Thanks for the suggestion. However because of a design decision some of the styles affected rely on user applied local formatting. e.g. we only have one style for tables which is 'Table text'. Users a directed by the style guide to use local formatting such a bold for heading text or to center /right align text within tables. Consequently your code can't be used as I wish to retain correct local formatting but get rid of unwanted formatting.

The unwanted formatting is easy to identify by a comparison against the base style.

BUT the only way I worked out to do this is on a character by character basis. This is because when you use the style pane you can select all instances of the particular style and when I do this I can see that in many cases there are only individual characters or words affected. Sometimes only 1 instance, sometimes many hundreds of instances.

I have a strong suspicion that some of the underlying problems are due to the fact that parts of the final document came from sections authored in Japan.

I'll keep scratching my head. But other suggestions are welcome.