Styles (Char) (Windows XP)

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Does anyone know why created styles, after applied to several items adds Char to the style name? We have been reapplying the correct style but would like to avoid this and discover why word adds CHAR to our style name. We do not have any automatic updates engaged for styles. Any ideas?

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I think that this is what happens when you apply a Paragraph style to a selection that is only part of a paragraph, it creates a new Character style that has the same font attributes as the paragraph style.

StuartR

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This gets created when a user:
– selects characters
– applies a paragraph style
– saves the document in Word 2002
– opens it in Word 2000 or 97, saves it
– reopens it in Word 2002

There’s no way to stop entirely, however it is possible to minimize by stopping the practice of selecting characters unless applying a character style…
Happy Friday!

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I’m wondering if the scenario you describe is due to the new (2002) feature of being able to apply different styles within the one paragraph. AFAIK, 2002 introduced a style delimiter mark (looks the same as a para mark) that enables this behaviour. This, of course, won’t be understood in pre-2002 versions, so the styles affecting part-paragraphs might be converted to “char” styles if the doc is opened and resaved in 97 or 2000.

Alan

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As Stuart says, Word 2002 (Word XP) creates these ‘ Char’ styles (character styles based on a paragraph style and with ‘ Char’ added on the end of the style name) whenever a user selects a character (or more, but not the whole paragraph) and applies a paragraph style. It happens immediately. You don’t have to save the document, or open it in any other version of Word. It also happens with Word’s own built-in paragraph styles as well as user-defined styles.

In previous versions of Word with character styles, this action by the user (selecting characters and applying a paragraph style) resulted in the character formatting associated with the paragraph style being applied to the selection as direct formatting, but it has never produced the intended result of applying the paragraph style to the whole paragraph. Nevertheless, users persist in doing it.

If you attempt to delete one of these ‘ Char’ styles from the style sheet you will delete the associated paragraph style as well, and any paragraphs already correctly styled with it will be set to Normal paragraph style by default. The only safe way I have found to remove these quasi-character style from a document style sheet is to convert the document to rtf and edit out the style definition from the style sheet in the rtf header. It’s a drastic solution and Word is likely to crash at some point if you try to do this with large documents.

All in all I should describe this behaviour of Word XP as a consistently reproducible, readily described and persistent bug. Two service packs on and Microsoft have done squit about it.

Can anyone report on its status in the Word 11 beta?

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