Use style guides

If you need to reuse the same text formatting options repeatedly, you may consider creating a Style Guide. Style Guides let you apply uniform formatting by highlighting text and selecting a style from the Styles menu. List Style Guides allow you to customize your bullet lists and numbered lists.

Apply styles to text

When you first create a document, you’ll find three pre-populated heading styles.

To apply a style:

1

Select your text

2

From the Edit toolbar, open the Styles menu

3

Select a style to apply it to the selected text. Use the search bar to find a specific style.

Hover over different styles to get its details such as font, alignment, and line spacing. 

Edit an existing style

To edit an existing style:

1

From the Edit toolbar, click the Styles menu

2

Select Edit Style Guide to open the Style Guide Editor

3

From the left panel, select the style you want to edit

A blue line on the left side of the document shows which style you’re editing.

The Paragraph Styles editor has three main sections:

• Text lets you edit text settings like font type, size, color, emphasis, and alignment
• Indentation allows you to change the indentation for certain lines of text
• Spacing lets you adjust line spacing, as well as add spaces before or after a paragraph

4

Click Publish in the toolbar to save your changes

Add a new style

There are two ways to add a new paragraph or list style to your style guide:

• Create a new style
• Duplicate an existing style and make changes

Note: You can only create one table style.

Add notes to styles

Once you add a new style, you can create notes that appear as custom tooltips next to the style in the Styles menu.

To add a note:

1

From the Style Guide Editor, select a style in the left panel

2

Open the Notes section in the right panel

3

Add your note in the text box

4

From the toolbar, click Publish to save your changes

To view your note in the document editor, hover over the style in the Styles menu. A Note section should appear with your custom note.

Lock styles

After applying styles, any formatting changes manually applied to the text take priority by default. Document owners can lock specific style attributes to prevent these manual changes.

To lock a style attribute:

1

From the Style Guide Editor, select a style from the left panel

2

In the right panel, find the attributes you want to lock

3

Click the lock icon to prevent changes to the selected attribute

Import and export styles

If you have a style guide you’d like to reuse, you can import and export it using the options in the toolbar.

To export a style guide:

1

From the Style Guide Editor toolbar, click Export

2

Select a location to save your file. Style guides are saved in the .style format

To import a style guide:

1

Open the Style Guide Editor for your document

2

From the toolbar, select Import

3

Select a file with a .style extension. This updates the style guide in your current document.

Edit List Styles

List styles allow you to customize how your bullet and numbered lists look within a document, spreadsheet, or presentation. Each option in the bullet or numbered list dropdown is a List Style. This means you can create new list styles, modify existing, and delete any you wish to remove from the dropdown for all users collaborating in the file.

To edit your list styles, access the Style Guide Editor by: 

Clicking the bullet or numbered list drop-down menu under the Edit tab and choosing Edit List Styles
Selecting the Styles drop-down menu under the Edit tab and clicking Edit Style Guide

To update a list style guide after you’ve accessed the Style Guide Editor:

1

Select the List Styles drop-down on the left-hand panel

2

Under Bullet Lists or Numbered Lists, choose and expand the list style you wish to edit.

3

Select a specific list level by clicking the List Level number in the left-hand panel or choosing the number from the drop-down menu in the right-hand panel.

Each List Style has 10 levels. Level 1 is your default bullet style. Additional levels are what you’ll see if you press TAB while editing your list. This streamlines the creation of multi-level lists.

4

In the right-hand panel, use the Style dropdown to view available symbol options or select Custom to add your own

If you use Custom Style to add your own symbol, a Custom Symbol field will appear in the right-hand panel. You can copy a symbol from the document Editor page and paste it into this field.

Note: You’ll need to ensure that the font in the Style Editor panel matches the font applied to the custom symbol you copied.

5

Edit the Font, Symbol Size, Symbol Color, Indentation, and Emphasis by selecting the checkbox to the left of these options and changing the default formatting

Note: By default, list symbols inherit formats from the text being listed unless checked in the Style Guide. Using List Style Indentation will prevent users from changing indentation amounts manually from within the file.

6

Change the Bullet Alignment by clicking the drop-down menu to choose Left or Right indentation

7

To customize your List Text, add a prefix or suffix

8

Select the lock icon to the right of the formatting options to prevent other collaborators from making overrides to your list style

9

Select Publish in the top left corner of the screen to apply formatting changes to your document