Have you ever started formatting a document and it started “acting funny?” There is a way to make the madness stop. They are called Styles. Styles give documents a consistent, uniform look and make editing a breeze.
Unfortunately, the majority legal documents are created by applying direct formatting or what I like to call “manual overrides.” For example, to double-space a paragraph you highlight the paragraph and use the line spacing toolbar button.
Editing this way seems easy, but essentially Word is being used as an electric typewriter. Editing an entire document this way is tedious and time consuming. Manual Overrides makes it more difficult to make quick changes in formatting, especially in long legal documents. It becomes especially disastrous when editing someone else’s document! This type of formatting is popular mainly because it requires no special knowledge.
Additionally, formatting documents directly disables many helpful Word functions, or makes them only partially disabled (i.e., that “crazy-acting” document). Therefore, for all its popularity, formatting with manual overrides is an inefficient way to format a Word document.
