styles morphed into "default paragraph font para char"

[Guest]

The Problem: all of the styles have morphed into a style called "default
paragraph font para char"

Have a major document (MS Word 2003, Professional version / OS is Win XP)
that will need editing, etc for the rest of its long life. Created styles for
it that worked like a charm. Finished/published it 2 weeks ago. Looked at it
today and every style has morphed into a strange style called "default
paragraph font para char" that I've never seen before. However, the doc still
looks exactly the same as before. Several of my backups/revisions have the
same problem. None of my other documents have this problem.

I've never seen such a thing. Microsoft Knowledge Base has no clues for me
(that I can find). What happened? What can I do?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Do you have "Keep track of formatting" checked on the Edit tab of Tools |
Options? If so, what happens if you clear the check box?

--
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.

 

[Guest]

You did it! It worked. Wow! Why?

I had figured it was a history of crashing/recovering without deleting temp
files, and having a changed normal.dot. So, when I saw your advice (and it
worked!), I had just deleted all temp files I could get my hands on, and I
was about to replace normal.dot with a pristine version (I must have clicked
"yes" sometime or other to a dialog box asking me if I want to change the
template). However, I'm not having any luck overwriting that normal.dot with
another one. Any advice on that?

Thanks, Susan!

 

[Guest]

Suzanne,
I was able to replace Normal.dot. I am very confused, though, about why I
was able to work so long on this doc with "Keep track of formatting" on and
it only recently became unruly. Aside of this, what is "default paragraph
font para char"?

More important, can I still use this file? Should I create a new file with
some kind of new formatting for this document?

thanks
Sandra

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

There is a difference between "styles" and "formatting." In Word 2002,
Microsoft introduced the Styles and Formatting task pane, which seems to
reflect an admission of defeat, a concession that most Word users will never
be persuaded to use styles. So whenever you add direct formatting to Normal
(or any other style), Word creates a "formatting" listing of Normal+Bold,
Normal+18 point, Italic, or whatever. The idea is that you can use these
collections of formatting like styles, reapplying them as needed to other
paragraphs. They also, if you do use styles, tend to serve as a reminder
that you're not using them "correctly," that is, that you probably need to
either update the style to match the new formatting or create a new style.
If you don't want to see these "formatting" listings, however, then you
clear the check box I mentioned.

Enter the "char char" bug: Whenever you apply a paragraph style to just part
of a paragraph (intentionally or, more often, unintentionally), Word applies
it as a character style, so that you end up with, say, a Normal paragraph,
part of which is formatted in Heading 1 Char. This bug was somewhat
corrected by SP1 for Office XP IIRC.

The Default Paragraph Font (as explained at
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/DefParaFont.htm) is just the
underlying font applied to a paragraph as part of the style; it isn't a
specific font, just the font defined by the style. Reapplying the DPF
character style is, in effect, the same thing as stripping off any direct
font formatting (by using Ctrl+Spacebar).

Here's where it gets murky, as I can't quite see any scenario that would
result in "default paragraph font para char," which looks like it's trying
to be both a paragraph and a character style.

I'm not sure what to suggest doing with your document. If all your
paragraphs have been formatted strictly with styles and have no direct
formatting applied, you could Ctrl+A, Ctrl+Q, and Ctrl+Spacebar, but this
would remove *all* direct formatting, both paragraph and character
formatting, so it's pretty drastic and probably not necessary. You can also
probably delete the "default paragraph font para char" style, but I'm not
sure what repercussions that might have, either.

You could treat the document as corrupt (see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm), or you could carefully
rebuild it from the template (create one if you haven't already). Starting
with a fresh document based on the template, copy and paste portions of the
original document in, keeping an eye on the Styles and Formatting task pane
to see if new styles or formatting show up. If they do, Undo to remove the
pasted text and hope for the best. If worst comes to worst, you can paste as
Unformatted Text and reapply your styles.

I would not advise this amount of work if you hadn't said that this document
was going to have a long life and need to be edited a lot. In such a
situation it's probably worth the effort to get it as clean as possible.

--
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.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. For the time being, I've created a pdf and
will decide later what to do.

One more question: in the last few days, I have run into two more people at
my company who have the exact same style problem cropping up on them -- with
the exact same name "default paragraph font para char". We've all discovered
the problem in the last few days. One had opened my doc on their machine to
take a look at it, the other hadn't.
Perhaps a virus? Perhaps a common occurence that has only recently become
"common"?
This morning I downloaded anything suggested for Office / Word 2003.
thanks, Suzanne,
Sandra

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I wish I knew enough to help you, but unfortunately I've run out of ideas
here!

--
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.

 

[Guest]

I have had the exact same problem. I created a "template" (really just a
reusable Word document with all the styles pre-defined for reuse on all our
documents) two years ago and it has worked very well here and in our other
offices, among many users nationwide. Beginning early this year, it started
changing the "read out" names of these styles -- in other words, the styles
are still there, but in the little box that show you what style you're using,
it says "default paragraph" and several other variations of that, as well as
"char char char" and others.

Okay frustrating enough. Now, whenever even a single word of text is cut and
pasted from an affected document, it automatically and irreveribly "corrupts"
the styles for the previously "pristine" document. We reuse a lot of our
documents, so this now has perpetuated into eight separate proposals, all of
which will have to be repasted as unformatted text into a clean "template"
and totally reformatted. That is the only "fix" I can think of unless someone
else knows of a better way.

BUT, that gets to the basic problem -- what caused this to happen suddenly
out of reusing this document and all the other documents/proposals created
from them?

There was some discussion on the Knowledgebase that sounded something along
these lines and discussed a fix pack (??) -- but it mentioned documention
that dates back to sometime in 2003. Why would this just be hitting us now?

I am using Windows XP and Word 2003. Most of us are, but there may be other
versions of Windows and Word being used -- but it was never a problem before.
We cut and paste like crazy and never any problems like this!!

Any further insight would be very welcome!!

Thanks!!
Liz Z

 

[Guest]

I also have the problem of my styles displaying as "default paragraph" when
work at home in Word 2003. (This doesn't happen in my older version of Word
at my office.) My documents are formatted strictly using styles. The
formatting is OK-just the style name displays as "default". My work-around
is to delete the default paragraph style (in the Styles/Formatting list).
Then the style names display properly. I have to do this every time I open my
documents in Word 2003. It's a pain but at least the style names display
properly!

 

[Matthew Lenton]

"You can also probably delete the "default paragraph font para char" style, but I'm not sure what repercussions that might have, either."


Yes, I have tried this and it seemed to work OK. You click the little "AA" Styles and Formatting button which reveals all the styles in a right hand pane. Scroll until you find the offending "Default Para Char Char" style and click on it - a drop down arrow will appear, one of the options is delete - do this! It might take a couple of attempts. You should find that your text that had that incorrect style will now lose it, but highlight it and then apply the actual style you want. I found when doing this on body text for example, I only had to select it in one place in the document, and once I had deleted the "Default Para" and corrected it to the style I wanted, it was then applied throughout the document. Click Save. . .

Definitely try this before going down the road of starting your document over from scratch.

Unticking the Options>Edit>Keep Track of Formatting button doesn't do anything to fix this problem, it just hides it from view.

It does seem as if this problem is capable of spreading from document to document, even just pasting one character from a "bad" document will cause a good one to go bad. It therefore makes sense that it will become a more frequent occurence in your organisation.

Rather annoying that Microsoft don't seem to offer much help on this common problem.