I've been working on a 200-page document, a lot of which is put together by cutting and pasting from a wide variety of sources. In term sof styles it was complete chaos and I wanted to bring order. I copied the whole into a new document based on my own template with a very limited number of styles and then went through re-formating by clearing all styles and then applying the styles I wanted. But the document still seemed to be full of all sorts of styles. Many of these listed in the Styles pane turned out not to be in use, and so I could simply delete them. But this could be done only style by style, one at a time, and so was a very slow and time-consuming processs. So my first question, to which I haven't been able to find a clear answer in anything I've read on styles, is whether it is possible to do a bulk delete of all custom styles listed but not actually in use in the document in consideration.
Secondly, where an in-use style is used a significant number of times I want to use Find & Replace to change it to the style I want. I find this generally works well, but have come up against one particular problem. To be able to find and replace, you have to be able to select the first style from the massively long drop-down list appearing in a very small panel in the Find & Replace box. What do you do if the style you want to find just is not there, as there is no facility for entering a name by hand?
And finally, I seem to be left with a number of styles that have apparently just one instance of use. They will not delete, but selecting the supposed instance brings no result and it cannot be found through Find & Replace. If I try and modify it by adding some outrageous characteristic so it should stick out in the text like a sore thumb, I still can't find where it is. How can I get rid of these single-instance styles that apparetnly cannot be found and changed? I'd like to end up with a manageable list of styles in use that I can overview without scrolling all the time.
(It's probably very obvious to the specialists that although I've been a Word user for a couple of decades I am still not comfortable at all with styles. I thought I'd mastered them at the start of this century, but then got totally lost again when Microsoft changed everything, in that I found what used to be a very simple way of working turned into something very complicated and generally very much slower than applying manual formating. I have tried searching to get clear answers to my questions, but have not come up with anything that has worked.)
