Microsoft Office Forums - View Single Post - Problem with MS Word paragraph and character styles: format getting messed up

Guessed · 07-22-2020, 12:02 AM

As far as I can tell, you are using Revision tracking, Paragraph and Character styles in the way they were intended. But the industrial scale you are applying the revision tracking is perhaps pushing it harder than it likes. Your tracked formatting bubbles say that there is a character style applied AND the colour set to Text 1. This does imply that rejecting that tracked revision will change the colour in some way - do you ever notice that applying the character style while tracking shows a bubble with two tracked changes rather than the one that you made.

I don't think you have messed up and there is nothing special in my LinkedIn profile that would give me any more seniority or insight than you have demonstrated. Your document styles and eloquence here demonstrate you have a high level of understanding and proficiency in using Word and styles. But I would say you are pushing aspects of the software in ways that the programmers who made it didn't consider deeply enough.

I don't know that there is a simple fix to resolve the tracked revisions bug you have discovered but there are benefits if you can continue to evolve your templates and work practices to keep things at the 'complex enough' level but still avoiding complexity wherever you can reasonably do so.

Microsoft Word's implementation of styles is flawed. They made an early design decision to allow a paragraph style to be applied to a part of a paragraph. That bad decision then forced them into a series of bad design/implementation decisions (Linked 'para/char' styles, character styles not overlapping etc) and resulted in things like the Char Char styles bug that tortured users for many years.

Setting up style chains like My_03b_Body_Other_paras based on My_00_Body_base based on Normal achieves nothing more than adding complexity for complexities sake. It forces you in to doing more work than you need to when adding content for no realistic gain. It also creates nooks and crannies in the document structure where bugs like the one you have discovered can hide. Was that the cause of your issue - probably not - but where you can avoid complexity, IMO, you should.