RE: Word Troubles

["Chinell, David F \(GE Indust, Security\)" <David -dot- Chinell -at- GE -dot- com>]

Johnny:

Your comment "I have had the good fortune of not having to work with Word as my main
authoring tool for the past 13 years as a TW" is hardly the thing to motivate Word experts to leap to your assistance. I, for one, think Word's flexibility and potential for automation far outweigh its limitations. I won't sneer at your tools if you won't sneer at mine. Deal? About your questions...

You should check out articles at The Word MVP Site: http://word.mvps.org/

If you're going to work with Word on an ongoing basis, the Word-PC list is one of the best and most helpful. To join: mailto:word-pc-subscribe-request -at- liverpool -dot- ac -dot- uk (no subject or command text is required).

When you copy and paste anything from one document to another, the styles applied to the copied material will also be copied to the target document. This preserves formatting that would otherwise be lost. To avoid this, you can copy then click Edit > Paste Special, and select Unformatted Text or Unformatted Unicode Text. The pasted material will assume the style of whatever paragraph you paste it into.

But then you'll have to reapply the correct styles. Better methods?

I'm sure Word 2003 has some powerful tools in new style and task panes. Hopefully someone will tell you easier ways to clean up unwanted styles. In Word 2000, you could use some combination of:

- Renaming styles in the source document to match desired styles in the destination document (the source style won't be copied)

- Using advanced features of Find and Replace to replace styles in the source or target document

- Deleting unwanted styles from either source or target (material styled with a style you delete is restyled as Normal)

I'm not going to be great at treating your other problem, as I use Word 2000, which doesn't create extra styles. But I've saved some suggestions for the future, and you can try them out. Here's a longish post I copied about your problem.

<Quote>


=============================
TURN OFF WORD FORMAT TRACKING
=============================

Word 2002
Word 2003

Subscriber Cathy Welch-Eckey described a problem she was having with formatting documents in Word 2002. It seems that when she selects some text (not a full paragraph) and applies a paragraph style, Word automatically generates a new character style. She finds this bothersome, and wanted to know if there was a way to disable the behavior.

The answer is that there is a way, and there isn't--the problem, as described, could actually be two problems. If the question really is whether you can turn off the ability to apply paragraph styles to any text selection that is less than a paragraph, then the answer is no, you cannot. This capability is built into Word, and there are no settings or compatibility options that I can locate to turn it off.

If the question is whether you can stop Word from automatically generating a new character style every time you apply a paragraph style to a set of characters, the answer is yes, you can. Beginning in Word 2002, at the same time that the task pane was introduced, Microsoft added a feature that allows Word to "track" your formatting. Before learning how to turn this feature on and off, it is helpful to understand exactly what it is.

When you modify the formatting within a document, you can do so using styles or you can apply explicit formatting through the use of the options in the Format menu or through the tools on the Formatting toolbar. If you examine the Styles and Formatting task pane, you notice that it can display several different things, controlled by the Show drop-down list at the bottom of the pane. Choose the Available Formatting setting, and you may be surprised at what you see in the task pane. You should see all your defined styles, plus you may see things such as Normal + Italic, Heading 1 + Centered, etc.

These additional entries in the task pane are there because Word is tracking your formatting. When you apply explicit or inconsistent formatting to your document, Word tracks it and makes it available in the task pane. This is helpful if you want to apply the same formatting again, or if you want to locate these instances of abnormal formatting.

For some people, the clutter caused by these extra entries may be distracting. One way to remove the distraction is to use the Show drop-down list and choose something different for the task pane, such as Available Styles. A more permanent solution, however, is to turn off format tracking altogether:

  1. Choose Options from the Tools menu. Word displays the Options dialog box.
  2. Make sure the Edit tab is displayed.
  3. Clear the Keep Track of Formatting check box.
  4. Click OK.

Word will now, no longer, keep track of your formatting as it differs from the styles in the document. If there are any styles or formatting that you want removed from the Styles and Formatting task pane, follow these steps:

  1. In the task pane, position the mouse pointer over the style or formatting you want to delete. You should see a down-arrow appear at the right side of the entry.
  2. Click the down-arrow. The top option in the resulting menu indicates how many times this style or formatting is used in your document. If you choose it, you can select that formatting so you can either change it or remove it.
  3. If you want to delete the style or formatting from the task pane, choose the Delete option. You are asked to confirm your decision.
  4. Click Yes. The style or formatting is removed.

(Thanks to Mary F. Padilla for contributing to this tip.)

</Quote>

Hope some of this helps

Bear
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