ability to define character styles

Real example from our existing documentation: Decision was made to put references to menus, buttons, text on the screen in bold. Reevaluation of the help led us to decide that we should use italic for screen references because we had other uses for bold. The problem is that to fix this, without character styles, one must go back through thousands of articles and manually find each screen reference and edit from bold to italic. If we had character styles, we would have tagged each screen reference with a ScreenRef style, and then when we needed to change this, we would have fixed the style and it would have changed evereywhere.

Example two. Our style guide says to use bold red for certain types of warnings. Aside from the fact that this takes two actions (change to bold, change to red) each time we want to use this, the result is sometimes inconsistent. One user picks a different shade of red. One person from marketing feels that red feels too much like corrections in school and uses purple instead. Another person forgets the bold, etc. Once again, character styles are the answer: an admin defins the styles needed (e.g., ScreenRef, Warning, etc.) and then the writer, instead of having to apply multiple formatting options simply selects the text and applies the appropriate style. Much faster and more efficient