Delete All Character Styles (VBA Word 2003)

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I found this code on the internet. I thought it would delete all of the character styles in a document. It doesn’t. Does anyone know a way to do that?
Thanks.
Jerry

Dim aStl As Style
Dim rDcm As Range
Set rDcm = ActiveDocument.Range
For Each aStl In ActiveDocument.styles
If aStl.Type = wdStyleTypeCharacter And aStl “Default Paragraph Font” Then
With rDcm.Find
.Style = aStl
While .Execute
rDcm.Select
ActiveDocument.styles(aStl).Delete
Wend
End With
End If
Next

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The code you posted will delete all character styles that are actually used in the document. It won’t delete character styles that are not in use. To delete *all* character styles (except the pseudo-style “Default Paragraph Font”) you can use

Dim aStl As Style
For Each aStl In ActiveDocument.Styles
If aStl.Type = wdStyleTypeCharacter And aStl “Default Paragraph Font” Then
ActiveDocument.Styles(aStl).Delete
End If
Next aStl

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Hans:

I was hoping it would do that—delete all of the character styles being used—but it misses a lot of them for some reason.
Deleting all available character styles would be great. I will try that.

Thanks.
Jerry

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Jerry,

Do you really want to “delete the styles” or do you want to remove the character style formatting from the text?

StuartR

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Stuart:

Actually I want to remove all of them, even the unused ones.
Han’s code works great.

Thanks.
Jerry

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Hans:

Me again.
Under what circumstances might this macro fail. With certain files I get an error message at the line ActiveDocument.Styles(aStl).Delete saying that the style cannot be found, but the file has plenty of character styles in it. Any ideas?

Thanks.
Jerry

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As far as I can tell, the Styles collection includes the styles that are built into Word, such as Hyperlink and Page Number. These built-in styles cannot be removed. You could change the code to

Sub RemoveCharStyles()
Dim aStl As Style
On Error Resume Next
For Each aStl In ActiveDocument.Styles
If aStl.Type = wdStyleTypeCharacter Then
ActiveDocument.Styles(aStl).Delete
End If
Next aStl
End Sub

The line On Error Resume Next simply suppresses the error message

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Hans:

Thanks. That does remove some of the character styles from the file, but not all. I know that Word can generate its own character styles from paragraph styles. I was wondering if those are the ones that get left behind for some reason. I could from the names that they are not “built-in” styles, but styles that started out as paragraph styles and became charcter styles at some point. So I added this to the macro:

If aStl.Type = wdStyleTypeParagraph Then
ActiveDocument.styles(aStl).Delete
End If

That did remove all of the problem character styles that were left behind, but of course wiped out all of paragraph styles too. I guess the character styles that are based on paragraph styles are not seen as StyleTypeParagraph by Word.

Jerry

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I meant to say “not seen as StyleTypeCharacter by Word.”

Jerry

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If “Keep track of formatting” has been ticked in the Edit tab of Tools | Options…, Word displays pseudo-styles based on formatting. For example if you make a word bold in a paragraph that has been formatted as List Number, Word will display a pseudo-style named List Number+Bold. Such pseudo-styles are listed as paragraph styles, so you can’t delete them even if they act like paragraph styles.
For this and related reasons I always turn “Keep track of formatting” off. The only disdvantage is that the option “Select All” in the Styles and Formatting task pane is disabled, but I can live with that.

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It’s never been clear to me what that number counts, and what gets selected. I have instances where the use count lists, say, 21 instances, but only 18 or so are visible. Asking Word to find the instances only shows the 18 visible ones. Yes, I am including all the options in the Find box to look at the main doc, the text frames, and the headers/footers.

Does anybody know about this? I’ve had documents that insist there are 38 instances of Normal style, then refuse to find any of them.

Thanks.

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Sorry, where do you see “that number”?

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Sorry – I mean the number that shows up when Word offers to highlight all XX instances of the style (if you have Keep Track of formatting selected for Word 2003). XX seems much too high to me, especially for Normal style. Word will offer to highlight all 23 instances in use, but only one or two are actually highlighted. Those two are the same that are found if I ask to find text with that style. The others seem to be phantoms of some kind.

Yes, I use find on the headers and footers too, so that doesn’t account for the discrepancy.

Thanks,

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Aha! After tracking through lots of other posts, I found that the extra instances are probably end-of-row markers in tables. I don’t know why the end-of-row markers should have Normal style, but they seem to. Even though when I select them the style shows as either the table style or the paragraph style of the adjacent paragraph, running macros that examine each paragraph and record its style indicate that those end of row markers get picked up as Normal style.

Using Andrew Savikas’ method (in Post: 462,899) for figuring out whether the current paragraph is an end of row marker I was able to skip them in the style counter – and nearly all instances of Normal disappeared.

Now to find a way to detect whether a paragraph is an empty paragraph in a header or footer. The character count property for paragraphs in a header or footer with no text is 1.

Thanks,

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Jerry, can you explain to us WHY exactly you want to delete all the character styles from the document. This might help us come up with a solution that better suits your aim.

I get the feeling that you are only trying to remove all the formatting from within paragraphs (both character styling and local formatting) and keep only the paragraph style formatting. This can be done by selecting all (Ctrl-A) and pressing Ctrl-Space and Ctrl-Q

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Hi Jerry,

There’s a bunch of other built-in character styles you can’t delete also. These include:
Comment Reference
Emphasis
Endnote Reference
Followed Hyperlink
Footnote Reference
HTML Acronym
HTML Address
HTML Cite
HTML Code
HTML Definition
HTML Keyboard
HTML Sample
HTML Typewriter
HTML Variable
Line Number
Page Number
Strong

This list is for Word 2000. Later versions may have more.

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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