Styles changing throughout doc? help.

[tony]

OK. documents range from 50pages to 200 pages. problem
is that when ever i highlight some text and try to center
that text. it centers all of the text on the entire
document. I am using about 11 different styles in these
documents, and all of them change. I have checked to see
if that "automatically update styles" box was checked and
it is not. I am using office XP on windows XP.. another
interesting thing. today i noticed that all my styles
have been converted to (COMPLEX) and have arabic symbols
after them. how do i get back to the default. I thought
if i found Normal.dot i could delete it and it would
recreate under defaults. however i cannot find this on
my computer. so i am thinking that Normal.dot is not in
XP.. I am open to any suggestions. Thank you!!

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi tony

Yep, you have a seriously screwed-up template. I never use any
language except English, so I've never even seen a style marked
(COMPLEX), and I'm pretty much guessing about what happened.

First, go to Start > Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office
Tools > Microsoft Office XP Language Settings and remove any languages
you don't use, if there are any.

Next, go into Windows Explorer. Open the Tools > Folder Options
dialog, click the View tab, and click "Show hidden files and folders".
Also clear the box for "Hide extensions for known file types". Now hit
Search and look for Normal.dot. It should be in the same folder that
holds your user templates, generally
C:\Documents and Settings\<name>\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates
where <name> is your log-on name. There should be only one Normal.dot;
if you find others, delete them.

Instead of deleting the original Normal.dot, just rename it to
something like AbNormal.dot. Then restart Word, which will build a new
one. Then you can use the Organizer to move any customizations
(styles, macros, etc.) from the old template to the new one.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

For the basic problem, see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/WholeDocumentReformatted.htm (note that
the "automatically update" issue pertains to the Format | Style dialog, not
Tools | Templates and Add-ins in case there was any confusion). For the
rest, Jay has given you some tips.