All Fonts Are Times New Roman. Yet Selecting-All (Ctrl+A) Makes the Font Selector Empty

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What in the world is going on here? I suspect something funky is going on behind the scenes?

Thanks to anyone who can shed some light on this enigma!

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The font selector becomes blank whenever any part of your text selection contains more than one font. You can still select your desired font and that has the effect of applying that font to the entire text selection.

I know that your belief/intention/information is that everything in the document is Times New Roman. However this behavior is a “tell”, indicating that there is something, no matter how small or obscure, that isn’t Times New Roman. It can even be a font that is from the same font family (like Times or Roman). That difference alone is enough to clear the indicator font dialog box. The font name has to match exactly.

Here’s an example of how finicky and precise the marking is. Suppose you have a document title. When you set it up, your sequence of actions was to center the text first, then set the font and size. The sequence of formatting tags looks something like this:

If your text selection includes that first tag, then your text range includes a part of the document that is not Times New Roman, even though that is the very next formatting tag! It matters not at all that the font selection for Times New Roman is just one byte to the right. As far as Word is concerned, your text selection includes multiple font regions and the font dialog will appear empty as a result.

This is one of those things you just need to go with. Word is telling you something, but ultimately that something isn’t terribly important. Just set the formatting the way you want and move on.

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Thanks, BHarder. That’s what I thought; my question is, How do I see the marking, to determine what’s off? Thanks again.

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Hi again – Just wondering if anyone can clarify this? Thanks so much!

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How do I see the marking, to determine what’s off?

You don’t. Word has no mechanism for analyzing the document at that level of detail. WordPerfect was the last major word processor that showed the formatting codes exactly as they are, and even then it was an option that you had to activate.

This is something that GUI word processors gave up. The idea was that such levels of detail were detrimental to ease of use and not valuable enough anyway.

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You don’t. Word has no mechanism for analyzing the document at that level of detail. WordPerfect was the last major word processor that showed the formatting codes exactly as they are, and even then it was an option that you had to activate.

This is something that GUI word processors gave up. The idea was that such levels of detail were detrimental to ease of use and not valuable enough anyway.

This is why I use WordPerfect when I want to get real work done. I always have the Reveal Codes screen active and it helps me make even simple documents look like I want them to.

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This is why I use WordPerfect when I want to get real work done. I always have the Reveal Codes screen active and it helps me make even simple documents look like I want them to.

Word’s Reveal Formatting Tools

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Word’s Reveal Formatting Tools

While those were news to me, and interesting in a “oh, look at that” kind of way, I’m really not liking the interface they provide.

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While those were news to me, and interesting in a “oh, look at that” kind of way, I’m really not liking the interface they provide.

Word for Wordperfect users

I’m OK with your prefering Wordperfect. I preferred it myself when I went to work in an office dedicated to using Word and I knew WP very well. I contributed one article to Wordperfect for Lawyers back then. I don’t know that either program is better, but they are different.

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What in the world is going on here? I suspect something funky is going on behind the scenes?

…

Thanks to anyone who can shed some light on this enigma!

I suggest you look behind the scenes in your own posted document. Open it. Everything is as you described it. Now hit the FILE tab on the ribbon.

Holy smoke, so that’s who you are. … All that juicy information is part of the Word document itself, you know.

Funky or not, it is behind the scenes.

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Thanks so much for the clarification! That sure is frustrating!

What’s more, trying to troubleshoot this issue by selecting paragraph by paragraph confirms that the entire doc is in Times Now Roman; it’s only when I “select all” that the font selector goes empty.

Any suggestions for a workaround?

Thanks again!

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Actually, it appears there is something in or around item 7 on page 2 that is causing that behavior. From the top of the document, if you hold down the shift key and scrolldown with the arrow key, I see the Font Name go blank once I go into that paragraph. You may have a non-printing character somewhere in that paragraph or in the “number list” that is causing that behavior, or the document may actually be slightly corrupted.

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Hmmm, when I tried that, the size disappeared when I went past any line with a link. Just selecting the link gives a size of 12 but including other text blanks the size. I couldn’t get it to do what you said, Wendell, when I just tried selecting para 7. Becauseof what happens with the links, it’s blank for all text when text with the links is selected. Not sure if there”s something I’m doing different though.

Eliminate spare time: start programming PowerShell

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I should have mentioned that I tested it with Word 2010, and other versions may behave differently. I also did not see any links in the document – just list items and formatting indents. What version did you use?

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I don’t know how I got it, but I did get it, to my amazement, and the presence of a link would certainly explain it. If you can find the link, I suggest you fool around with it and you might come up with the very thing that I found.

What I found was the original document, in Word format, by the original author. It looks identical to the document that is posted, but if you tap the ‘File’ tab you will see that it bears the original author’s name, and most other properties have been cleaned up for publication.

Embedding that in an HTML file is one clever way of establishing copyright – you have to know where to look and what you’re looking for.

If you follow a link and get what looks like the document posted, check the File tab and compare the Properties.

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I’m using Word 2016 (from 365). The first link was in this line

his expertise in steel, but “largely because,” Schwab recalled, of his “ability to deal with people.”

and the link is the text “ability to deal with people.”

Eliminate spare time: start programming PowerShell

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I now think that my suggestion has been a wild-goose chase.

I originally thought that I had two different sets of properties, one from the O.P. and the other from the original author. Now, however, I cannot duplicate that – the properties I have either online or using a saved version, viewed with either Word 2010 or Word 2013, are confined to those of the the original author.

I am really scratching my head over that, but if you learned nothing from this at least remember to check the Properties of documents when investigating them.

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First, thank you, access and Wendell (especially for spotting the location of the trouble — the first line of item #7). I’m stumped what’s causing the problem.

Indeed, deleting that line and retyping it doesn’t even fix it.

Wendell, any idea how what to do?

Thanks again.

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I’m finding that if I delete one of the earlier numbered items and its accompanying paragraph, thereby shifting the problematic item 7 to item 6, the formerly problematic text is no longer problematic, but the new item 7 (i.e., the former item 8) has the problem instead. This seems to support the view that the file might be corrupt.

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I think the problem is NOT to do with the file and more likely a Microsoft-imposed limit. It appears that if you select any more than 50 paragraphs, Word doesn’t bother displaying the font in that control. This is reproducible in other documents that I created using Word 2013.

Make a selection with up to 50 paragraphs and check the count with code in the immediate window
? Selection.Paragraphs.count

Then try with more paragraphs – the font control becomes blank every time.

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Jon5

I just scrolled down your entire document line by line using the down arrow and here are my observations.

In the unnumbered portions of the document, the ribbon shows the Normal font to be boxed in and that makes sense.
47036-Normal-is-boxed-in

However, in the numbered sections, the ribbon the Normal font is not boxed in even though the fonts are Times New Roman.
47037-Normal-is-not-boxed-in

I suspect that’s the cause of the blank font when selecting ALL: unfortunately, though, I’m not advanced enough to know why but I suppose it could be because when selecting ALL, it’s being determined that there are Normal text entries but there are some entries that are not Normal text entries which in your case is your numbered list.

EDIT: I just created a numbering list on one of my computers with Word 2016 and my other computer with Word 2013 and both of them have the same results.

HP EliteBook 8540w laptop Windows 10 Pro (x64)

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“However, in the numbered sections, the ribbon the Normal font is not boxed in even though the fonts are Times New Roman.”

I noticed that also, but I didn’t see how paragraph style (such as Normal) could affect the font control.

However, Andrew’s explanation would account for what I reported in post #15.

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We are in agreement: we do not understand why using CTRL+A results in the font selector being empty when the whole document’s font is TNR.
— At this time, I can’t even research why this is the way it is, normal result or not and it’s time for me to change gears.

It has dawned on me that I work on different WORD versions on documents both at home as well as at the office I volunteer at. That means I’m always working in compatibility mode and sometimes must select allow editing a document. Even though everything works out well, it’s probably the differences between the different versions that have to be accounted for. So, this is another observation.

Another observation and maybe this is the most important observation
Your document is an article from 2014
Was that article downloaded from the Internet or a report you received into your computer and/or the article pasted into your word document?
Maybe you adjusted the article to your liking but it came from a source of not your own creation?
At that time were you using the same WORD version you are using now?

HP EliteBook 8540w laptop Windows 10 Pro (x64)

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cmptrgy

You are going off on tangents and ignoring the actual reason which I described above. This has nothing to do with paragraph numbers nor imported tags from html nor internal document corruption. The document provided by the OP contained more than 50 paragraphs so the selection of everything exceeds 50 paragraphs.

It is easy to recreate this behaviour in a completely bland document with no formatting.

[*]Open a new, completely empty document
[*]Type “=Rand(50,1)” and press enter (You now have a plain document containing 51 paragraphs since there was already one in the empty document)
[*]Do a Ctrl-A and you can see the font displays a blank
[*]Now delete one paragraph and try again

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Andrew thanks for your excellent explanation

I would like to let you know that I had done a paragraph count on the original document using the Review, Word count on the ribbon and it reported less than 50 paragraphs.
When I did ctrl+A it reported 49 paragraphs. When I didn’t use ctrl+A it reported 48 paragraphs.

47044-49_48-paragraphs

Why there is a difference of 1 paragraph I do not know.

Tonight I used “=Rand(50,1)” and I really liked that as I never knew about it.
— It worked exactly as you said.

HP EliteBook 8540w laptop Windows 10 Pro (x64)

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