Cannot change style

[Guest]

I have a document that for some reason will not let me change the style from
"normal" to "heading 1." I was able to change the styles before today. This
problem does not exist for the entire document but only for the beginning. I
can locate the place in the document where I can change from "normal" to
"Heading 1" and on the preceeding line I am not able to make the change. Any
assistance will be appreciated.

 

[Shauna Kelly]

Hi Carl

What version of Word do you have?

Shauna

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word

 

[Guest]

Hi Shauna,I am using Word 2000 (9.0.3821 SR-1)

I havefound a solution to my problem but it is going to be considerable
work. First, I found out that the paragraph marks are not being recognized
in the area where I cannot change the style. When I replace
theunrecognizable paragraph symbol with a paragraph insertion that is in the
good section ofthe document then I am able to change the style. Thus, I must
believe that somehow the paragraph information in the defective section has
somehow been corrupted. How this happened I certainly don't know. I am
rather frustrated that this happened as I am working on a 1600 page document
that has inexcess of 130000 paragraph marks. Fortunately, I have only about
300 pages that have the defective paragraph mark.

I willbe looking forward to readinganything that you might be able to
determine about this problem. Thanks for replying.

 

[Shauna Kelly]

Hi Carl

The probability of corruption is certainly greater than 0, but it's very
low. I'm not sure I've ever seen a defective paragraph mark.

My bet would be that what you're seeing as 'paragraphs' actually consists of
one big paragraph with new line characters used to space out the text.

See
What do all those funny marks, like the dots between the words in my
document, and the square bullets in the left margin, mean?
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/NonPrintChars.htm

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word

 

[Klaus Linke]

The probability of corruption is certainly greater than 0, but it's very

low. I'm not sure I've ever seen a defective paragraph mark.

It does happen sometimes...
I've seen it in documents imported from other formats, and in docs produced
by OCR programs.
A sure sign of the problem would be if you switch to Normal View, then set
the width of the style area on the left (Tools > Options > View) to, say,
2".
Also turn on the view of formatting marks.

If you don't see a style name in the left pane for every ¶, that means some
of the "paragraph marks" are broken.

Try to "replace all" ^13 with ^p, and, to be on the safe side, all ^10 with
^p. That should fix it.

Just saving in *.doc format and re-opening the document usually works too,
but maybe not reliably.

^13 is a "carriage return", ^10 a "line feed". Paragraph marks in Word use
the code ^13, but Word needs to also keep track of them and assign a style
(and maybe other formatting) for each one, or else they just don't work
properly as paragraph marks.


Greetings,
Klaus

 

[Guest]

Hi Klaus,

I did as you suggested. Indeed the defective area does not have any
information in the area for the paragraph marks. However, in the
nondefective area there is information. I cannot determine how you wereable
to display the carriage information.

I am interested in doing what you suggested as it could save me a lot of
time. Presently, however, I am going in and replacing each of the paragraph
marks by a copu and past. When I do this the text takes on the appearance
that I originally had and I am able to change from "normal" to "heading 1"
styles.

Look forward to hearing from you

 

[Klaus Linke]

I am interested in doing what you suggested as it could save me

a lot of time. Presently, however, I am going in and replacing each
of the paragraph marks by a copu and past. When I do this the text
takes on the appearance that I originally had and I am able to change
from "normal" to "heading 1" styles.

You can use "Edit > Replace":
Find what: ^13
Replace with: ^p
then "Replace All".

and then the same with ^10, if the problem is not fixed already.

Out of interest: Is the document imported from some other format or
application?

Regards,
Klaus

 

[Guest]

Hi Klaus,

No the document was not imported or anything like that. I had the document
stored on a 256 kegabyte Memorex Flash memory stick. I have been using this
form of saving the file for at least three months and all has worked well.
However, a couple of days ago I suddenly had the problem where I was not able
to make a table of contents. The TOC started some 300 pages into the
document rather than at the beginning as it is supposed to. I found that
everything had bee changed to 'normal' style in the damaged area. As I
said, I could not change back to the "heading 1.'

In my attempt to repair the damage I was able to select text from before the
damage to after the damage and then I could change everything to "heading 1."
I then copied a paragraph mark that as associated with a paragraph in the
good area and pasted this paragraph mark to a paragraph in the damaged area.
This caused the paragraph in the damaged area to become a "normal" style.

I tried what you suggested and was able to find the "^13" and I made a
change. What you suggested did result in the damaged paragraph mark being
replaced with something that allowed the text to have information associated
with it in the style window. However, the text stayed as a "heading 1" which
I had earlier changed it to as I said above. So I stopped. I then found out
that I could select all of the damaged text and at the very end I replaced
the damaged paragraph mark with a good one that I had copied and pasted.
This resulted in all of the damaged text being changed into the original
'normal style' and the original formatting that I had. However any of the
paragraph marks that were in the damaged area were not changed and I still
could not get any information in the style window about them.

What I believe that I must have done is to have assigned the style
specification over the entire damaged area as it was viewed in Word as just
one huge paragraph. However, that did result in saving me some repair time.
I now just have to go through the damaged area and find the 300 or so entries
that I had designated as 'heading 1'. 'heading 2', or ' heading 3' and make
the manual changes by inserting a good paragraph mark for the damaged one and
then selecting the text and applying the 'heading 1' style to it.

It is work, but it is getting the job done.

I hope that this is not something that is going to happen again.

Thanking you for your interest. Any other information you might determine
about this problem will be appreciated.

 

[Jay Freedman]

I can't suggest what happened to your document or any easier way to
fix it, but I will tell you that working in Word directly from any
form of removable media -- memory stick, CD, DVD, floppy, or even in
some cases a network share -- is inherently unsafe.

Always copy the unopened document to your hard drive, edit it there,
close it, and copy the revised file back to the removable media. Any
other method invites document corruption.

On floppy disks, the mechanism of corruption is generally that Word's
temporary files overflow the available space and start overwriting the
document or each other. With larger media it isn't so clear, but I
suspect that it involves timing of read/write operations. Most
removable media can be too slow to keep up under all conditions.

The fact that you were able to defy the odds for three months or so
doesn't mean that you could do so indefinitely. Besides that, I have
to wonder why you don't have an independent backup of a document
you've spent a lot of time on. See
http://www.gmayor.com/automatically_backup.htm for some help with
that.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.

 

[Klaus Linke]

I now just have to go through the damaged area and find the 300 or so

entries that I had designated as 'heading 1'. 'heading 2', or ' heading 3'
and make the manual changes by inserting a good paragraph mark
for the damaged one and then selecting the text and applying the
'heading 1' style to it.

It is work, but it is getting the job done.

A damaged document would be an explanation! In that case, it might have been
safer to make a backup, then open the original with the file type set to
"Recover text from any file", and copy the damaged portion from there.
That way, you'd be sure that any damage is removed (including the damaged
paragraph marks).

If you do it your way, you could still replace all paragraph marks as I
suggested, instead of pasting them one by one.
There's no way around reapplying proper styles, I am afraid, but you do not
need to select a paragraph to apply the style.

Regards,
Klaus

 

[Klaus Linke]

After you fixed your document, it would be a good idea to save in XML format
once (or RTF in older versions).

The Word binary *.doc format is pretty fragile. It consists of a header,
blocks of raw texts, and areas with the formatting information with pointers
back into the text to tell Word how to format things.
If the document was damaged, there's a good(?) chance that fixing it by hand
will leave problems, say in the header or dangling formatting pointers.
Saving in one of the formats I mentioned often fixes those issues.

Regards,
Klaus