Putting Style Names Next to Paragraphs on a Printout

Steve notes that, in Normal view, if you set the "style area width" to something like an inch, you can see the style names beside each paragraph of text. This is very handy if you are editing using styles. Steve believes that it would be even handier if you could print the document in this view, so it included the style names beside each paragraph. He wonders if there is a way to do this.

There is no way to do this; unfortunately Word has never provided a way. It is possible to "fake" the data by putting your document text in the right column of a two-column table and typing the names of the styles in the left column, but that approach is not easy at all.

Another approach that seems half-way reasonable is to take a screen shot of your document and then edit the screen shot so that it doesn't include any extraneous information such as menus. You can then paste the screen shot into another document and print it. One advantage to using this approach is that you can "annotate" the screen shot so that it includes callouts explaining the use of the styles or instructions to the reader.

If you would like a more automated approach, you might try recording or developing a macro that accomplishes the following general steps:

1. Record the style of each paragraph's style in the entire document.
2. Change the paragraph formatting of all paragraphs to a style not in use.
3. Turn on Track Changes.
4. Go through each paragraph and set the paragraph's style back to the style recorded in step 1.
5. Print the document with markup showing.
6. Close the document without saving it.

While the style name won't appear at the left of the printout, as it does on-screen with the style area showing, it will show in the balloons at the right side of the document. (The balloons are put there by the Track Changes feature.)

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (9687) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Putting Style Names Next to Paragraphs on a Printout.