Word 2002
In some documents, including the one I'm working on now, the styles and
formatting pane won't show which style is being used for the selected text.
By that I mean, when I put my cursor on the text, the pane usually reveals
which style is applied to that text. But at the moment the formatting of
selected text simply says "char char char", even though I have selected the
text and used Ctrl-Q and Ctrl-space many times to remove any character and
paragraph formatting. I can apply styles no problem, but Word won't then show
which has been applied - Why is it doing this?
thanks

--
MB.

Hi Mike,

Word 2002
In some documents, including the one I'm working on now, the styles and
formatting pane won't show which style is being used for the selected text.
By that I mean, when I put my cursor on the text, the pane usually reveals
which style is applied to that text. But at the moment the formatting of
selected text simply says "char char char", even though I have selected the
text and used Ctrl-Q and Ctrl-space many times to remove any character and
paragraph formatting. I can apply styles no problem, but Word won't then show
which has been applied - Why is it doing this?

The "char" suffixes to style names indicate that a
paragraph style was applied to a text selection that did
not include a paragraph mark. Word takes this to mean that
you want to have character formatting with the character
attributes of that paragraph style. In the background, it
creates a character style and links it with the paragraph
style. Change the definition of one, and the definition of
the other changes.

The best way to avoid this is to make sure that *nothing*
is selected when applying a paragraph style (to a single
paragraph). Or that you've explicitly included a paragraph
mark (¶) in the selection.

Getting rid of the "char" styles can be tricky. You'll find
a macro that may help in the Tips section of my website.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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