Changing the order of styles in Microsoft Word’s Style Gallery is possible but buried way down inside the message boxes.
A standard Word Style Gallery looks like this.
Right-clicking on a style gives some options, including Remove from Style Gallery.
Moving the styles into another order is more complicated. You’d think modern Word would let you ‘drag and drop to rearrange the tiles but alas no.
Got Word for Mac? Check out Manage Styles and display order in Word for Mac
Style Priority
Style Gallery order is set using the mysterious Priority setting. It’s listed there in the style summary in Modify Style:
But you won’t find a place to change Priority anywhere in the many Modify Style options! ‘Add to Styles gallery’ is there but not the accompanying Priority setting.
‘Style Priority‘ isn’t a good name. Something like ‘Style Order‘ or ‘Style Display Order‘ would have been more appropriate.
The order of the styles list and gallery is a Word Mystery© until you dig into the Manage Styles area starting from the Styles pane and the little Manage Styles button at the bottom.
Manage Styles | Recommended is where Priority is controlled, the Priority is shown on the left column.
“Set priority to use when sorting in recommended order” then the Assign Value button.
(It’s also the place to change the visibility of a style: Show, Hide or Hide until used)
Style Priority order
Style Priorities start at 1 (top of the list) down to 100 (last).
Normal style arrives with Priority 1, therefore always at the start of the Style Gallery.
Default Paragraph and No Spacing styles are Priority 2
Heading styles have Priority 10 (leaving some priority spaces empty to squeeze styles between 1 and 10, if necessary).
In recent versions of Word priority 100 now shows a ‘last’ in the style list.
Order of Styles with same Priority
If more than one style has the same priority value (e.g. the Heading styles), Word uses alphabetical order of style names to decide which style comes first.
We tested that by changing some styles to the same priority value.
Document or Template?
Below the style list is the usual and important Word style question. Save to the document only or to the template for other documents?
Style Priority in action
Here’s a revised Style Gallery. Unwanted styles are removed. The priority values changed so the main paragraph/body content styles are together at the start of the list.
Headings are last on the list because they are less frequently used and quickly chosen by keyboard shortcuts . See Fast Keyboard shortcuts for Word styles.
Style.Priority in VBA
The Style object has a Priority property (Long) e.g. Style.Priority
Under the hood, inside a Word document
Style Priorities are saved in Word documents or templates.
Inside the Word document there’s a styles.xml file. Each style listed has a style attribute w:uiPriority
A short style might like this, in part
<w:style w:styleId="MyStyle"> ... <w:uiPriority w:val="15"/> ... </w:style>
Normally you’d not touch the document XML because style changes can be done easily and more reliably via Manage Styles or even VBA.
However, the Word XML details are important for our friends with Word for Mac.
Manage Styles and display order in Word for Mac
Fast Keyboard shortcuts for Word styles
