We believe that all InDesign training courses should incorporate the correct use of styles to enhance workflow and maintain consistency within a document and across a range of documents. Most delegates on our InDesign training courses know what styles are: a series of named formats which can be applied to your text so you don't have to manually apply formatting attributes one by one. Even new InDesign users are probably familiar with the use of styles in Microsoft Word: "Heading 1", "Heading2", "Normal", etc. However, InDesign's implementation of styles is much more sophisticated and, when we run InDesign training courses in London, we always emphasise their importance.

The key benefits of using styles are, firstly, maintaining consistency: the same formats are applied every time without accidental variation. Secondly, speed: if a heading needs six text attributes applied then, if you are not using styles, you will have to apply each of these attributes manually. If you have styles in place, you can apply the necessary formats with a single click or a keystroke. A third benefit is that you can update and modify the look of your text simply by redefining your style(s).

A less obvious advantage to using styles in InDesign is what might be termed scalability. Styles figure prominently in some of the program's advanced techniques and documents that have no styles cannot benefit from these features. For example, a main aspect of creating XML-based layouts, is that of mapping XML tags to styles to document styles.

A second example is tables of contents. (InDesign creates these from the styles used in a document.) In defining the table of contents, one specifies which styles one wishes to include. When the table of contents is created, InDesign searches for each piece of text in those styles and puts the appropriate page number next to it.

In actual fact, the table of contents feature is more powerful than the name suggests since it can be used to generate a list of anything within a document as long as a particular style has been used consistently throughout. For example, if every photo in a document has a caption formatted with a particular style, the table of contents facility can be used to produce a "list of photographs".

A third example of the advanced use of styles is when working with books; a feature which enables multiple InDesign documents to be treated as one entity for such operations as preflighting, printing and the production of tables of contents. Different users can work on each document within the book and the styles used within all documents can be streamlined by a process called synchronisation.

Because of their importance, we cover styles both on our intro to InDesign training courses and on or advanced InDesign classes. On our advanced training courses, we explain the use of things like nested styles whereby you can include a character style within a paragraph style. The character style is then automatically applied to certain characters within the paragraph; for example, every character up to the first occurrence of an em dash.