REPOST: Formatting paragraph marks using the format painter in Word 2000

[Jo]

Hello everyone

I posted the following message last week but have yet to have a reply
to it. I have tried to find the answer to my question elsewhere but I
have been unsuccessful. If any of you have any ideas, I would be very
happy to hear them.

Thanks in advance

Jo

Original message:

Hello

I am a Word trainer and I am having a problem with formatting
paragraph marks using the format painter in Word 2000.

I am using the format painter to copy formatting from a line of text
and I then want to format the whole of another paragraph by pasting
the formatting to the paragraph mark only.

On some machines this works and on some it doesn't. Is this down to
an option setting I am unaware of?

Thanks in advance

Jo

 

[Jo]

I would suggest that the proper thing to do is train people in the use of
styles.

Thanks Doug, we were in fact covering styles in the course. However,
doesn't really address my question. But thanks anyway.

Jo

 

[Graham Mayor]

I looked at your question last week (as I am sure did most of the people who
contribute here) but having failed to achieve what you wanted to do, I felt
unwilling to add to the discussion. In any case this seemed a very strange
thing to attempt to do.

Most of the Word MVPs would discourage the use of manual formatting, other
than for emphasis, and strongly recommend the use of paragraph styles to
achieve the desired formatting. I am glad to see that your training program
will not be overlooking this crucial aspect of Word use.

If you are going to persist with this, then I would suggest that you compare
the autoformat as you type settings on the machines that allow it, with
those of the machines that don't - and see if the 'automatically update'
check box is set in the format > style dialog. However, again most of us
would recommend that the autoformat while you type settings are largely
disabled and the 'automatically update' check box is unchecked, as both of
these play havoc with document formatting.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP
E-mail (e-mail address removed)
Web site www.gmayor.dsl.pipex.com
Word MVP web site www.mvps.org/word
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[Jo]

Thank you for your advice, Graham.

Just to add a little background information, I had no intention of
discussing this method of formatting as part of my standard course.
One of the delegates on the course mentioned that he had been shown by
someone how to apply formatting in the way I described. A number of
the other delegates in the room tried the method and we ended up with
some machines behaving differently to others. So, when asked why this
should be the case, I said I would look into it. Hence my post.

Thanks again.

Jo

 

[Bob S]

I am using the format painter to copy formatting from a line of text
and I then want to format the whole of another paragraph by pasting
the formatting to the paragraph mark only.

On some machines this works and on some it doesn't. Is this down to
an option setting I am unaware of?

The rule for applying styles to a paragraph using the format painter
is the same as for any other method of applying styles: You should
either select the entire paragraph including the paragraph mark, or
you should have the insertion point in the paragraph but have no text
selected. Anything else is asking for trouble.

In particular, if you select only the paragraph mark and apply
formatting (or styles, which are just named collections of
formatting), it may end up applied only to the paragraph mark. The
best known example is applying "hidden" font formatting to the
paragraph mark, which produces "interesting" and useable results but
certainly does not hide the whole paragraph.

As to why it sometimes appears to work, I can only guess that it might
depend on exactly what type of formatting is being applied or exactly
what the current formatting is. If you are really interested, treat it
as a debugging exercise and find out what the differences are between
the working and non-working cases. Let us know if you come up with
anything consistent; maybe there is a use for it...

Bob S