You may want all the specifications you issue to incorporate your company branding and style. NBS Chorus Pro (and above) subscriptions include a dedicated Stylesheets feature to support this. This feature allows your organization to create and add into Chorus, any number of bespoke, branded and customised output formats (custom stylesheets). Everyone in your organization can then use these directly from Chorus to consistently apply your company branding and style when publishing specifications. Please refer to the Styling your specification for Chorus Pro and above topics for detailed information about this feature.
If your Chorus subscription does not provide access to this feature, you can still achieve a similar result, albeit requiring additional steps to be undertaken outside of Chorus. This can be done by publishing to a Microsoft Word document and then applying styling within Microsoft Word. This guide will take you through setting up and saving a Microsoft Word style template which you can use to help repeat this process for each specification you publish. For guidance on applying this style template to a published specification, please see Applying a Template to an NBS Chorus Specification.
Please Note - When using this method there are a few restrictions to be aware of before you start. The Templates in Word are designed to apply text styling (formatting) to your document, so any text or images entered into this template will not be carried across to the specification you apply this Template to. If you want to include pre-written text and/ or images, please see Creating A Microsoft Word Template - Advanced.
This article is therefore suitable for those who
- Do not have access to the dedicated Stylesheets functionality.
- Wish to make minor adjustments to the text styling (formatting) of their NBS Chorus specification.
- Do not wish to include pre-written text or images/ logos.
Please note - This guide was written using Microsoft Word for Microsoft 365 MSO Version 2501, some of the options may be in different locations depending on the version of Word you are using.
Creating the Template
To begin creating your template, firstly start by publishing an existing specification from NBS Chorus to Microsoft Word (see Publishing your specification), then open the published specification in Microsoft Word. This specification will then become the basis of the template you will use to style your specifications going forward.
Formatting Text
- Select the Home tab and select the Styles pop-out panel.
The Styles panel will then be displayed at the right of the screen:
- Within the template, select an example of the type of text you wish to style, in the style window, you should see which style is being used for this text.
NB. you may need to scroll on the styles box to find the highlighted style.
- Hover the mouse cursor over the highlighted style, click the drop arrow shown to the right-hand side, then select the Modify option.
- The Modify Style dialog will then be displayed. Amend the Formatting options as required to reflect how you wish this type of text to be styled. Please note, in this template you only need to amend the style for a single instance of the type of text you wish to style, when applied to a published specification the style will be applied to all instances of this type of text. When done click the OK button.
- Repeat steps 2-4 above for each type of text you wish to style.
Saving The Template
Once you are happy with the styling of your template you will need to save the template so you can apply this styling to your future specifications.
- Select File>Save As. Choose the desire location to save the style template file and enter the required name for it, ensure you change the file type to Word Template (*.dotx) before clicking the Save button.
To apply the styling in the Template to your specification please see Stylesheet: Applying A Microsoft Word Template - Basic (Chorus).