I wonder if this problem has occurred due to some form of corruption.

What could have caused the corruption?

1) The PC had hung once, and I had to reboot. However, as far as I remember, I had not used the recovered files; I had started with the last saved version on the hard disk.

2) Though, the file is not that big (67k words), it has a fairly large number of corrections.

The “Reviewing Pane: gave these statistics:

Summary: 12588 revisions, Insertions 6831, Deletions 5181, Moves 0 Formatting: 240, Comments 336

I have dealt with larger files, though, and I doubt the current problem it due to this factor.

3) This is quite unlikely to cause corruption. I am using a macro to automatically save all open word files (every 20 minutes in the current setting).

4) Browsing through the Internet, I saw suggestions that running Chkdsk could help.

But as the “erroneous formatting” is already in the document, I doubt this would help.

Also, there seem to be some “fixits” available, but I am wary of using them; the last thing I need is for the formatting or change tracking to get messed up.

5) The “word of caution” near the end of this post suggests that the problem is inherent in MS Word.

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On another note, I tried to reproduce the same errors on the sample file, but I was unable to do so.

I corrected the problem by
a) rejecting the change (which produced the wrong color and sometimes the wrong size)
b) applying the paragraph style again (with tracking off)
c) reapplying the character style with tracking on.

This correction seems to stick; on closing and opening the file four times, I found the character style name is being correctly displayed in the balloon.

Further, the “reject” option does a complete and correct roll-back.

If this really works, it is going to be a laborious process of finding all these errors and correcting them.

Also, the sample file is really small, and perhaps the scaling up might not work.

Finally, a word of caution: As you can see in the attached file Sample_tracked_4.docx, any changes (overtyping or addition [words or punctuation]) made in a sentence that has already been formatted with a character style leads to that sentence being fragmented in the balloon.

Further, rejecting the changes will only undo the character styling of parts of the sentence.

The only way out of this situation that I could think of is to first reject the character style for each fragment, apply the paragraph style to the whole sentence (which includes the changes), and then reapply the character style.

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The bottom line:

I’ll just have to plod my way though all the weird character styling (as indicated by the tracking balloons) and hope the change sticks.

I direct editing of the xml file would require me to know and understand the exact formats, and even with a careful use of Find & Replace, it could produce a bigger mess.

And thank you Charles and Guessed for your inputs and help.

Attached Files

Sample_tracked_4.docx (13.1 KB, 7 views)