Word is renaming my styles

[Daniel Rimmelzwaan]

Hello all,

I have a template with all these nice styles, and I am trying to get people
in my company educated about using them. The thing is however, that Word is
renaming them and I don't know how to stop it.

There is a style called 'Body', and when I start a new document, everything
is fine. At some point (and I don't know exactly when), Word renames it to
'Body Char'. Then there is a style called 'TOC 1', and at some point, Word
renames it to 'TOC 1,ChapterTOC', and so on.

I want to know how I can stop Word from doing this, so I don't confuse
people when I talk about the Body style and my users can't find it.

Thanks,
Daniel

 

[Rick]

The REALLY horrible thing about this bug (and it IS an acknowledged bug) is
that it has the effect of breaking your documents. In highly formatted
documents with families of styles, the style chain is broken when Word does
this stupid renaming thing. If Body is the parent style and you've defined
dependent styles based on Body, take 3 guesses what happens when Body
becomes Body Char! Even worse, tinker some more and you'll eventually see
"Body Char Char" and "Body Char Char Char." Just wonderful, isn't it?

This is a particularly nasty and unforgivable mistake by MS. Considering
that Word is ALL about styles, you are actually penalized for using them
with 2002. I'm currently testing a Hot Fix for this so I suspect it will be
available to the general population in the next few weeks.

We've found that it happens---as far as we can see, anyway---during
cut-and-paste operations between two documents/templates that have the exact
same style name as part of the pasted text. For instance, if you cut a block
of text formatted with Body, then paste it into another document that ALSO
contains a style called Body, chances are (and it doesn't always happen)
that in the doc you pasted into, Body will be renamed Body Char. So, I've
had the unfortunate task of telling people NOT to cut and paste---or to
paste as unformatted text (Paste Special). They are not thrilled.

The other way this happens is when you select part of a paragraph's text,
then apply a paragraph style. What you SHOULD do is simply click inside the
paragraph--don't select any text at all, then apply the style.

I understand how frustrated you are ... I'm in the same boat. I'm
responsible for deploying Office XP to 10k desktops and I'm taking A LOT of
heat for MS's sloppy programming.

Rick

 

[Larry]

I've never used Word 2002, but have followed with interest its various
problems and bugs that have been discussed in the newsgroups over the
last year. But this is by far the worst I have heard. Obviously,
copying text with "X" style to another document with "X" style is
something that users do all the time. If the document is going to fall
into chaos as a result of this ordinary action then Word 2002 is a piece
of junk to be avoided at all costs.

Larry

 

[Graham Mayor]

See the thread
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...v=/groups?sourceid=navclient&q=char+char+Word

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP
E-mail (e-mail address removed)
Web site www.gmayor.dsl.pipex.com
Word MVP web site www.mvps.org/word
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>>< ><<>

 

[Rick]

The real problem here is the idea that Word does this on standard
cut/copy-and-paste operations. We have users happily cutting-and-pasting
with no idea that that they've been bitten ... until they start seeing the
formatting mess. When the parent style is affected by the bug, the child
styles---not being able to find the parent---get linked to ... drum roll
.... "Normal." By the time this is noticed, the style familes are just an
absolute mess.

As a side problem, if your templates contain macros (as do the templates
systems deployed in large organizations) and those macros call Style names
that no longer exist, the macros are broken. Also, if your company
implements something like a corporate font change, you can no longer trust
that users documents contain correct styles in order to do something like
automatically updating the styles to reflect the new font.

 

[Daniel Rimmelzwaan]

Thank you Rick, I was beginning to think it was something I wasn't doing
right. Also thanks for the paste special tip, I was pasting my stuff into
notepad and then copying it from there into my new document. Now that I know
when and how it happens, I can be more careful in my pasting.