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Dealing with Styles in Someone Else's Document?

As happens often, I recently received a document generated by someone outside my company, and I need to edit it.

Everything was going fine, until I cut a paragraph and moved it.  When I pasted it, the paragraph was in a style that appears completely random.  Font, size and line-spacing that appears nowhere else in the document.

It seems that when I cut and pasted the paragraph, Word thought it helpful to import a random style set from my computer, rather than use the one in the document.  When I opened Styles and style inspector, I could not find the original style and could not figure out an easy way to re-format the paragraph to what it was.  I manually reformatted the paragraph.  But then, every time I moved something else, or added a heading, Word again chose seemingly random styles.

Is there a way to address this?  I assume there must be, since almost any business will have to constantly deal with documents being sent from one company to another. 

1)  Can I keep the original formatting and edit the document without Word screwing it up for no reason?

2)  Can I easily apply my own preferred style set to the document?

3)  Is there an accepted way for dealing with this?

Thanks in advance.   You all are a great help.

Answer
Answer

I've never seen behavior like that, in Word 2013 or any other version. It certainly isn't the standard behavior of Word, but it could be caused by settings in the document itself. When you see it, does the applied style name change to some other style name, or is it just that the settings within the style are changed?

There is one place that's likely to permanently cure most of Word's gratuitous "let me help with that" behavior:

Go to File > Options > Proofing > AutoCorrect Options. Click the AutoFormat As You Type tab of the AutoCorrect dialog. Clear all of the check boxes in the "Apply as you type" and "Automatically as you type" sections, and any of the ones in the "Replace as you type" section that you prefer not to use.

A less likely place: Visit the Modify dialog for each style and make sure the "Automatically update" option near the bottom is NOT checked. (There is no such check box for the Normal style, so visit http://word.mvps.org/faqs/Formatting/WholeDocumentReformatted.htm and follow the instructions for Word 2007, which also apply to 2010 and 2013.)

If you want to change the definitions of styles that already exist in the document, you can attach a different template, in which the styles (with the same names) have different definitions. Click the Developer tab (which you may need to enable by going to the Customize Ribbon dialog and checking the box for it), click the Document Template button, click the Attach button and select the template you want, check the "Automatically update document styles" box, and click OK. Immediately go back to the same dialog and uncheck the box, to prevent further changes.

However, doing this will not apply (or reapply) styles to paragraphs that don't have them; that's a purely manual (or possibly Find/Replace) operation.

For a good description of what this does (and doesn't) do, see http://shaunakelly.com/word/templates/attachtemplate.html.

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Last updated October 31, 2024 Views 719 Applies to: