Deciding to work with styles in MS Word document editing is something of a false start. In Word you are always working with styles. If you open a new (empty) document using File, New… and begin keying text, Word automatically uses the Normal style (by default 10-point Times New Roman for Word 97/98 and 12-point Times New Roman for Word 2000) as its base style for text formatting, and any document you receive from elsewhere will almost certainly have the Normal style as its base style too. Insert an endnote, and Word uses the Endnote Reference style to format the superscript numeral denoting the endnote, and the Endnote Text style to format the note text. Insert a Word comment and the same process occurs; the Comment Reference style and Comment Text style are automatically used. If you use headers and footers, the Header style and Footer style are used.
This type of ‘automatic’ style use makes sense. Text must be constructed from text attributes of one type or another, even if these attribute are only a font name and a point size. Such styling ensures formatting consistency for elements like endnotes, comments and so on. You can see the styles applied to a document by using Tools, Options… (Preferences for the Mac), View, and entering, say, 2 cm as the Style area width: setting. Scrolling through a document in this view mode is a valuable way of checking your styles and proofing them. You must be in Normal view or Outline view to do this.
You then realise that you cannot have text in Word that is not set in a style. So it makes more sense to say that when you decide to work with styles, what is really meant is controlling and exploiting them.
The particular style names mentioned above are some of Word’s built-in styles. There are about 90 of them in Word 97/98 and 100 in Word 2000. If you open a new (empty) document and go to the ‘All styles’ list in the Styles dialog box, you are looking at a pristine listing of all the styles currently available for use, and they are all built-in styles. Built-in styles cannot be deleted from Word; that is, they cannot be deleted from the ‘All styles’ list (which equates to the styles in Word), though many can be deleted from the ‘Styles in use’ list (which equates to the styles in the active or current document). This is one problem area, as editors are sometimes asked to ‘delete unused styles’ when submitting a completed document. This is often not possible, or only partially so, and can cause a lot of frustration. Also, it is commonly documented that built-in styles cannot be renamed. This is incorrect. It is true that built-in styles cannot be completely renamed, but their names can be added to (augmented) as an editorial aid.
Then there are user-defined styles. These we create, and we name and define them, and we can modify and delete them. Our user-defined styles are viewable as a subset by opening the Style dialog box and choosing ‘User-defined styles’ from the List: area. The other two options here are ‘All styles’ (all the styles available to the document: built-in styles and user-defined styles&endash;if present&endash;combined) and ‘Styles in use’.
The ‘Styles in use’ list is also problematic. The label ‘styles in use’ does not accurately reflect the content of this subset. Choosing ‘Styles in use’ in the Style dialog box presents the following styles:
1. Built-in styles currently applied to text.
2. Built-in styles that have been modified (including only name modifications), regardless of whether they are currently applied to text.
3. All user-defined styles, regardless of whether they are currently applied to text.
4. Any style that has been applied to text and then removed (replaced or overwritten with another style).
The causes of the components of 2 and 3 where styles are not currently applied I can only arrive at via interpolation: when you modify a built-in style or create a style, Word assumes you have not done this for nothing, that you are going to use it, and puts it in the ‘Styles in use’ group. The cause of 4 is probably a programming bug. I have not seen these issues documented anywhere but they apply to my installations of Word 97 and Word 2000, so I guess they apply to yours. (Also, I work on PCs, but I assume the same goes for Macintosh Word). So this means that what you see in the ‘Styles in use’ list may not be there in the text.
To move on, the content of the ‘Styles in use’ list in the Style dialog box corresponds to the content of the Style Preview drop-down list on the formatting toolbar. Well, almost. A new (empty) document contains the Heading 1 through to Heading 3 styles in the Style Preview list. This is Word’s way of trying to get users off to a good start! However, aside from this anomaly the correspondence between these two listings is complete and is worth remembering. A lot of Word documentation states that Style Preview lists all styles available to the document. This is correct, but only if you use the shift key while clicking on the Style Preview drop-down list. The distinction is an important one to note.
A good way to start with a document, if you really want to identify the styles currently in use, is to use File, Print…, and in the Print what: drop-down list choose ‘Styles’. This prints the styles (plus their descriptions) listed in ‘Styles in use’. You could then check the document with Style area width: activated and see if there are styles in your print that are not on the screen (you can do this in Normal view but Outline view can be easier). If there are, and they are user-defined styles, you can delete them using the Delete button in the Styles dialog box. This will help clean up your ‘Styles in use’ list. If some of the styles that are in your print, but not on the screen, are any of the built-in styles from Heading 1 to Heading 9, you’re stuck with them in the ‘Styles in use’ list. You cannot delete these built-in styles from this list once they are in it. If the document is huge and scrolling appears ludicrous, use the Find function to search for all the styles you have printed out. This can be done quickly. The styles that are not found are the ones to mark on your print. All the unmarked styles in your print then correspond accurately to the styles applied to the document text.
A technique used by some on-screen editors to remove bogus styles from received documents is to select and copy the content of the entire document and paste this into a new (empty) document. This technique will remove bogus styles. However, it can also, and probably will, result in automatic modifications to at least some of the remaining styles, because the Normal style in the originating document does not copy over. It is the Normal style in the new document that is used. Modifications to other styles can result if you use this copy and paste method because document styles are often based on the Normal style, that is, they draw some of their attributes from the Normal style. If the Normal style then changes, they change. Thus copying 10 or 15 or 20 styles across from one document to another document can result in extensive changes to these styles if the Normal style in the source document is different in any way from the Normal style in the target document. If you have a good understanding of style attributes and you can ensure that the Normal style in the target document has identical attributes to that in the source document, you should be able to use this copy and paste solution without error.
What happens, then, if the ‘styles in use’ list is important in your work and this problem hits you and you aren’t aware of the issues involved? At a minimum it is likely to cause a loss of confidence, both in your document’s contents and in how your document is being formatted. No desktop editor likes to be there. Thus it is handy to remember that ‘styles in use’ usually doesn’t mean styles in use. The author has been tapping away, applying styles and then replacing them, and creating styles that aren’t used. Phantom styles accumulate in the ‘Styles in use’ list, so you might have to deal with them. This is one answer to the issue of deleting unused styles mentioned above. Deleting all unused styles from a document is often not possible. But a print of the document’s styles, with the phantom styles struck out, can accompany your returned document. This print comprises a true listing of the styles in use.
Working with only user-defined styles is attractive. If you can do this, the ‘User-defined styles’ list in the Style dialog box comes into full swing, a lot easier than having to regularly scroll up and down the ‘All styles’ or ‘Styles in use’ listings, trying to identify the built-in styles you are using. These lists do not identify the built-in styles actually in use. The issue here, of course, is that built-in styles are so useful. For a start, documents styled using Heading 1 through Heading 9 styles can fully exploit Word’s Document Map, a great way to navigate around a document and become familiar with its content and heading structure. The Document Map looks for these styles and uses them very nicely. So how can you use built-in styles in a manner where you can easily distinguish the ones you are using from the ones you are not?
It is not widely known that you can rename built-in styles, but if you go into the Style dialog box, click on the Heading 1 style to select it, then click the Modify button, the Modify Style dialog box opens with the style name (Heading 1) selected. Delete this name and key in the letter ‘A’. Click the OK button, and you have renamed the Heading 1 style to ‘Heading 1,A’. The ‘A’ you have keyed in has been appended to the end of this built-in style name, with a comma automatically placed by Word as a separator, and it is now listed as ‘Heading 1,A’ in the style group listings (Style dialog box). It is also listed as ‘Heading 1,A’ in Style Preview, in the Style Area width: facility, and it prints as ‘Heading 1,A’ if you print out your styles. It is also used by the Document Map, which sees it as Heading 1, though if you add it to a toolbar it retains its unmodified name. You have given yourself the means of easily identifying a used built-in style from those 90 or more styles in the ‘All styles’ list, and also easily identifying a used built-in style in the ‘Styles in use’ list.
As far as I can determine, you can perform this renaming trick with any built-in style. The key is that Word, internally, sees the appended name component as the actual style name when you modify this name. Part of this procedure is keeping in mind that you cannot have two styles with the same name in Word (for obvious reasons). So Word won’t allow you to rename ‘Heading 1’ as ‘Heading 1,X’ and ‘Heading 2’ as ‘Heading 2,X’. It sees both these styles as having the name ‘X’. But you can rename these built-in styles to ‘Heading 1,A’, ‘Heading 2,B’, ‘Heading 3,C’ and so on. This is not a problem for you as the user. After all, you are merely seeking to apply a unique identifier. If you try this, you may find that, when examining the ‘All styles’ list and ‘Styles in use’ list, you are happily identifying the built-in styles you are actually using.
So what happens if you use this renaming method to facilitate your work and then you want to revert to using the original style names. You simply apply what is almost the reverse procedure. Click, for example, ‘Heading 5,E’ in the Styles: list in the Style dialog box, click the Modify button, click inside the Name: text box, delete the appended characters ‘,E’ and click the OK button. If you do something you didn’t want to, click the Undo button on the standard toolbar. I love the Undo button.
While we’re playing with all this styles stuff: remember that if you are copying text from one document to another, it matters very much whether you select the paragraph text without its paragraph mark or you select the text and the paragraph mark. If you select the paragraph mark, the style of the paragraph is copied into your document too. This is one reason why working with Word’s nonprinting characters displayed can be important (nonprinting characters&endash;paragraph marks, tab marks, manual line break symbols etc. are toggled on and off by using the Show/Hide button (¶) on the standard toolbar.
I see styles as the Gollum of desktop editing. They are extremely useful, malleable, and sometimes deceptive. They invoke suspicion and mistrust, arouse our ambivalence, but give in when we get the jump on them. We can’t shake them. An indispensable part of the plot!
I would appreciate comments about all this. I am interested in understanding undocumented aspects of Word that might help editors and squeezing editing-related procedures to see what pops.
About the author: Brett Lockwood ([email protected]; www.WordBytes.com.au) is a freelance editor and training officer for the Society of Editors (Victoria).