Format problems during copy/paste

[Guest]

About 6 months ago, I started having problems with a copy/paste operation
that previously had been totally straight forward. I'm doing an Edit -->
Select All on the source document and then appending it to the target
document. For some reason it's started "inverting" everything; bold text
becomes regular, regular becomes bold; everything is underlined. I can't
figure it out. Anybody seen this before?
Word 2000, SP3, Windows 2000 v. 5.0, SP4

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?THlsZUJfQXVzdGlu?=,

About 6 months ago, I started having problems with a copy/paste operation
that previously had been totally straight forward. I'm doing an Edit -->
Select All on the source document and then appending it to the target
document. For some reason it's started "inverting" everything; bold text
becomes regular, regular becomes bold; everything is underlined. I can't
figure it out. Anybody seen this before?

This sounds very much as if the style into which you're pasting (or the
style of the same name in the target document) is formatted the same as the
text your pasting. Bold, underline and italics are "toggle" formats: if you
bold something that's already bold, you get "not bold", for example.

I'd say: check that the paragraph where the insertion point is blinking when
you paste is formatted with the "Normal" style, with no direct character
formatting (select the paragraph and press Ctrl+Spacebar). Now paste.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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[Guest]

Didn't solve problem directly but got me pointed in the right direction.
Somewhere along the way a different template must have gotten attached to the
target document. For that template, "Normal" text was defined as bold and
underlined. Not sure how it happened, but I think I can clear this up now so
it won't keep happening. Thanks.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

See http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/styles/FormatOfTextChanges.html

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

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[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?THlsZUJfQXVzdGlu?=,

Didn't solve problem directly but got me pointed in the right direction.
Somewhere along the way a different template must have gotten attached to the
target document. For that template, "Normal" text was defined as bold and
underlined. Not sure how it happened, but I think I can clear this up now so
it won't keep happening.

Excellent. Here are a couple of thoughts:

1. My first thought was that the formatting was carrying over from something
you'd just pasted in previously. That's something to keep in mind (and is why I
mentioned the Ctrl+Spacebar)

2. By default, in some versions of Word, the "update automatically" option is
activated for the Normal style. This means, if you format text with bold, the
Normal style will also have "bold" in it. If the style is also set to update
back to the template, this could be a source of the problem.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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in the newsgroup and not by e-mail