With regard to this and my other recent threads, lest it should be the case that I appear dismissive or unwilling to take advice, I should clarify a couple of things:

Quote:

"Resetting margins beats retyping the whole thing."

Only barely. The document referred to in this post is not far short of 200 pages long, and consists of numerous ( I literally don't know how many ) headings with paragraphs underneath. Even if every single one of those paragraphs were indented by the exact same amount, contained the exact same tab settings etc., that's a lot of re-setting margins. Yes, technically, of course it is quicker than re-typing the whole thing; but still far from desirable. If there are in fact no other options, there are no other options; but you can see why I'm not that eager to embrace it.


Until reading that statement below, that thought had never occurred to me. In common, I dare say, with many people - certainly a majority, I would suggest - I've learned to use Microsoft Office as I've gone along, because I've had to. If I'd sat down and read the instructions ( were there instructions...? ) some twenty-odd years ago, before typing my first document, bearing in mind the learning curve renews and changes with each updated version, I'd never have got any actual work done. One might argue that I wouldn't be having some of the problems that I'm now experiencing; that may or may not be true - hindsight is 20 / 20 - but the situation now is what it is. Which brings me on to ...


This has more of a bearing on my other post about delays while typing etc., but by way of addressing the point:

Firstly, once again, hindsight is 20 / 20. If I'd been aware of this twenty years ago, I might have done things differently - although I do say 'might' ( see below ) - but I wasn't. If I typed a paragraph and it needed to be formatted the same as the one three paragraphs earlier, I used Ctrl+shift+C and Ctrl+shift+V, and Bob was my uncle: job done - quick, straightforward and very simple. It never occurred to me that doing this once, twice, five hundred times, would create difficulties further down the line, because why would it?

Those more knowledgeable than I, which covers a lot of ground, may know the answer to that question; but right up to around a week and a half ago, it's never been apparent to me that there even was a question. Which brings me on to ...

Secondly, thinking now about the document that gave rise to my other question about time-lags and delays while typing and copying formats etc.: that particular document is well over 300 pages long, and because this is a document that will never need to be printed out, each of those pages is 345mm wide x 300mm high. ( Is there anything wrong with that ...?... I don't know - I can only say that there hasn't been up to now, in the fifteen-odd years that I've been using that particular document ). At an educated guess - for obvious reasons, I'm not going to actually count - there are maybe fifteen different levels of indent, at least half a dozen different types of bullets, at least half a dozen different font colours, half a dozen font sizes and probably three or four different fonts. The reader's jaw may be dropping and their eyebrows raising by now, but again, I'm constrained to point out that until around a week and a half ago, this has never once been a problem.

However - history aside - let's assume that I now decide that rather than the ( hitherto ) five-second action of copying and pasting formats, I want to set individual styles for each different format. Taking into account the stats above, as the saying goes, you do the math. I don't even know if you can have that many different styles - with my luck, I'd get 99% of the way through the operation before discovering you can't - but let's say hypothetically that you can. Each of those styles has it's own button on the ribbon, except of course that the ribbon only displays eight style buttons; so I have to bring up the list of styles and find the correct one ( Heaven alone knows what sort of nomenclature I'd use for these ). Generally, I'm a keyboard-shortcut guy rather than a mouse-click guy; but even if there were enough available keyboard shortcuts that aren't already in use for other things, so much of my memory would be involved in mentally storing that information that I'd forget my own name.

Assuming, hypothetically, that I were to embrace all of the above, and take on the - let's face it - humungous job of allocating a style to each individual one of the permutations of paragraph formatting, combined with the hideously cumbersome job of locating each style each time I want to format a paragraph, that would take longer than simply twiddling my thumbs while the copy-and-paste-formatting operation works - which it did, perfectly, up to about a week and a half ago, which is where we came in.

The turning-to-gibberish problem only affects a couple of documents; the typing-lag ( plus arbitrarily switching from one document to another, plus taking up to 30 seconds to open a document ) applies to several, if not all, of the documents I work on daily. Whatever it was that caused this problem, that's what I'm looking to solve; although using styles - if I lived long enough to go through the process above - might be a perfectly effective workaround, all I want to do is exactly what I've been doing for the last fifteen or so years without a problem: use copy-and-paste-formatting. It's not like this has got progressively worse over a period of time as the documents have got longer and more complex; two weeks ago it worked perfectly, and now it doesn't.

As I say, I only say all this to make clear why I'm not immediately jumping at styles to solve the problem; I'm not complaining or criticising the response - I'm grateful for any and all responses - but I hope you can understand why using styles to solve this particular problem in this particular context seems rather like buying a new car to fix a stuck window.

Any ideas as to how I can make Microsoft Office behave exactly the way it did up to a couple of weeks ago would be very gratefully received.