Word 2003: Paragraph style used in table changes unexpectedly

[NellieNobody]

I am in the process of copyediting numerous Word 2003 docs based on a
terrible template (There is *nothing* I can do about that!) and edited by two
or more software developers (I could go into a rant here about software
developers not understanding what tech writers do for a living, but I'll try
to contain myself!).

Naturally, all sorts of junk styles have crept into these docs. One of my
first steps has been to delete unused styles. Recently I've had a strange
problem. I'll delete several styles without any problems. Then I'll delete a
style and all of the tables in the document change. Sometimes they will
simply lose their borders. Other times the text in the tables will change to
a paragraph heading style (not a built-n style, but one based on Heading 1).
One odd thing is that it's never the same style that causes the problem.
Another odd thing is that the problem sometimes doesn't appear until I have
closed and reopened the document.

To resolve this problem, I have tried all the usual tricks such as saving the
file as an RTF then saving it as a DOC.

I have also resorted to deleting the paragraph heading style, saving the
document, closing it, and reopening it. When I highlight text in the table,
Word does not show any paragraph style for the text, not even Normal.

I've tried inserting new tables to see if the default table style (Table Grid)
has been corrupted. The only differences between the style in these docs and
in a doc based on the Normal template are "Don't allow hanging punctuation,
Font Alignment: Baseline, Don't adjust space between Latin and Asian text,
Don't adjust space between Asian text and numbers."

I've also tried doing an Open and Repair and receive the following repairs:
"Numbered Styles 1" and "Internal Data Integrity (Type 4) 1". I have not been
able to find any explanations for these.

Can anyone give me a clue as to what's going on here?

 

[Kate]

Hi Nellie,

We had a similar problem. The styles in our tables kept corrupting. The
headings would lose their bold appearance, the text would become bold and
either centred or right-aligned and other tables would lose their borders.
Initially, we tried re-applying the styles, but that didn't work. We also
tried to remove the bolding/bold text manually, and that didn't work either.
We even tried re-installing Word and the Service Packs.

However, the corruptions kept recurring in different documents, with
different users and on different machines. In the end, we decided it was
likely to be a corruption of the Normal.dot template.

We were also using Microsoft Outlook as our email tool and it was set to use
Word 2003 to edit email messages. We removed that connection and we haven't
had any problems since (2+ months). As such, it looks like that might have
been the problem.

Removing the corruption
================
To remove the corruption from the original file, you will need to save the
file as an HTML document and then back to a Word document. The problem with
this is that you will lose any cross references or fields that you have used
in your document and will need to re-work the tables that have been corrupted
by reapplying the styles (and may need to reapply the styles to other parts
of the document), so you will need to weigh up the cost of this against the
cost of rewriting the document. (We were working on very large documents so
decided to do this.)

If you decide to remove the corruption:
1. Save the document as an HTML document. (File -> Save As ->Web Page).
2. Close the file.
3. Reopen the file and save it as a Word file. (File -> Save As -> Word
Document).
4. Close the file.
5. Reopen the file.

Removing the link to Outlook
==================
1. Open Outlook.
2. From the Tools menu, select Optons.
3. Click on the Mail Format tab.
4. Deselect the following options:
(a) Use Microsoft Office Word 2003 to edit e-mail messages.
(b) Use Microsoft Office Word 2003 to read Rich Text e-mail messages.
5. Click the OK button.

I hope this solves your problem.

Best of luck.

Kate