How do I turn off all the styles

[Horrified by MS Office]

Word 2007 is sucking up my time with attempting to get a basic set of styles
and banishing the rest to style hell. I am already advising the University of
Calgary academic community to stay away from this product. We do not have
time to learn how to deal with this program. It is nothing short of horrific!
MS Terror would be a more fitting name.

All I want to be able to do is to creat a style set with 5 - 7 styles in
order to set up an academic writing template. I then want to be able to rip
out all the other crap and banish it. Right now there are so many 'styles'
and 'quick styles' that it is consumes vast amount of my time to attempt to
get this program to function as a word processing program. I want to disable
the mouse over feature. I want to get rid of the horrible boxy quick style
menu. I want to get rid of all the preloaded styles. THen I can build the
styles I need without the frustration of all the other crap clouding and
obscuring anything I try to accomplish. I JUST WANT A PROGRAM THAT DOES WORD
PROCESSING.

DOES ANYONE KNOW WHETHER MS WILL ALLOW PURCHASERS TO TRADE THIS PIECE OF
GARBAGE IN FOR 2003? At least you could get it to do want you wanted! It
seems that this latest evolution is made for mindless people who could care
less about docuemt regimen and just want to be able to click on a bunch of
buttons to see what the result looks like!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

In Word 2003 you can control style visibility, and I believe you can do the
same with even more sophistication in Word 2007. Have you tried using the
Manage Styles dialog?

 

[CyberTaz]

Additional to Suzanne's pointer...

From Word Help:

Turn off the Mini toolbar
Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, or Office
PowerPoint 2007
Click the Microsoft Office Button , and then click Program Name Options,
where Program Name is the name of the program you are currently in.
Click Popular, and then under Top options for working with Program Name,
clear the Show Mini Toolbar on selection check box, where Program Name is
the name of the program.