How to apply heading styles in Word

Proper heading styles are the secret behind documents that look consistent, navigate easily and generate a table of contents automatically. Applying them from the keyboard takes a fraction of a second.

Step by step

1. Click anywhere in the line you want to turn into a heading.
2. Press Ctrl+Alt+1 for Heading 1.
3. Use Ctrl+Alt+2 for Heading 2 and Ctrl+Alt+3 for Heading 3.
4. To return a line to normal text, press Ctrl+Q to remove paragraph formatting.

Tips & troubleshooting

• Headings appear in the Navigation pane (Ctrl+F), so you can jump around a long document.
• Word's automatic table of contents is built from these heading styles.
• The same shortcuts apply headings in OneNote.

Why styles beat manual formatting

Making a line big and bold looks like a heading. Applying Heading 1 tells Word it is one, and that unlocks several features.

• Navigation pane: tick View, Navigation Pane to see an outline of the document. Click a heading to jump to it, or drag one to move the whole section.
• Table of contents: References, Table of Contents builds one from your headings. Click in it and press F9 to update the page numbers.
• Consistency: right-click a style in the gallery, choose Modify, and every heading of that level changes at once.
• Collapsing: hover beside a heading and click the small triangle to fold away the text beneath it.
• Accessibility: screen reader users move through a document by its headings. Without styles, a long document is one unbroken block to them.
• PDFs: headings become bookmarks when you export.

More keys for working with headings

• Alt+Shift+Left Arrow promotes a heading one level, and Alt+Shift+Right Arrow demotes it.
• Alt+Shift+Up Arrow and Down Arrow move the current paragraph up or down.
• Ctrl+Shift+N applies the Normal style.
• Ctrl+Shift+S opens the Apply Styles box. Type the name of any style, such as Heading 4, and press Enter.

Use the levels in order

Think of headings as an outline. Heading 1 is for the main sections, Heading 2 for subsections within them and Heading 3 for points within those. Don't pick a level because you like its size, and don't jump from Heading 1 straight to Heading 3. If a level looks wrong, change the style rather than skipping it. The document title has its own style, Title, so it stays out of the table of contents.