Use Advanced Editing and Formatting Features
Styles and formatting precedence
Every paragraph carries a paragraph style, optionally a character style, plus any direct formatting. Style Inspector and Reveal Formatting (Shift+F1) show exactly where each attribute comes from, and they are the diagnostic pair for the classic complaint "why won't this text change?"
Precedence, highest first: direct formatting, character style, paragraph style, theme defaults. Styles inherit through the Based on chain, so editing a parent style ripples down unless a child overrides that attribute. In Modify Style, Automatically update silently rewrites the style when you reformat a paragraph using it, while New documents based on this template pushes the change into the template rather than just the current file.
Find and Replace beyond plain text
Use Format inside the dialog to search formatting, and codes such as ^p (paragraph mark), ^t (tab), ^# (any digit), ^$ (any letter); ^& in the Replace box means the found text. Wildcard mode changes escaping rules and disables some options. Go To (Ctrl+G) jumps to pages, sections, bookmarks, and fields.
Layout and pagination
Section breaks control columns, orientation, headers, and page numbering restart; the Continuous versus Next Page distinction is a frequent trap. Keep with next, keep lines together, page break before, and widow/orphan control govern how paragraphs split across pages. Tab stops with leader characters drive manually built contents lists; multilevel lists link levels to styles.
Worked example
A heading ignores a style change and Reveal Formatting shows Direct formatting on the font. Select the paragraph, press Ctrl+Space to clear character formatting and Ctrl+Q to reset the paragraph style, then reapply the style change.