cmc said:
At the bottom of the Styles task pane in Microsoft Word 2007 is
a check box labeled "Disabled Linked Styles." Can someone
please provide me with an explanation of a linked style?
I understand it has something to do with the combination of
paragraph and character styles, but nowhere in Microsoft can I
find a succinct definition of a linked style and why I'd want to disable
them. Please help -- urgent!
Hi cmc,
As I heard the story, some people did not understand why they could not
apply some paragraph style to just part of a paragraph.
So Microsoft added that "feature" in Word 2002.
I'd *strongly* recommend to check the option to "Disable Linked Styles".
If you apply a paragraph style to only part of a paragraph in Word
2002/2003, or 2007 with linked styles enabled, it will create a character
style behind the scenes... one of the "Char" styles you may have heard
about, or probably already have seen.
That character style has the same font formatting as the paragraph style
it's based on.
Usually, the character style and the "Char" extension to its name is not
shown. It does often show after the document was edited in an older version,
or if the link between the paragraph style and the character style was
broken.
The styles pane will usually only show you one style... In Word 2002/2003 it
will look as if it's a simple paragraph style (when in fact it isn't), in
Word 2007 it will show as a linked style (with both the ¶ and the ª showing
to the right of the style).
Depending on your selection, Word will apply either the character style or
the paragraph style.
Unfortunately, there are lots of issues with that, and there were hosts of
bugs on top of that.
One bug led to "Char Char" styles, that were in fact paragraph styles, "Char
Char Char" character styles, and so on.
There were design issues. For example, the varying support of the new
feature in the different versions led to all kinds of problems when you
exchange documents.
The font formatting in the paragraph style also in some cases could be
different than that in the linked character style.
Another design issue: The Char styles are named differently in the different
language version, so if you exchange docs between them, you could end up
with a Char
style (US/UK), Car styles (Portuguese), Zchn (German) ...
And if Word happens to hide those extensions, you can get a real mess.
Just the other day I got a document I couldn't properly format, until I
discovered that the "Normal" style was a pure character style (strangely
without any Char extension), and was not linked to the corresponding
paragraph style ("Standard" in my German version), as it should probably
have been.
The most important issue IMO: You have a very hard time to tell which style
is applied, and to keep your document cleanly formatted.
If the styles pane tells you it's "Body Text", it could really be "Body
Text" paragraph style, or any paragraph style with "Body Text" applied on
top as a character style.
In Word2007, you can in principle determine both the character style and the
paragraph style applied through the new "Style Inspector", but that's really
a lot of hassle to use, and impractical.
So I would never, ever dream of using linked styles on purpose, and instead
use paragraph styles and character styles as I need them.
Unfortunately, lots of built-in styles have become linked styles by default
in Word2007, so you can no longer avoid them altogether (as you still could
i Word 2002/2003).
Regards,
Klaus
