Automatic Update with character styles

[Guest]

Word 2002
I have many documents created using my template. I have recently carried
out major change to paragraph styles in the template. All documents have
template loaded and "automatically update document styles" box checked. I
have set up Word's inbuilt style Heading 3 in template to have font size 20.
However, every document after I open it, shows font size 14 which it had
previously.
I have narrowed the problem down to a character style which appear to be
present for Heading 3 in the documents. My problems ar three fold
Where did the character style come from? (is it from the normal template
which I cannot get rid of?)
How do I get rid of the character style? (Word will not allow Heading 3 to
be deleted -even just the character style).
How can I ensure that Update Document style simply overwrites the any
character style in the document? Surely that is what it is for. If I cannot
ensure consistency across all my document styles then it appears that
Microsoft has destroyed the principal of using styles.

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Martin,

Not 100% sure... but does the problem disappear after you replace "Heading 3" with the "Default paragraph font" character style? That'll remove all character formatting (italic, ...) though.

Word in the newer incarnations has a propensity for creating "char" styles.
For example, it'll do so if you apply a paragraph style and you have just part of a paragraph selected.

You might find cleanup macros that remove all these char styles, but usually they mess up your formatting too (some more, some less). Nobody seems to have found a perfect way to get rid of them yet.

Greetings,
Klaus

 

[Guest]

Hi Klaus

No nothing simple works. I have replaced Heading 3 with default paragraph
font and played with the organiser.
A sledge hammer approach did work though. I created a new blank document
using my template and then copied the whole text from the old document to the
new.
It is very worrying though because you will not know when update styles is
going to work and when it will not work.