Hello, Word gurus, and thank you in advance for your help.

Today's questions revolves around the Font dialog, specifically the +headings item that appears (along with +body) at the top of the font list. Currently, the setting for +headings in my current Word doc is Arial plain. As a result, all my paragraph styles identified as headings (i.e. appears as "Arial (Headings)" in the Modify Style dialog) are not bold. I want all "heading" styles to appear in bold, so I would like to change the setting for the +headings font to bold, however, doing so does not change the appearance of any of my existing fonts.



How can I

1) change this behaviour so that all my heading styles are always bold?

2) if a separate issue/solution, change the appearance of all the heading styles in my current document in one go?

Thanks.

- Nikko

Hello,

These are separate, tangentially related, issues.

Learn about the heading styles and how to modify them.

• Why use Microsoft Word’s built-in heading styles? by Shauna Kelly
• Understanding Styles in Microsoft Word

Modify them in your normal template.


Bold or not bold is irrelevant to the theme settings.

See also:

• How to create numbered headings or outline numbering in Ribbon Versions of Word by Shauna Kelly
• How styles in Microsoft Word cascade by Shauna Kelly

What you need to do is modify each of your heading styles so that it includes the bold attribute. For more on styles in general, see the links that Charles posted.

Note that "+Heading" simply means that the font name is inherited from the current theme font defined for headings.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Thank you, all, for your replies.

As suggested, it looks like there is little to do but correct each style that is experiencing an issue I am having where all the bolded Arial text now appears as plain (and shows as "Arial Bold (headings)" in the font drop-down. As pointed out, though, I can at least shorten this task a bit by identifying the "top-most" style that is referenced by others and fixing that...it should cascade down through the inheritance chain.

I don't know why this suddenly happened to everyone at my company; maybe a Word update or something.

If it is showing as Arial Bold (Headings) that tells me that the bold version of the font is being applied and then perhaps Bold formatting is being applied. Bold is a toggle in Word.

Many heading styles, by default, are set to bold formatting. If you selected the bold version of a font as the default theme font, it is going to be toggled off if bold is set for the heading.

Both bold and Italics are toggles and generally have their own font variations rather than being something applied by Word.

Try switching to Arial (plain) as your heading theme font.