This article was adapted from Microsoft Office Word 2003 Inside Out by Mary Millhollon and Katherine Murray. Visit Microsoft Learning to buy this book.

One convenient aspect of using templates with defined styles is that you are not forever committed to using particular formatting. You can change a document’s formatting at any time by adjusting the properties of the styles defined in the template. If you are considering modifying a document’s styles, you should visit the Style Gallery in Word. The Style Gallery enables you to preview how an entire document will look if styles are applied from another template. If you like what you see, you can copy the styles from within the Style Gallery directly into your document.

To preview a document with other template styles and to apply new styles to a document, follow these steps:

1. Open the document you want to format, and then on the Format menu, click Theme.
2. In the Theme dialog box, click Style Gallery. The Style Gallery dialog box appears, as shown:

   

3. Select a template in the Template list, and choose an option in the Preview section, as follows:

   To preview this...	Click this
   How your document will appear if it is formatted with the selected template	Document
   An example of a sample file formatted with the template, if an example is available	Example
   The format for each style in the template in list format	Style Samples

4. To apply the selected styles to the current document, click OK.

Keep in mind that when you apply styles using the Style Gallery, you are not changing the template that is attached to the current document. Instead, the Style Gallery lets you view and apply styles from other templates to the contents of the current document.

About the authors  

• Word expert Mary Millhollon is an instructional writer, a consultant, and the co-author of Microsoft Word Version 2002 Inside Out and Faster Smarter Web Page Creation. She also runs her own Web publishing and design firm.
• Katherine Murray is a columnist on the Microsoft Office Community site on Microsoft.com, the coauthor of Microsoft Word Version 2002 Inside Out, and the author of Faster Smarter Microsoft Office System 2003 Edition and dozens of other computer books.