Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3. What are they good for?

It's always proper to have headings and subheadings to be formatted the same throughout a document. Sure, you can use the AutoFormat button to accomplish this - even when you make a change to them down the road, it's easy to use over and over (especially on smaller documents.) But experienced Word users know and apply the popular Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3 styles to their headings and subheadings, making life a lot easier (especially on larger documents.)

There are two reasons for this. First of all they are easy to apply to text; I use the dropdown on the Formatting toolbar. Secondly, when you need to make a change on any of them - modifying the format of the style changes all the headings in your document automatically. Basically, it's what they were originally created for. But is this all that these styles are good for? Of course not.

They're called built-in heading styles (by the way, there's actually 9 of these), and they are the foundation for setting up other documents and scenarios in Microsoft Word. Shauna Kelly, Microsoft Word MVP, post an article on her FAQ site called "Why use Microsoft Word's built-in Heading styles?", where she outlines 15 reasons (other than the one I explained above) to use them.

I've used them for creating Table of Contents pages (Reason #3) for several years; but even I learned a few other reasons for using them - like Reason #10, creating bookmarks in a PDF. The best reason, according Shauna, is Reason #15, the Outline View:

You can use other styles in Outline View, and you can choose the Level at which they'll appear. But it's easiest to use the built-in Heading styles, because they're already set up ready for you. Outline View is probably the most useful, and least used, resource in Word. See How to save yourself hours by using Outline View properly at the MS Word MVP FAQ site for a full (and enthusiastic) description of what Outline View can do, and how to use it.

This is more than a worth while read for any Microsoft Word user, and you will learn a great deal about its capabilities other than built-in styles. Thank you, Shauna.

Happy Labor Day!