How to Change an Existing Style in Word 2016

Word 2010 For Dummies

Styles change, even in Word 2016. When you change your mind about a style in Word 2016 and want to update some specific element, heed these steps:

Summon the Styles pane.

Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+Alt+S.
Position the mouse pointer over the style you want to change.

Don't click, which selects the style. Instead, hover the pointer in the style's entry and a menu button appears on the right.
Click the menu button.

The style's menu appears.
Choose Modify.

The Modify Style dialog box appears, although it's the same Create New Style from Formatting dialog box, just with a shorter name.

The Modify Style dialog box is the same as the Create New Style from Formatting dialog box.
Change the style's formatting.

Use the Format button to alter specific styles: font, paragraph, tabs, and so on. You can even add new formatting options or assign a shortcut key.
Click OK when you're done.

Modifying the style affects updates text with that style applied. For example, if you change the font for your Figure Caption style, all figure caption text changes at once. That's the power of using styles.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.