Word styles are driving me nuts.

September 16, 2006 2:11 AM

Word is starting to drive me insane. Is there any way to force it to use only the styles I defined, and not clutter the list with every minute variation of those styles?

As soon as someone accidentally makes some text bold or changes a font (when they should've just selected a different style/formatting), Word automagically ads that variation as something like "Normal + Arial 12pt". This VERY quickly turns into an enormous, incomprehensible mess.

Is there any way to a) force Word to only use explicitly defined styles and b) consolidate all the "+ n" styles back to their basic forms?

posted by Harry to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Previously. Is that it?
posted by popcassady at 2:56 AM on September 16, 2006

Protecting the document (Tools-Protect) will give you an option to "Limit formatting to a selection of styles," but that's a per-document setting, not an application setting.

The only way I can think of to fix an already-formatted document would be via searching and replacing on the style types (Edit-Replace, click More, click Format, select Style). If you've got multiple documents that will need this fixed, you'd probably need to use VBA to automate it.
posted by Doofus Magoo at 4:45 AM on September 16, 2006

There's also a checkbox in Style Manager that allows the software to auto-keep whatever style shifts are performed throughout the document's edits. Yours is prolly checked to do that.

Also, if you are using a (MS-Word) document as the basis for other documents, and that document has had a lot of style shifts, you may experience funkiness when messing with styles. I had a document that I used as a "starter" for other documents for quite a while, and it eventually became corrupt, as did any document I spawned from it. I finally deleted my normal.dot file and replaced it with one from a cow-orker's machine, and everything's copacetic now.
posted by dontrockwobble at 5:26 AM on September 16, 2006

popcassady is right, if I would have read the links first;
see http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/43702

I bet you a dollar this is it.
posted by dontrockwobble at 5:29 AM on September 16, 2006

a) Tools, protection (in Word 2003 but not Mac)

b) Select All (CTRL-A) then to reset everything back to the character/paragraph styles you defined: CTRL-Spacebar and CTRL-Q (on Mac it's CTRL-Spacebar and CTRL-Option-Q)
posted by Lanark at 5:36 AM on September 16, 2006

First, you need to make sure that Word doesn't create new styles automatically:

- Go to Tools \ AutoCorrect Options \ AutoFormat As You Type and uncheck the Define styles based on your formatting option at the bottom of the list of options.

Then make sure that the Styles and Formatting pane is only showing your styles rather than all the different formatting used in your document:

- Select Format \ Styles to show the Styles and Formatting pane. At the bottom of the pane, next to the word "Show", select "Available styles".

Now, when you change the formatting of a styled piece of text, the Style box in the toolbar will still show the style name plus the extra formatting, but only your actual styles will show up in the drop-down list of styles.

As Lanark said, to revert text to its style, select all the text you want to revert (using Ctrl-A if you want to select everything) and press Ctrl-Spacebar then Ctrl-Q.
posted by iffley at 5:36 AM on September 17, 2006