Customizable styles in Google Docs

Google Docs now have Customizable styles in documents.

This is a feature that MS Word has had for a long time, which makes a huge productivity difference to anyone who is writing long documents.

Basically, instead of formattting each sub-heading individually (eg making it bold, 12 pt and underlined), you just say once what the rules for that "heading2" is (eg bold, 12 pt and underlined), and then apply "heading2" to any text that you want to look like this. The time-saving comes when make a change.  For example, when you realise that underlining is for typewriters, instead of having to change each sub-heading individually, you just change heading2 to be (say) bold and 14 point - and all the same change is made to every place where you've used "heading2".

I don't know the the addition of Styles to Docs means they will be added to Blogger's Post-editor anytime soon.   But it may affect loading Word documents to Blogger via Google Docs. I haven't tested yet, so don't know if Word's styles will be kept when the document is converted - but I'd hope that they would, given that it's a very mature feature in Word.

The interesting part will come when you either copy-and-paste or publish from Docs to Blogger: is the formatting itself transferred over, or just the style name?

My guess, without testing, is that for copy-and-paste, it might just be the style name. If that's right, then to make the Word-to-Docs-to-Blogger conversion work, you will need to add CSS rules to your blog, using the same style names used in Docs.

And if you have a lot of email subscribers, remember mind that the messages they receive do not have your blog's stylesheet applied to them.   (I experimented with various header style options in BloggerHAT, but eventually gave us and followed the example of other big-time bloggers and applied the formatting manually, for just this reason:  no matter what I tried, my email-subscription messages looked bad,)

(BTW: If you know a way to apply a stylesheet to emails sent by Feedburner, or even by Blogger, then I'd love to hear about it.)