Changing style names

[Beth]

I am working in a document heavily formatted with styles. While I'm
working in this document, Word is changing the style names. For
instance, the "Heading 1" style just changed to "Heading 1,Heading 1
Char". And "Body Text" gets appended with 3 or for iterations of
"Body Text Char" (if I don't change it immediately back to "Body Text"
the list seems to grow). I modify the style back to the original
name, and awhile later it has changed again.

I recently rebuilt this document because of a corruption problem
(copying everything except the last paragraph mark of each section
into a new document) and the problem happened in the old and the new
version. I don't think the document is corrupt anymore.

I had another document also heavily formatted with styles and the same
thing occurred.

Is this just an annoying bug I have to live with, or is there a way I
can fix it permanently?

Beth

 

[Martha]

(e-mail address removed) (Beth) wrote ...

I am working in a document heavily formatted with styles. While I'm
working in this document, Word is changing the style names. For
instance, the "Heading 1" style just changed to "Heading 1,Heading 1
Char". And "Body Text" gets appended with 3 or for iterations of
"Body Text Char" (if I don't change it immediately back to "Body Text"
the list seems to grow). I modify the style back to the original
name, and awhile later it has changed again.

You're using Word XP, aren't you? First, get all the service packs.
One of them is supposed to fix the "Body Text Char Char Char" part of
the problem.

To avoid the appended "Char" altogether, never apply a paragraph style
to something that is less than a paragraph. Before applying your
formatting, either make sure you have the entire paragraph selected,
including the paragraph mark at the end; or nothing is selected, i.e.
the cursor is flashing in the paragraph you want to format. If you
want to format just a few words, use a character style.

Note that this is "a feature, not a bug": the "Char" styles let you
apply, say, Heading 2 formatting to the first few words of a
paragraph, and therefore have those first few words show up in the
table of contents. To achieve that in previous versions, you had to
mess around with hidden paragraph marks.