Having trouble displaying Modify Style box

T

Tom Duprex

I am running Word 97.

I'm having a problem displaying the Modify Style dialog box. I create a
paragraph and format it the way I want it. Then when I click in the
Style box on the Formatting toolbar and press enter I'm expecting the
Modify Style dialog box to appear. It doesn't. If "Normal" is
appearing in the Style box my paragraph reverts to Normal.dot font. In
experimenting, I found that if I selected the entire paragraph it
worked once in a while. Just leaving my cursor in the paragraph didn't
work at all. What am I not doing, or doing wrong?

tia
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

Normal cannot be updated by example. You have to go to Format | Style |
Modify and modify it directly.

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

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
T

Tom Duprex

Normal cannot be updated by example. You have to go to Format |
Style | Modify and modify it directly.

That explains it then. Thank you Suzanne.

In an attempt to become more familiar with Styles in Word 97 I was
working and exercise from Special Edition Using Word 97 (page 162), and
even referred to a copy of Special Edition Using Word 2000 and both
instructed you to build/edit a paragraph in the normal style to your
specific design and click in the Style box and hit return. It was a
frustrating experience. Re-reading and redoing the exercise and not
being able to reproduce the example.

Obviously this never worked. Consistent with your reply the only way I
got it to work was to start out by FIRST designating the paragraph as a
Body Text, then making my changes. Clicking in the Style box and
hitting enter then produced the Modify Style dialogue box appeared.
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

The authors of Special Edition Using Word 97 obviously hadn't tried this and
were relying on memory. It *was* possible to do this in Word for Windows 95
and earlier, I think. I'm not sure why this was changed, but I expect there
was a good reason for it. Word 97 was also the first version in which it was
necessary to press Enter after typing a custom size into the font size box;
again, this threw a lot of veteran users for a loop.

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

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
B

Beth Melton

Your memory is correct. :)

I suspect the inability to update the Normal style using this method
was done as an attempt to prevent users from inadvertently modifying
their entire document. I suspect this is what prompted the "don't base
new Styles on the Normal style" controversy. I do think it's
interesting that since they modified the behavior you don't see this
come up nearly as often anymore.

--
Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/
 

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