Hi Paul,

I hit Escape, save, close, and reopen the document each time I get the
message about Word analyzing the document.
After that (usually done in a few seconds), "Select all instances" works
instantaneous.

Besides being a lot faster, the message usually doesn't reappear for a while
(whereas it usually does reappear with the next kind of formatting or style
if I let Word analyze the doc).

"Edit Find" does a much better and faster job than the built-in "Select
all instances..." (which sometimes misses things, or even manages to select
more than it should), and I hope very much that those issues will get fixed.

One thing I do when starting to clean a doc is to replace all paragraph
marks with the "Default paragraph font" style.
Manual character formatting done to the paragraph marks is completely
inconsequential, and is quite frequent.

I wish the same could be easily done for "end-of-cell" and "end-of-row"
markers in tables, as that's another source of inconsequential manual
formatting that shows up in the styles and formatting pane.

Unfortunately, that's not as simple, and if you try to do assign DPF to the
markers (manually or with a macro), you're likely to mess up the formatting
in the table cells. Maybe that's some AutoFormatting gizmo kicking in, but
it looks very much like a bug to me.

:-( Klaus






"Paul" wrote:
Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think this is the problem. I am
searching/replacing only the styles (the search/replace text boxes are
left blank).


"Shauna Kelly" wrote:
Hi Paul

You're right. The "formatting in use" often seems to record formatting
that was once, at some earlier point, used in the document. But just to
be sure that you're fully scrubbing your document clean, don't forget to
check all the "other" places that strange formatting might be found:
headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes and comments.

I find that a straight operation to search for one style and replace with
another works well.

What you're seeing (replace 100, replace 40 etc) would be consistent for
searching for something like two spaces in a row, and replacing with one
space. If the search finds, say, 3 spaces in a row, and you're searching
for 2, then it will take two runs to get 3 spaces down to 1. Could that
explain in some way what you're experiencing?

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word


"Paul" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I'm tidying up a document of about 130 pages - no graphics but lots of
text and tables.

I have rationalised most of the document replacing the manual formats
with styles, using CTRL+Q and CTRL+Space, etc.

The Style and Formatting task pane is showing some left over manual
formatting, e.g. Table Text + Right and claiming just one or a few
instances. Attempting to select the instance does not work - Word will
pause for 30 seconds while it finishes analysing the document, but then
not move the cursor to the instance. I have also tried locating with
Find using the formatting options, but no joy.

Any suggestions for how I clear this?

On a related point, using Find and Replace to replace one style with
another is somewhat flakey (I resorted to this a few times when there
were a large number of instances of formatting I wanted to change and
Word could not seem to cope with selecting all instances) - you often
have to run it multiple times to pick up all instances (first time will
replace say 100, then 40, then 20, then 5, etc until you get to 0).

Thanks

Paul

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