Heading style overriding manual formatting

[Michel Bintener]

Hi there. I've just noticed an apparent irregularity in Word's behaviour
when it comes to style formatting. In one of my customised templates, I use
Word's integrated "Heading 1" for the title, and I changed it to "Helvetica,
12 pt, bold, justififed, spacing before and after 12 pt". What I have
noticed now is that in some cases, Word ignores manual formatting when
applying this particular "Heading 1" style to a paragraph. For instance, if
I type "Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse", and after applying the "Heading
1" style, the italics are changed into regular characters. If, however, I
write "To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf", the manual formatting remains
unchanged after applying the heading style. So I thought that maybe if the
last character was in italics, Word would undo the formatting. Wrong! If I
type "To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf", the formatting stays the same.
This is really confusing, and also annoying. I used the same examples in the
normal template, to make sure it was not related to some kind of template
corruption (I even deleted my Normal template to make really, really sure),
and it keeps happening. Changing the font for the heading (i.e. from
Helvetica to Times New Roman) does not change anything. I would be happy if
anyone could explain this apparently irregular behaviour to me. (And no, I
won't take "Word doesn't like Virginia Woolf." for an answer!) Thanks in
advance!

Michel
(Word 11.1, Mac OS X 10.3.8)

PS: My apologies for posting in HTML.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Michel,

I was SURE I wouldn¹t be able to reproduce this , but I can! How weird.
I thought it might matter whether or not I spaced (once or even twice) after
typing and before applying the Heading 1 style, but the results aren¹t
consistent (and it shouldn¹t matter anyway). Furthermore, the same
phenomenon occurs using underline instead of italic.

I¹ll escalate this to Microsoft and post back here if/when I get a response.

Thanks!

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
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[Michel Bintener]

Hi Beth,
thanks for forwarding this to Microsoft. It is strange, isn't it? I'm glad
that the behaviour can be reproduced, because I was afraid Word was slightly
mad at me for having used Apple's Pages more often in the past few weeks.
Again, thanks for your help, and I would really like to see some feedback by
Microsoft on this.

Michel

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Michel,

I heard from Klaus Linke (another MVP) about this and here's what he said:

It depends on whether more or less than 50% of the characters were manually
formatted. And that doesn't make a difference if you have more than one
paragraph selected.

Those special rules drive most people (me included) insane. I never know what
result I'll get when applying a style, and it's very easy to miss if you have
lost manual formatting (since you haven't lost the manual formatting 10 times,
but suddenly do the eleventh time).

He also said that this comes up regularly on other Word newsgroups though
I've not seen it before on this one (obviously . So it's a "known issue"
at Microsoft and all we can do is hope they decide to fix it one of these
days.

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
(If using Safari, hit Refresh once or twice ­ or use another browser.)
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Michel Bintener]

Hi Beth,
thanks for your reply. I tried it once again, and this explanation does
indeed make sense. Note: the explanation makes sense, but the behaviour does
NOT. At least not to me. I don't see why my text should lose its manual
formatting, especially since I put it there for a specific reason. I really
hate it when Word does more than what it's asked to do.
But nevertheless, thank you both for explaining what causes the problem. I
guess I'll have to remember what formatting I've made, apply the heading and
then re-format the paragraph again. Thank you, Microsoft Word. (that, by the
way, was completely ironic.)

Michel

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Michel, all,

The rationale, as far as I understood, goes something like this:
-- If less than 50 percent have been manually formatted, it's likely manual formatting applied on purpose (like italic to highlight a single word). Let's keep it.
-- If more than 50 percent have been manually formatted, it's likely manual formatting applied on top of the style by inexperienced users. Let's remove it.

IMHO, inexperienced users don't appreciate that concern, and experienced users are driven nuts.
The least I'd hope for is an option to turn that "feature" off.

:-/ Klaus