Mathcad text styles make it easy for you to create a consistent appearance in your worksheets. As an added advantage, text styles enable you to quickly apply text formatting rather than having to make each piece of text the right size and color.

Using text styles across your worksheets make your work consistent and easier for other people to follow.

You can examine the available text styles provided in Mathcad by choosing New from the File menu, and looking at the different templates, each of which has text styles in it.

The Normal template that you get when you choose File > New comes with a number of built-in styles, so try those ones first. Make sure you have View > Toolbars > Formatting on, so you can see the Formatting toolbar above. 

As you type, you should see Normal as the style showing.

Applying Text Styles

First click in a paragraph or select text in multiple paragraphs. Then apply a text style from:

1. The left-most drop down list in the Formatting toolbar.

2. The Style option from the Format menu.

Note, when you apply a text style, you are asked if you want to "Reset existing formatting based on selected style." If you click on Yes, everything changes to the new style. If you answer No, then any font properties, such as Greek characters, bold, and italic are preserved.  

Creating New Text Styles

It's fairly easy to create new text styles. Just choose Style from the Format menu, to open the Text Style dialog.

The Font button lets you chose character options like the Font, Size, and if you want your characters to be bold or italic.

Click the Paragraph button to set indents, tabs, and alignment.

You can also base a style on an existing style. If you do so, any changes to the existing style also change any styles based on it. That's actually an advantage, so that if all your fonts change from Times Roman to Verdana, you only have to change a base style.

Modifying Styles

When you modify a style through the Format > Style dialog, all text previously created with that style, is modified. That makes it much easier to reformat long worksheets or a set of worksheets, without having to change each individual heading or other element.

Using Styles in Multiple Worksheets

You can create all  your standard styles in a template, and use that template to start all your worksheets. If you put your template in the Template folder inside the folder where Mathcad is installed, your template appears, each time you choose File > New.

Copying Styles into Other Worksheets

To copy a text style from one worksheet into another one, just copy some text with the existing style into the new worksheet. The text style is now available in the new worksheet. It remains available, even if you delete the copied text.

Mathcad Math Styles will be discussed in a future article.