Formatting In Use (Style and Formatting Task Pane) Slow + Incorrect?

[Paul]

Hi,

I'm tidying up a document of about 130 pages - no graphics but lots of text
and tables.

I have rationalised most of the document replacing the manual formats with
styles, using CTRL+Q and CTRL+Space, etc.

The Style and Formatting task pane is showing some left over manual
formatting, e.g. Table Text + Right and claiming just one or a few
instances. Attempting to select the instance does not work - Word will pause
for 30 seconds while it finishes analysing the document, but then not move
the cursor to the instance. I have also tried locating with Find using the
formatting options, but no joy.

Any suggestions for how I clear this?

On a related point, using Find and Replace to replace one style with another
is somewhat flakey (I resorted to this a few times when there were a large
number of instances of formatting I wanted to change and Word could not seem
to cope with selecting all instances) - you often have to run it multiple
times to pick up all instances (first time will replace say 100, then 40,
then 20, then 5, etc until you get to 0).

Thanks

Paul

 

[Shauna Kelly]

Hi Paul

You're right. The "formatting in use" often seems to record formatting that
was once, at some earlier point, used in the document. But just to be sure
that you're fully scrubbing your document clean, don't forget to check all
the "other" places that strange formatting might be found: headers, footers,
footnotes, endnotes and comments.

I find that a straight operation to search for one style and replace with
another works well.

What you're seeing (replace 100, replace 40 etc) would be consistent for
searching for something like two spaces in a row, and replacing with one
space. If the search finds, say, 3 spaces in a row, and you're searching for
2, then it will take two runs to get 3 spaces down to 1. Could that explain
in some way what you're experiencing?

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word

 

[Paul]

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think this is the problem. I am
searching/replacing only the styles (the search/replace text boxes are left
blank).

Hi Paul

You're right. The "formatting in use" often seems to record formatting
that was once, at some earlier point, used in the document. But just to be
sure that you're fully scrubbing your document clean, don't forget to
check all the "other" places that strange formatting might be found:
headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes and comments.

I find that a straight operation to search for one style and replace with
another works well.

What you're seeing (replace 100, replace 40 etc) would be consistent for
searching for something like two spaces in a row, and replacing with one
space. If the search finds, say, 3 spaces in a row, and you're searching
for 2, then it will take two runs to get 3 spaces down to 1. Could that
explain in some way what you're experiencing?

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Paul,

I hit Escape, save, close, and reopen the document each time I get the
message about Word analyzing the document.
After that (usually done in a few seconds), "Select all instances" works
instantaneous.

Besides being a lot faster, the message usually doesn't reappear for a while
(whereas it usually does reappear with the next kind of formatting or style
if I let Word analyze the doc).

"Edit > Find" does a much better and faster job than the built-in "Select
all instances..." (which sometimes misses things, or even manages to select
more than it should), and I hope very much that those issues will get fixed.

One thing I do when starting to clean a doc is to replace all paragraph
marks with the "Default paragraph font" style.
Manual character formatting done to the paragraph marks is completely
inconsequential, and is quite frequent.

I wish the same could be easily done for "end-of-cell" and "end-of-row"
markers in tables, as that's another source of inconsequential manual
formatting that shows up in the styles and formatting pane.

Unfortunately, that's not as simple, and if you try to do assign DPF to the
markers (manually or with a macro), you're likely to mess up the formatting
in the table cells. Maybe that's some AutoFormatting gizmo kicking in, but
it looks very much like a bug to me.

:-( Klaus

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think this is the problem. I am
searching/replacing only the styles (the search/replace text boxes are
left blank).

 

[Paul]

I like your tip:

One thing I do when starting to clean a doc is to replace all paragraph
marks with the "Default paragraph font" style.
Manual character formatting done to the paragraph marks is completely
inconsequential, and is quite frequent.

Although the manual character formatting to paragraphs does have an impact
on numbering, this is not usually intended by the user in any case!

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Paul,

Yeah, right, I forgot about numbering.

Klaus

 

[Klaus Linke]

BTW, just remembered a weird one, concerning "styles in use":

-- Create a table.
-- Assign some style, say "Test1" to one cell (say by typing that name in
the style dropdown).
-- Assign another style "Test2" to the cell below.
-- Merge the two cells.

--> The merged cell is in style "Test2", and nothing in the document is in
style "Test1".

The styles and formatting pane, though, will show you that "Test1" is still
used once, but won't select anything if you "Select all instances".

Now split the cell again (one column, two rows): The upper cell will
magically be formatted in "Test1" again.

You could say that a feature (Word remembering the styles of merged cells)
results in a bug (Word reporting styles "in use" that aren't actually --
visibly -- used).

:-/ Klaus