Thomas Campitelli was telling us:
Thomas Campitelli nous racontait que :

Thank you both for your responses. I should be more clear. I am less
interested in chaning the behavior of normal.dot and more interested
in changing the behavior of the document on which I am working. I

Do a Find/Replace to replace all text formatted with Normal to be changed to
Body Text.

would also like to apply the default style as body text to a template
that can be distributed throughout my office. If I have to change the
normal.dot on everyone's machine to get this to work, that does not
seem feasible. I'm not quite sure how to apply the advice in
addbalance.com to my current document.

So, within a given document or template, is it possible to default to
Body Text? Is normal.dot the only place that this can be accomplished?
Thanks again.


It depends on the template content.

If you apply Body Text to every body text paragraph in the template, you
will have defaulted it to the Body Text style. Also. if you create
AutoTexts, make sure they are based on Body Text when you create them if
they contain paragraph marks (¶).

Of course, if someone copies/pastes text from another document, and part of
that pasted text was formatted with the Normal style, you will end up with
Normal in your document as well.
Also, some functions default to Normal and I do not think you can change
that (For example, if you delete a style, any paragraph that had been
formatted with the deleted style will be formatted with the Normal style).
There is no real default style as there is a default font (The default font
is just the font formatting of the Normal style). I maybe wrong but this has
been my experience...

--
Salut!
_______________________________________
Jean-Guy Marcil - Word MVP
ISTOO
Word MVP site: http://www.word.mvps.org