Anyone else ever notice this Word feature?

Subject: Anyone else ever notice this Word feature?
From: Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 21:25:19 -0400


Folks,

I'm using Word 2000, and I don't know if this behavior occurs in older or newer versions. I've seen it before, but I just put two and two together and figured out what it means.

The subject is character styles vs. paragraph styles.

Suppose you've received a document that consists entirely of "Normal" style with manual overrides. You select a (whole) paragraph and assign it a named style, Body Text, for example. Now you place your cursor at the end of the paragraph and press Delete so that you join the following paragraph to the first one. Okay, the _paragraph_ style of the whole paragraph is now Body Text. But Word is still tracking the _character_ style of the second part of the paragraph as Normal with an override (or maybe without an override--it's sometimes hard to predict what Word is going to do in this situation).

Okay, highlight the whole paragraph.

The first part, highlighted, consists of white text on a black background. The second part, highlighted, consists of lavender text on a black background.

Now go back up to the style dropdown and select Body Text again. Voilà, the lavender disappears.

So here's the benefit of knowing about this. You can select the entire document and skim through it for lavender text. When you find some, you can apply the style you want to it, eliminating the override and thereby presumably reducing the complexity of the document and the likelihood of corruption.

Ain't that neat?

Maybe you've known about this for years, but I never saw it mentioned before. So I thought I'd bring it to folks' attention.

Dick
www.dmargulis.com




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