Any formatting applied to your report template will carry over to your generated report. Formatting applied to mail merge tags will be applied to the generated data. We recommend using Word styles and format painter to set a font, text color, and other formatting types.

Styles are a feature in the Microsoft Word app that help you efficiently apply consistent formatting to a document. Use styles to apply fonts and other text settings to the headings and body text in your report template. Styles can also be used to automatically create a table of contents.

Access styles from the Home tab in Word.

Format painter is a feature in Microsoft Word that allows you to quickly apply identical formatting (like font, text color, and size) to multiple pieces of text in a document. You can use format painter to copy the formatting from one section of text to another—it’s like copying and pasting for formatting.

When you paste a text or a mail merge tag into a document, it may have font settings different than the rest of your document. When this happens, find an example of the formatting you want to use and then use format painter to apply this formatting.

Documents in Fieldguide can be viewed in both Word for Desktop and and the Word web application (Microsoft Office Online). If a document’s formatting isn’t displaying correctly in the Word web application, try enabling the embedded fonts setting in Word.

If the formatting settings from your template (like font or alignment) are not applying in the generated report, first try clearing the Style settings for that text in your report template.

If that doesn't fix the problem, try using custom Styles for the text in your report template. Word's default "Normal" style can sometimes cause fonts to generate incorrectly.

Instead of using Word's "Normal" style:

Try using a custom style: