Styles glitch?

[Mary Lee]

I am working in Word 2003. I have been putting a document together from all
kinds of sources. When I had the chapters separated out, things were going
fine (as usual). Now that I have them all together again (about 250 pages) I
am getting problems. Word is (seemingly) arbitrarily assiging the level 1
attribute to (seemingly) random pieces of text assigned to many different
syles. What's worse, I have gone through the document twice now (multiple
saves!) and reassinged the proper levels, only to have the problem be right
back again after I close and then re-open the file the next morning. I even
saved the document as its own template before fixing it again, and that did
not help. Ultimately, I am going to strip it and reformat it with a new
template I am creating, but I was hoping to print a review copy by Monday.
This not only messes up my document map for my own navigation, but it ruins
my TOC.

Does anyone know what is going on here?

Thanks so much!
Mary Lee

 

[aalaan]

Select all, then clear all formats. Then re-impose formats?

 

[Mary Lee]

Ultimately, yes, but that will take a day or better to accomplish and I can't
do that before print deadine this afternoon. I fixed them all once again and
just won't close until after I print. I may have to leave my computer on all
weekend so I can make the changes that will come in on Monday, then the next
task will be to strip it and apply my own template.

I was reading about a the problems with the document map (yikes, who knew?),
and that seems to be related except that some of the text it is changing
doesn't look anything like a header - it's just body text and that is what it
looks like. It is even doing it to some caption styles that were pasted in as
caption styles. I made new ones and applied them, and that is what they say
they are, but it is not how they are acting in the doc map. When I go to
modify style from the styles pane, it says that the style is body text level,
but when I go to format paragraph, it shows level 1 for the erring text.

I have not had these problems with document templates I have set up myself,
but I suspect something has crept in from all the pasting in during the
initial creation phase of this project.

 

[Guest]

SelectAll and then use Control+Spacebar and then Control+Q. These two
commands will remove any direct formatting and reset all paragraphs back to
the default Style. Does that help?

Did you also know that the DocMap (a very useful navigation tool) is
actually an AutoFormat command? If you haven't used styles strictly, running
the DocMap is almost the same as running AutoFormat. This is the usual
reason for the levels changing. Try not using DocMap and see if that
resolves the problem. If it does stop the levels changing, then there is a
good chance that the problem lies with the style settings conflicting
somewhere and the DocMap function is the indirect cause of the levels
changing.

 

[Mary Lee]

I'll try that! I know that I'm living in my own nightmare right now: because
of all the pasting in and focusing on content and not formatting, my styles
are rather hit and miss at the moment. I had no idea until the reading I did
today that Doc Map (which I love) was like using auto format (which I never
use). That explains why some other people's documents - who have no idea what
styles are - sometimes have a partially functional document map when I get
them.

The other thing that threw me was the changes I made not staying put when I
closed and re-opened the document.

 

[Guest]

Yes, I can believe that you were surprised. A whole room full of Word
'experts' were quite taken aback when the Word developer told us that DocMap
was an AutoFormat tool which was why we were experiencing what we were with
DocMap: it was difficult to judge he wasn't even more taken aback that none
of knew!

Terry

 

[Mary Lee]

Since they already have auto format, I wonder why they did that? I find the
document map to be way easier for day-to-day navigation through my document
than going to the outline view. I keep it opened all the time and don't use
the outline view unless I am moving things around a lot. Even then, it's
almost easier for me to cut, use the doc map to get where I want to go, and
paste.

It will be fine once I get my template all in place, but for this project I
just had to stay with the content until now. I couldn't tell at first just
what I was going to need, but now I can go ahead and do my template and get
everything ship shape.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I think the idea was that Document Map works only if heading styles have
been applied. If the document contains no heading styles, there will be no
Document Map. Naturally, this would be disappointing to users. Therefore, in
order to sure that things that were "supposed" to be headings had heading
styles applied, Word, through the "Define styles based on your formatting"
feature, would apply heading styles to paragraphs that "looked like"
headings (a single line, not ending in a period, perhaps formatted bold, in
a larger font size). If you had applied this formatting to something that
wasn't mean to be a heading, then it became one anyway.

What I could never understand about the action of this function (before I
discovered it and disabled it) was why it would decide that text in a table
should have the Footer style applied. <g>

 

[Guest]

To add to that: I would have thought that the DocMap was a function that was
only going to be used by 'power users' who will almost certainly be using
Styles anyway. Therefore, the imposition is intrusive. I was under the
impression that the intention was to change this so that DocMap only acted
as the 'navigation aid' that we all expected it to be.

I am surprised it still persists though I have not noticed any ill effects
from using DocMap for sometime now. I'm not sure if this is a testimonial to
my using styles correctly or if the function has finally been tamed.

Terry

 

[Guest]

My English is failing! For 'testimonial' please read 'testament'.

Terry

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I'm never sure about those two words, which mean very much the same thing. I
choose one by intuition (pretty finely honed because I'm a reader) but am
often not confident about my choice. I guess, though, that an inanimate
object can be a "testament" (~evidence), whereas a "testimonial" must be
provided by a human being (~testimony)?

Interestingly, S. I. Hayakawa's "Choose the Right Word" deals with
"testimony" vs. "affidavit," "deposition," and "evidence" but is silent on
"testimonial" vs. "testament."

 

[Klaus Linke]

Daiya Mitchell's article
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/DocumentMap.htm
has a macro that undoes the AutoFormatting (changes in outline level),
without changing any other formatting.

Regards,
Klaus