normal style changes from doc to doc

[Guest]

I work on a college campus, a professor recently contacted me with some word
problems. It seems he copies and pastes a lot from one document to another.
Sometimes (but not always) when pasting, his text gets put into the recipient
document ok but as soon as he hits delete to remove extra paragraphs, the
text font will change to a different font type and size than what was used in
either document. For example he will copy a section of text that is Times
new Roman 12, and when he pastes it and deletes a space it turns into
courrier 10 pt.

Everytime this happens I can go into the Normal style and see that the
normal style is courrier 10. I know that the root of the problem lies
somewhere in the styles but I'm not sure how to fix it. Is there some way I
can take ALL the documents he opens and make sure that the normal style
updates to one font size and style? Is there a better solution to this
problem. Any help is surely appreciated.

 

[Guest]

WIgirl:

Use Format > Style to define the styles in the destination document however
you'd like them to appear.

When you paste text from another document, apply the desired style using the
Style list in the Formatting toolbar. If it's already the correct style,
Remove any manual paragraph formatting by selecting the text and pressing
Ctrl+Q. Remove any manual character formatting by pressing Ctrl+Spacebar.

There is no simple way to force copied text to automatically change it's
assigned style, or to strip off manually applied styling.

A simpler approach might be to show your user how to use Paste > Special and
paste the material as unformatted unicode text.

Bear

Windows XP, Word 2000