w:qFormat (Primary Style)

Marks a style as a primary (Quick) style, causing it to appear in the authoring application's Quick Styles gallery.

Parent elements

w:style

Description

w:qFormat is a toggle element that flags a style for inclusion in the Quick Styles gallery — the prominent style picker shown in Word’s ribbon Home tab. Only styles with w:qFormat set to true appear there by default.

It is defined in ECMA-376 Part 1 §17.7.4.14.

Attributes

Attribute	Type	Possible Values	Description
`w:val`	`ST_OnOff`	`true`, `false`, `1`, `0`, `on`, `off`	Enables or disables Quick Styles gallery inclusion. Omitting `w:val` is equivalent to `true`.

Examples

<w:style w:type="paragraph" w:styleId="Heading2">
  <w:name w:val="heading 2"/>
  <w:basedOn w:val="Heading1"/>
  <w:uiPriority w:val="9"/>
  <w:qFormat/>
  <!-- pPr and rPr omitted -->
</w:style>

using DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Wordprocessing;

var style = new Style(
    new StyleName { Val = "heading 2" },
    new BasedOn { Val = "Heading1" },
    new UIPriority { Val = 9 },
    new PrimaryStyle()    // PrimaryStyle = w:qFormat
)
{
    Type = StyleValues.Paragraph,
    StyleId = "Heading2"
};

Notes

In the Open XML SDK, w:qFormat maps to the PrimaryStyle class.
w:qFormat only controls gallery visibility; the style can still be applied programmatically or through the full Styles pane regardless of this setting.