Customizable and Persistent Paragraph Styles Now Available in Google Docs

Google Docs is expanding the use of its customizable paragraph styles and may even be rolling out the feature for all users. Some Docs users noticed that the paragraph styles in the documents editor were now customizable and they were also persistent between documents.

This has been a minor but annoying shortcoming of the online document editor. The feature was in testing with some users, as Google does with most new features and changes, but it is now being rolled out to all users.

"You can customize the look of text and headings in your document using the styles toolbar menu. The styles toolbar menu displays the style of your text selection in a document, and lets you change the style or clear the formatting of your text," a new Google Docs help document explains.

The document has been updated, but it seems that the final version of the feature, that rolled out to users, is a bit different than the one depicted in the help page.

Specifically, the old default styles, Normal Text and Heading 1 to 6, have been replaced with more granular ones Normal Text, Title, Subtitle and Heading 1 to 3. The help page images show the old style selection, even though they are customizable as well.

The new feature is great for one thing, custom styles now survive beyond one document. Any new documents that you start will use the default styles that you can customize beforehand.

This means that you can now define your fonts, sizes, options and colors and have them applied for all documents moving forward, rather than having to set them by hand for each new doc.

You can customize the styles on a per document basis as well. You can select a combination of font, size, color and so on and then apply it to a certain style, Normal Text, Heading 1 and so on. If you don't save that style as your default one, it will only be used in the current document.