Formatting help needed

[Stan Dubin]

It seems when I paste information from somewhere else (another
document, an email, etc.) into a Word document (using Word 2004) and I
make any kind of formatting change (bold, centering, underline, etc.)
.... the entire document changes with the formatting change despite the
fact that I am highlighting only the text I want newly formatted.

Can someone advise what I need to do so that this is not continually
happening?

Thanks.

Yours,
Stan Dubin

 

[Elliott Roper]

It seems when I paste information from somewhere else (another
document, an email, etc.) into a Word document (using Word 2004) and I
make any kind of formatting change (bold, centering, underline, etc.)
... the entire document changes with the formatting change despite the
fact that I am highlighting only the text I want newly formatted.

Can someone advise what I need to do so that this is not continually
happening?

Yes, You should disable "automatically update styles" in the fourteen
thousand places where this is set as a default.[1]

Possibly the most brain-damaged default setting in the whole world.

1 OK. I will take pity on a fellow sufferer.

Format->Style->Modify
Format->Style->New
Tools->Autocorrect->Autoformat as you type
Tools->Autocorrect->Autoformat->Preserve->check styles
Tools->Templates and add-ins

There is also the most irritating one of all, when you do actually
break down and format something by hand....

A *&^!@-ing box pops up and asks you whether you want to change the
style to match the formatting, and when you answer "No!! you bleeding
gibbering moron, for the four millionth time, leave the bloody style
alone". And then, when you are just about to explode, it insists you
answer "Automatically update styles to match formatting in future?"

Is there a matching question "Would you prefer that I never ask this
stupid question again?" Is there hell?!

I tell you one thing for sure. I'm not spending any more money on
Office till that piece af parrot-droppings dialog is preferenced off
for ever. I'll give up on decent typography. I'll eschew Unicode, and
I'll fix up the mangled long filenames in the Finder. I will sure as
hell not be inconvenienced by a lack of notebook mode or audio
clippings or project management or any other of the girly features that
have been added to thrill the journalists instead of fixing the bugs
that plague the paying customers. They won't even tempt me back with a
fix for the eps as preview misfeature if the auto-update styles is
still there.

OK. I lied. There are not fourteen thousand places to tell Word that if
I'm not excplicitly changing a style definition to leave the bloody
thing alone. It feels like there are.

Word and I have not been getting on today..... As you might have
noticed.
Yes, I have a deadline, but if I don't get this off my chest, there is
going to be another axe-murderer roaming the moors.

Can you imagine anything more depressing than having Word's numbering
barf all over your styles while you are de-SAPping a RFP to a deadline?
If that's not bad enough. I have to do the diagrams in UML and the eps
from the drawing package is tripping Word. How much can a man take?

Office Productivity Package?

 

[JE McGimpsey]

I will sure as hell not be inconvenienced by a lack of notebook mode
or audio clippings or project management or any other of the girly
features that have been added to thrill the journalists instead of
fixing the bugs that plague the paying customers.

Depressingly, based on my experience, I'd guess that there are by now as
many or more "paying customers" of Word04 that use the "girly" features
as actually use styles.

One of the schools I support has just hired its fifth secretary in two
years. I anticipate yet another call on the last day of the month saying
"Help! I edited the newsletter and the formatting is all wrong!".

Personally, the project center has dramatically changed the way I work,
and while it could be *much* better, I wouldn't want to go back. I also
regularly use notebook view in the too many meetings I go to (as "the
contractor", I'm usually responsible for taking minutes, since nobody
else wants to). OTOH, I've only had one occasion when I was able to
start an audio clipping early enough to capture the info I needed.

Yes, You should disable "automatically update styles" in the fourteen
thousand places where this is set as a default.[1]

Hmm... for me only the third and fourth of the five listed items are set
by default (and I honestly can't tell what the third does - I don't seem
to have additional styles after formatting by hand). I guess the
Preserve styles preference never bothers me since I never autoformat.

 

[John McGhie]

Hi John:

{Blush} If we're going to do this self-disclosure thing, I suppose I might
as well own up to a predilection for one or two girly features myself.
Particularly if they're attached to real girls (oops... This is a family
news group, isn't it...)

John already knows this, but I thought I would type it out for everyone
else...

AutoUpdate:

OK, this is a property of a style and of a template.

Where it's a property of a style, it causes the style (and thus every
paragraph in the document to which the style is applied) to update to the
current formatting of the paragraph you are editing. This setting can be
inherited if the style is chained.

So first one needs to use Format>Style from the menu to see if
"Automatically update" is turned ON. If it is, one should turn it off for
most purposes: particularly if the style in question is Normal style.
Allowing Normal style to automatically update means you lose complete
control of the document formatting, because in a default template, every
other style is chained to Normal.

Most of us change that. Update the Body Text style to your preferences, and
use that for normal text. Break its "Based On" link to the Normal Style by
setting it to "No Style". Then everything other than headings chains off
Body Text.

Break Heading 1's link to Normal, then chain all of your other heading
styles off it.

If you are using a Table of Contents in the document, you need to be aware
that the format of the table of contents can be set to either a built-in
format, or to "From Template". If it's set to a built-in style, Word will
impose the formatting by updating the TOC 1 to TOC 9 styles with hard-coded
settings. And when it does, it will turn Automatically Update on.

If you choose the format "From Template", your TOC will be formatted by the
TOC 1 to 9 styles you have stored in the document or template.

The other "Automatically Update" is in the Tools>Templates and
Add-Ins>Attach dialog. The "Automatically update styles on open" checkbox
causes Word to import the style settings from the template each time the
document is opened, overwriting any changes to the styles that have been
made in the meantime.

In a workgroup using attached templates, this setting should normally be ON,
so that if the official template is updated, each document gets the latest
settings each time. The exception is if you are using Numbering. If you use
paragraph or heading numbering in the document, this will all be reset on
document open due to a design bug in the mechanism.

Many people confuse Auto Update with AutoCorrect. It is also wise to go to
Tools>AutoCorrect>Autoformat While You Type and turn most of the items in
there OFF. Essentially, turn off everything in the top and bottom sections
of that dialog. After that, you are back in control of the document
formatting.

Cheers

Yes, You should disable "automatically update styles" in the fourteen
thousand places where this is set as a default.[1]

Hmm... for me only the third and fourth of the five listed items are set
by default (and I honestly can't tell what the third does - I don't seem
to have additional styles after formatting by hand). I guess the
Preserve styles preference never bothers me since I never autoformat.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410