Word 2016 Styles dialog boxes confusing

[Digmen1]

Hello, I have just started using Word's style feature and I find it very powerful. I have quite a few long documents with complex formatting and it will help me tidy them all up.
I seem to think that a lot of people do not really know about or use the Styles feature as its just up there on the Home ribbon and looks like a whole lot of gimicky blue text.
I have quite a few questions on Styles which I think is a confusing and buggy area.
My first is why do they use the generic word style?
My second is what do these options on the Style dialog box mean and do.
Automatically Update - it does not say what it automatically updates!
Then there are two radio buttons.
Only on this document (the default) and
New documents based on this template - whenever I click on this it never seems to keep it locked on. Why?

 

[macropod]

See:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Style-basics-in-Word-D382F84D-5C38-4444-98A5-9CBB6EDE1BA4
https://support.office.com/en-us/ar...-in-Word-d38d6e47-f6fc-48eb-a607-1eb120dec563
http://wordfaqs.mvps.org/DisplayStyles.htm
http://shaunakelly.com/word/styles/stylesms.html
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/styles/tipsonstyles.html
http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/styles.htm
http://www.word-tips.com/microsoft-word-styles/

Styles are at the heart of how Word works; you cannot use it without using (or abusing) one or more Styles. Since you cannot avoid them, it is axiomatic that any otherwise empty document you create has to start with Style. Ordinarily, that Style is named 'Normal'. The 'Automatically Update' option, when applied to a Style, means that if you change the formatting of a paragraph using that Style, Word will auotmatically update the Style's definition and the formatting of all other content using that Style. The 'Only on this document' option, as its name suggests, limits the Style changes to the current document instead of applying them to the document's template. If they're applied to the document's template, any new document based on the same template would acquire the new definition. As for 'New documents based on this template', why should it remain the default? You should take time to learn what the tools do before expecting them to improve your productivity rather than using them in a way that might destroy it...

 

[Digmen1]

Thanks macropod for a very detailed reply.
As I said I am keen to use Styles, but I still say the whole area is very confusing and flakey.
Eg it seems very hard to delete a style that you have set up in a new template that applies to several documents. It seems that you have to open each document and delete the style.
It seems very hard or impossible to edit a template file once you have set it up.
And I still think that the option "New Documents Based on this style" radio button should remain checked if you check it, otherwise what is the point of it?

 

[macropod]

Deleting a user-defined Style from a template is quite straightforward and doesn't affect any existing documents based on that template. Simply open the template for editing (via File|Open and chhose the 'All Word templates' file type) then delete the Style and save the template. You can't delete built-in Styles, however. If you want to delete a Style from a document then, yes, you have to delete it from the document; in that case, it doesn't matter whether you delete it from the template.