Using tab to change font style

Question

I have Word Doc I am working on and I have a heading with a style set up. I want the heading to have a time displayed at the end of the line with different formating so that the heading is in bold and the time is in italics

Sample Heading___________________________________10Mins

Is it possible to have part of this style when I press tab the text jumps to the far right (which I have working) but also the formatting of the font changes?

Answer 1

No, styles in Word do not work this way. I can suggest a couple of workarounds.

The simplest would be a two column table with the columns formatted differently. You could still use a right-tab with a line or dot leader if you want, but you would need to use Ctrl+Tab to generate that leader.

A second method would be to use a character style for the second part and attach a keyboard shortcut to the style. Because Bold is a toggle attribute in Word, if your Heading paragraph style is in Bold and you want your character style to be non-Bold and Italics in the heading, you would want the character style to actually include both Bold and Italics.

References:

• Using Tables in Word (on my website)
• Assigning Keyboard Shortcuts (my article on the Microsoft site)
• Why Use Word's Built-in Heading Styles? by Shauna Kelly

If you are using the Character style, it would be possible to write a macro that would insert the tab and switch to the character style with a keyboard shortcut attached.