Replies

Jefferson,

You associate the creation of ‘ Char’ styles in Word 2002 (Word XP) with the ‘Keep track of formatting option’, but I don’t think this is my experience.

While I think I know what causes the appearance of ‘ Char’ styles, I am still unclear how they seem to transform themselves subsequently from character styles (which is what they seem to be when they are born) into paragraph styles, which in turn can spawn a style ‘ Char Char’ and so on. Mike’s example shows one style with seven ‘ Char’s.

When you select anything within a paragraph, without selecting the whole paragraph, and apply a paragraph style to the selection, Word has always applied the font formatting associated with the paragraph style to the selection but without applying the paragraph style to the whole paragraph. This is the case with Word 97 and Word 2000.

With Word 2002 it seems that this font formatting has been elevated to a character style, which is generated on the fly and is named by taking the name of the ‘parent’ paragraph style and adding ‘ Char’ to the end. This would appear to be a ‘feature’ of Word 2002 and it would seem from some cryptic Word error messages I have seen that it might even have the name of a ‘link’ style. It is certainly the case, as Mike discovered, that if you attempt to delete one of these ‘ Char’ styles, you will delete the paragraph style on which it is based, as well.

What is still a mystery to me, however, is how these character styles seem to become paragraph styles themselves (and can then go on to produce ‘ Char Char’ styles and so on). I have also been shown documents in which the suffix has been ‘ Char1’, presumably because Word felt it needed to create one of these styles when a style of the same name already existed.

Incidentally, I encourage Word users here to restore the ‘Style’ command to their Format menu in Word 2002 because the list it offers seems to be a more reliable indication of the styles that are genuinely present in the style sheet than the list in the Styles and Formatting task pane, which is also pushed into the ‘Styles’ drop-down list on the Formatting menu. While I think the Styles and Formatting tool bar is an excellent tool for identifying and locating all manner of strange formatting that may have been applied to a Word document, I prefer to use the existing methods to remove the formatting or re-apply the correct style.

As for the ‘Keep track of formatting option’ itself, I don’t really understand what it does.

Any further information from yourself or any other colleagues in the lounge would be greatly appreciated.

Jefferson,

You associate the creation of ‘ Char’ styles in Word 2002 (Word XP) with the ‘Keep track of formatting option’, but I don’t think this is my experience.

While I think I know what causes the appearance of ‘ Char’ styles, I am still unclear how they seem to transform themselves subsequently from character styles (which is what they seem to be when they are born) into paragraph styles, which in turn can spawn a style ‘ Char Char’ and so on. Mike’s example shows one style with seven ‘ Char’s.

When you select anything within a paragraph, without selecting the whole paragraph, and apply a paragraph style to the selection, Word has always applied the font formatting associated with the paragraph style to the selection but without applying the paragraph style to the whole paragraph. This is the case with Word 97 and Word 2000.

With Word 2002 it seems that this font formatting has been elevated to a character style, which is generated on the fly and is named by taking the name of the ‘parent’ paragraph style and adding ‘ Char’ to the end. This would appear to be a ‘feature’ of Word 2002 and it would seem from some cryptic Word error messages I have seen that it might even have the name of a ‘link’ style. It is certainly the case, as Mike discovered, that if you attempt to delete one of these ‘ Char’ styles, you will delete the paragraph style on which it is based, as well.

What is still a mystery to me, however, is how these character styles seem to become paragraph styles themselves (and can then go on to produce ‘ Char Char’ styles and so on). I have also been shown documents in which the suffix has been ‘ Char1’, presumably because Word felt it needed to create one of these styles when a style of the same name already existed.

Incidentally, I encourage Word users here to restore the ‘Style’ command to their Format menu in Word 2002 because the list it offers seems to be a more reliable indication of the styles that are genuinely present in the style sheet than the list in the Styles and Formatting task pane, which is also pushed into the ‘Styles’ drop-down list on the Formatting menu. While I think the Styles and Formatting tool bar is an excellent tool for identifying and locating all manner of strange formatting that may have been applied to a Word document, I prefer to use the existing methods to remove the formatting or re-apply the correct style.

As for the ‘Keep track of formatting option’ itself, I don’t really understand what it does.

Any further information from yourself or any other colleagues in the lounge would be greatly appreciated.

Andrew, and Hans,

Many thanks for your quick response.

Andrew, and Hans,

Many thanks for your quick response.

Andrew,

In the New Document task pane, how do you extend the number of recent templates to more than two, or list templates below the General Templates

Andrew,

In the New Document task pane, how do you extend the number of recent templates to more than two, or list templates below the General Templates

Daniel,

Word 2002 will do this for you very simply. In the find dialogue tick the box in the bottom left corner labelled “Highlight all items found in:”. The “Find next” button is re-labelled “Find all”. When you click it, Word selects every occurrence of your “Find what:” text, and ungrammatically reports that, “Word found nn items matching this criteria”. The initial search is on the Main text of the document, and you need to repeat the Find for footnotes and end notes, comments etc. if these are also to be included.

Stuart,

You are absolutely right, the Application Data folder (and perhaps half a dozen other folders) under the user’s profile is hidden. I have had two users in the past week contact me about not being able to find the folder into which they should place templates they wished to use.

Keith,

To get the dialogue that offers you the choice of ‘Update the style to reflect recent changes?’ or ‘Reapply the formatting of the style to the selection?’ when you select the style from the drop-down list in the Style box on the Formatting toolbar in Word 2002, you need to go to the Edit page of the Options dialogue on the Tools menu. Among the new options you have in Word 2002 is one labelled ‘Prompt to update style’. If you tick this box you will get the behaviour you were used to previously.

Frank,

I don’t understand exactly what your problem is, or why it is occurring, but I agree with Phil that, if at all possible, you should avoid using different styles for odd and even footers. It ought to be possible for someone with a good grasp of Word paragraph styles and their formatting to devise a Footer style that will accommodate both your odd and even footers. (I am thinking about things like appropriately positioned and formatted tabs and, if necessary, setting appropriate indents – positive or negative.) It is then a matter of creating the different odd and even footers with the various pieces of content preceded or separated by (the right number of) tabs. I am probably not making myself very clear, and it obviously depends on what sorts of things your odd and even footers are to contain.

I am assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that the documents are being created using a template that contains the styles, page set-up (including the headers and footers) that are required. Naturally the Layout in the Page Setup is set with ‘Different odd and even’ checked under ‘Headers and footers’.

If you are forced to stay with the different styles for odd and even footers you might consider this sort of approach:

Create two AutoText entries – one for the odd footer and one for the even footer – making sure that each is styled with its appropriate odd or even footer style and that the paragraph mark is included in the AutoText entry. Then set up the odd and even footers so that each contains an AutoText field for its own AutoText entry.

You say that the problem with the footers occurs when a section break is inserted in the document. This suggests that it is related to how the page set-up for the section following the break is being controlled. It may also relate to what sort of section break is being inserted. In my experience it’s all too easy get into a mess when the type of section break is anything other than ‘Next page’ or ‘Continuous’.

I think I has better stop, before I ramble on too much, but I hope there is something here that may give you a useful idea.

Jefferson,

This relates to the thread beginning with message 235242 on the Word XP (Word 2002) ‘ Char’ styles. You describe the dialogue as ‘collapsing two different styles into one for convenience’. Certainly Word is ‘collapsing two styles into one’, but not for any user’s convenience. This would appear to be a flakey bit of Word 2002 that needs fixing.

Incidentally, you say there are only two documented values for (Style) .Type. With the arrival of Office XP (Word 2002) there are four, listed in the VBA Help files as:

wdStyleTypeCharacter
wdStyleTypeList
wdStyleTypeParagraph
wdStyleTypeTable

even so, none of them is “both”.

Sorry to but in like this, but this particular bit of behaviour of Word 2002 causes users here a great deal of difficulty and I have to spend quite a bit of my time sorting it out.

With best wishes,

Phil,

In Word 2002 (Office XP) Cross-reference (along with Footnote, Caption, and Index and Tables) has been moved from the main Insert menu to a Reference side menu. This does not invalidate your advice, of course, but it does add an extra keystroke to the sequence, which is Alt,i,n,r (i.e. Alt followed by i followed by n followed by r): the ‘accelerator’ letter for the Reference side menu is n.

Best wishes,

David,

The TOC preview uses the built-in TOC styles (TOC 1, TOC 2, etc.). You may not see these on your list of styles in Word XP as the default is for them not to be listed. If you want to see these styles in the list you need to open the drop-down (pop-up) list labelled ‘Show:’ at the bottom of the Styles and Formatting task pane. This opens a dialogue headed ‘Format Settings’. In the middle is a scrollable list of styles. Scroll down to the TOC styles and check the boxes next to the ones that you want to see in your list of styles.

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?

Karen,

Thank you for your further help and advice.

Like you I keep well away from Normal.dot.

The mechanism I have for making macros and customizations available to our users is to place them in a template on a server and encourage the users to load the template as a global when they need to use its contents. In this context it looks as though I should need to include the subroutine you suggested in an AutoExec macro in the global template.