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Word: 'body' versus 'normal' style for body paragraphs?
Subject:Word: 'body' versus 'normal' style for body paragraphs? From:Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca> To:TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>, Susan Hogarth <hogarth -at- gmail -dot- com> Date:Mon, 27 Nov 2006 13:00:48 -0500
Susan Hogarth wonders: <<Is there a reason I would want to use the
'body' style instead of 'normal' for body paragraphs?>>
The best reason stems from a poor design choice on the part of Word's
programmers. "Normal" paragraph style is illogically defined as the
style that many other styles are "based on" in their style
definition; for example, if you edit the Normal style to change the
font, all your heading styles change too. In what universe does that
make sense? A lesser but still significant reason is that if you
update your Normal.dot template, the changes can affect any of Word's
built-in styles that are defined in that template. (See the section
of the online help that describes how automatic style updates work.)
It's easy enough to avoid these problems (most obviously by editing
the definitions for the heading styles so that they no longer are
"based on Normal"), but most people forget to do this. Using "Body
text" avoids the problem. Similarly, creating and using your own
document template and ensuring that the style definitions are
logically and internally consistent can solve the problem. That's
arguably a good thing given how fragile Normal.dot is (it's
unacceptably vulnerable to corruption) and the fact that it's a major
target for writers of macro viruses--and Word's built-in protection
against these viruses is feeble at best. However, I always include
Normal.dot in my backups, so whenever it gets corrupted, it takes 3
seconds to recover a working copy from my backups.
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