Styles and Live Preview

The 2007 versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in particular offer powerful new formatting choices loosely known as styles and are typically found on a contextual Design tab that appears when you select an element such as a table onscreen. The styles might be found in a Ribbon group or gallery named “Styles” or something similar. For example, Figure 3-29 shows the gallery of styles available in the Table Styles group of the Design tab that you can use when you’ve selected a collection of cells on an Excel worksheet.

Figure 3-29. Click a style to apply all its formatting choices to the selected object.

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Style choices work with a new Office feature called Live Preview. When you move your mouse pointer over a choice in a gallery like the one shown in Figure 3-29, the selected object temporarily changes to show you how it would look if you applied the highlighted style. In this way, you can quickly “try on” various looks for the selected item. When the Live Preview shows you the look you want, you can click the selected style to apply it to the selected item.