Formatting Troubles

[Ting]

I have been plagued by formatting problems in both Word X and Word 2008, which I just upgraded to.

The overview of the problem is as follows: I apply a formatting change intended for one paragraph or one word, and Word applies that formatting change to the entire document. To get to what I want, I have to hit Undo.

Example:

I'm typing away in a bullet list. I hit return for the next line. I decide that I don't want the next line to be a bullet item, so I click on the bullet list button in the Formatting Palette.

Result:
Word removes every bullet throughout my document. If I immediately hit Undo, Word restores the bullets to every line but the one I wanted it removed from.

This has happened to me with a variety of types of formatting, such as font selection, font weight, font color, indents, etc.

I have been banned by my boss from using Word because of this problem, the documents I generate wind up behaving this way for anyone that edits them.

I had hoped that upgrading to Word 2008 would solve my problem, but it has not.

What do I need to set in order to get Word to apply my formatting changes to only the paragraph or characters I select rather than an entire document?

Thank you.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi Ting,

With the cursor in a problematic word, click on Format | Style. Click
Modify. UNCHECK automatically update, and CHECK add to template. OK
everything and exit back to document. If the problem occurs in other
documents, repeat the same procedure.

The problem is that a style is set to automatically update. It is
possible, depending on how the document is formatted, that you will need
to repeat this procedure for more than one style in the same document.
Full explanation (written for WinWord) here:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/WholeDocumentReformatted.htm
(hit refresh a few times if using safari)

Daiya

 

[Ting]

Thank you so much! That totally worked!