styles find/replace problem

[Animesh Chatterjee]

Hi,

I was attempting to create a table of contents in Word 2002. I was
intially mystified about why the headings in the table of contents
came up in the same font as the equivalent heading in the text, rather
than in the font I had specified for the TOC. I have now realised that
this is because I had not used styles to define the font and size in
the headings in the text; instead I had manually formated the
headings.

I have created several custom styles that match the font and size of
of my headings. I tried to use the find and replace command to replace
my pre-formatted headings with the style. For example, I had manually
formated some of the headings as 16 point Arial bold, 1.5 spaced,
justified. I created a style with these parameters. I then used find
and replace to find all 16 point Arial bold, 1.5 spaced, justified
text in my 165 page document and replace it with my custom style.

However, the replace did not work properly. Instead of replacing the
manual formatting with the style which I had chosen, it replaced the
manual formatting with differently formated styles. As an example, my
custom 16 point Arial bold, 1.5 spaced, justified style was called
"Title One". After doing the replace, the styles pane on the side of
the window suddenly showed up a whole lot of new custom styles, which
I had not created. These included "Title One + 14 point Arial - bold"
- and this was the formatting applied to some of my headings!
Interestingly, this only happened haphazardly - 7/9 headings in my
document formatted correctly (ie with my custom "Title One" style),
but the other two had this weird custom style.

Where did these extra styles come from, and how can I use the find and
replace command to replace my manually formatted text with a custom
style of my choosing?

Thanks in advance,

Animesh

 

[Graham Mayor]

You have applied an underlying style but the manual formatting remains -
select the document (CTRL+A) then reset the formatting to the underlying
styles (CTRL+Space).

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

And note that what you're seeing are not really "styles" but merely
"formatting." Better to remove it as Graham suggests (especially since it
can have the opposite effect), but if you don't want to see it listed, clear
the check box for "Keep track of formatting" on the Edit tab of Tools |
Options.

 

[Animesh Chatterjee]

Thanks for your replies, Graham and Suzanne.

Am I then correct in assuming that find and replace is unable to
replace manually formatted text with styles?

I can't really select my whole document and undo all formatting by
pressing control + spacebar, as I have a lot of other formatting, e.g.
italics and different sized fonts, which I don't want to loose. I
guess the best thing to do is to manually go through the document,
remove the manual formatting from each heading individually, and apply
the style?

Thanks

Animesh

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Use Find and Replace to search for the heading style and replace it with
Default Paragraph Font.

 

[Animesh Chatterjee]

Thanks Suzanne. Considering that my document is 165 pages in length,
your tip saved me a couple of hours of extremely boring work!

Animesh

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

There's nothing like a really long document to force you to find more
efficient ways to do scutwork!