Word 2000 - How do I remove Headings & other styles that haveesconced themselves in the Styles dropd

[memoto]

Oof! So frustrated! Only been working with Office since 1993, though,
so it's understandable that I still don't know my way around.

This time around, Office 2000 is what's making me tear my hair out. It
seems that every style I apply in a document, and many of its friends,
append themselves to the dropdown menu in the style toolbar, there to
remain until I delete them once in a while in one fell swoop.

As a result, the dropdown menu becomes cluttered with styles like
FollowedHyperlink, Hyperlink, Normal (Web), Emphasis, HTML
(Typewriter), and other permutations I don't even recognize. In all
these cases, I either copied and pasted a piece of text into Word, or
applied some style to a snippet of text.

Problem is, built-in styles can't be deleted, so I end up with odds 'n
ends like Heading 5 and Heading 8 alongside Normal, Default Paragraph,
and Headings 1, 2 and 3. For some reason, this annoys me no end.

My question is twofold:
a) Is there a way to remove built-in styles like Heading 5 from the
dropdown menu in the Styles toolbar (without deleting them altogether,
just getting them off the dropdown menu)? Can I reset that dropdown
menu back to the default?
b) Is there a way to prevent all these styles from adding themselves
to the dropdown menu to begin with?

My customization options are set to prompt me to save to Normal
template, but none of these styles adding themselves to the dropdown
menu ever trigger an alert.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You *can* "delete" built-in styles provided you choose "Styles in use" in
the Styles dialog. The styles aren't really deleted, but they are removed
from the list (and, if you have modified them, they are reset to their
default Normal.dot formatting). The gotcha is that there are some styles
that can't be deleted even that way. These include, at minimum Normal,
Default Paragraph Font, and Headings 1-3, plus any other heading styles that
have been used.

One approach is to create a new blank document and paste your text into it.
And you can keep these extraneous styles out in the first place by pasting
as unformatted text. Word 2002 and above offer more flexibility with regard
to setting style visibility.