Previewing New Templates with Style Gallery

You may be interested in how your document would look if you used the styles from a different template. For example, in the Acme-to-Intergalactic example used earlier, you might want to preview the impact of applying Intergalactic's template to your current documents, to determine which adjustments you'd need to make to your templates to accommodate Acme's documents.

To use Word's Style Gallery to preview what your document would look like (see Figure 11.10), choose Format, Theme, and click Style Gallery.

Next, select a template you want to preview from the Template scroll box. Word then shows what your document would look like if it were using the styles in that template. If some styles appear only later in the document, you can use the scrollbar to move to any location you want. If you want to apply the styles in the new template you've chosen, click OK.

It's important to understand what Style Gallery doesn't do. The Style Gallery does not attach a different template to your document. Rather, it copies styles from that template into your document, where they override any formatting settings from the template that is attached.

By default, Style Gallery previews how your document would look if you changed its styles to resemble those in a different template. Sometimes, however, this doesn't give you enough information to decide whether you want to apply another template's formats. Possibly, you've just started editing your document and haven't yet used the styles you're interested in previewing.

If you want to preview all the styles in a built-in Word template, you can ask Style Gallery to show you a sample document that uses all the styles in that template. With the Style Gallery dialog box displayed, choose Example. Figure 11.11 shows how Style Gallery displays an example of a Professional Letter.