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Step 1 - What is a Character Style ?

A character style can contain character formatting only, including font, font size, font style (bold, italic, bold/italic), font effects (such as small caps or superscript), character spacing, text borders and shading, and even language settings.

Character styles are most commonly used with built-in Word features, such as the footnote reference example. Other features that use character styles include hyperlinks and page numbering.

Step 2 - Character Styles

Character styles are superimposed on paragraph styles.

Character styles can sit on top of paragraph styles, which means that if you apply a paragraph style to a paragraph of text, you can select just part of that text to add a character style — just as you can select part of that text to apply bold, underline, etc.

In the Styles and Formatting task pane, a lowercase, underlined letter "a" sits beside each character style.

It's not necessary to create a character style to apply character formatting, and doing so really only provides added benefit if you have a combination of several character formatting commands that you frequently reuse.

When a character style conflicts with a paragraph style the character style will take precedence.

For more information on how character and paragraph styles overlap, please refer to the Overlapping Styles page.

However if a character style attribute is not specified then the paragraph style attribute will be used.

Font - Displays the (Format > Font) dialog box with the "Font", "Character Spacing" and "Text Effects" tabs.

Border - Displays the (Format > Borders and Shading) dialog box with the "Borders" and "Shading" tabs.

Language - Displays the (Tools > Language > Set Language) dialog box.

Shortcut key - Displays the Customise Keyboard dialog box.