman. The point of having styles based on other styles is to make fast changes to your document.
The effect will ripple through the whole document instantly. You can then swap between double-spacing and single-spacing by changing the formatting of the parent style. If you want to print a draft of your document double-spaced, set all the styles used in the body of the document to be based on one 'parent' stye (like the styles in Figure 1).
