how styles work in Word 2002 SP2

[Stephanie Stowe]

We upgraded from Word 97 all the way to 2002. There seems to be some
difference in the style behavior that I cannot understand.

I have a document with a paragraph which I want to change to the style
"Heading 1." It currently shows "Heading 1 Char1 + Arial Black, 14 pt, Not
Small caps" This seems to say that someone chose the Heading 1 style then
manually modified the text. I want to undo this. I want the paragraph tio
just be "Heading 1." So I select the text and the paragraph mark I select
"Heading 1" from the drop down in the Formatting toolbar (or from the Styles
and Formatting Task Pane). And nothing changes. I still see the crazy Char 1
+ Arial Blank...)

How do I change the style of a paragraph?

Thanks

S

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

If you want to return it to the default style formatting, just press Ctrl+Q
(for paragraph formatting) and/or Ctrl+Spacebar (with text selected) for
font formatting. If you don't want to see all the garbage, clear the check
box for "Keep track of formatting" on the Edit tab of Tools | Options.

--
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.

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi S,

Reapplying the paragraph style just removes manual paragraph formatting
(just like Ctrl+Q), not manual font formatting (Ctrl+Spacebar).

Regards,
Klaus

 

[Stephanie Stowe]

Do you have a styles 101 type reference you could point me to? I understood
them perfectly in Word 97. But I do not understand WHAT I did by pressing
Ctrl+spacebar, which worked beautifully.

Thanks

S

 

[Hank Roberts]

A followup to the problem with these monstrosities -- at least with
the setup where I'm employed, ctrl-spacebar ctrl-Q fails to remove
the portmanteau styles.

What we really want to do is get rid of them entirely.

Actually what we want is to prevent them, but (sigh) it's a feature.

To get rid of them entirely, until the next user sets paws on the
document, only one method I know of works.

That's running John McGhie's venerable "Label Styles" macro first,
which puts the style name in angle brackets ahead of each paragraph.

So we then have a paragraph that looks like this:
<Heading 2,Heading 2 Char1,Heading 2 Char2 Char,Heading 2 Char1 Char
Char,Heading 2 Char Char Char Char,Heading 2 Char Char1 Char>It's A
Feature?

This really ought to be in the Style named "Heading 2" -- but our
installation of Word 2002 no longer has that available, and we can't
use the Organizer -- the extra stuff seems stuck in the system
somehow.

Having run the macro, putting the whole Style name in angle brackets,
we then save as DOS TEXT (or whatever they're calling it now). ASCII.

Close Word to make it let go of the file.

Reopen the file, convert from text.

Find:

Heading 2,Heading 2 Char1,Heading 2 Char2 Char,Heading 2 Char1 Char
Char,Heading 2 Char Char Char Char,Heading 2 Char Char1 Char

Replace with: Heading 2

------- Save As DOS TEXT again. Close Word.

Make sure you have an entirely clean NORMAL.DOT file. If your default
empty new documents have any of this crud in them, recreate Normal.

Reopen the ASCII file. Under Templates and Options, turn off all the
fancy DOT files if any, this breaks Adobe's PDF template file among
others.

Then, run John's "Reapply Styles" macro. That goes through, looks
inside the angle brackets, finds "Heading 2" -- and formats the
paragraph with Heading 2.

When the macro halts, 'Debug' and hover over the right end of the
hilighted text and it'll show you the style name it found in angle
brackets that has no counterpart in plain vanilla Word -- do another
search/replace for that one. It's better to get rid of all of them
the first time with that first search and replace.

This is tedious. But, where I work, this may, if I'm politic enough,
become adopted -- right now the way to get rid of this style
corruption is "copy the entire 257 page document, open a new document,
Paste Special Unformatted, then reapply the proper styles one
paragraph at a time."