I am writing a style guide for our company. I am using Styles to control each
of the elements in the document because that's what we want to encourage our
users to do. However, my 11 page document has grown to over 55mb in size with
only a few, small images inserted so far. Are the styles making the file so
huge?

I am also noticing a severe reduction in response when I change a line of
text's formatting. It takes several minutes for certain formats to take
effect. My machine is otherwise powerful with plenty of memory and processing
power (I use it for graphics and such all the time without any performance
loss).

Last, and I have had an answer to this before but can't find it now, when I
tell Word to make some paragraphs bulleted (by first highlighting the
paragraphs then selecting the Style), a couple of minutes pass while Word is
doing something and suddenly my whole document is bulleted. When I hit CTRL+Z
it undoes all the bulleting except for the items I wanted bulleted in the
first place. Worse yet, all my Styles get changed along with it.

I am used to working with CSS for web sites. Is there a similar way to
program the style sheet separately from the document and not have it
automatically update globally in my document like this? I am trying to use as
few Styles as possible for the sake of our users.

Any suggestions/replies, much appreciated!