I had a new experience while working on a 100-page-plus proposal document recently that perhaps someone can explain. I would also like to ask whether a macro could fix such problems, though I expect the issue may get too thorny for a single one.

We work in Word 365 on SharePoint, though I don’t think that was the issue here, except for inexperienced hands messing things up in the first place.

We use Word’s autonumbering for captions, by way of References/Insert Caption, but then apply our own paragraph style to captions, rather than using Word’s built-in Caption style. Our style, one of a list of defined custom paragraph styles in a custom template, is bold-italic. However, our Table of Figures (TOF) style is regular, with neither bold nor italic.

In one large part of the document, not an actiual separate Word section, we were locally formatting the caption font size down from 12 to 10 to match text size in multi-page tables, and this is where the problem was occurring.

I noticed that some captions were appearing as bold in the TOF; in others, only the number or Figure xx were in bold. Assuming a character style “overlay” (applied on top of the para style), I tried clearing this with Ctrl+spacebar, and Ctrl+Q, even using the Clear All style, but to no avail—regenerating the TOF came up the same. Closing the doc and reopening after refreshing the web page solved nothing.
While I did find that clearing and leaving the font size at 12 when refreshing the TOF resolved the problem, this was not an option, and I have no idea why this should make the difference.

I finally managed to clear everything except the numbers on a remaining half-dozen entries, which remained bold.

Long story short, what finally worked was 1) selecting only the auto number in the caption, applying a paragraph style that had neither bold nor italic (and, in fact, was in a different font); 2) with nothing selected, reapplying our caption style; 3) selecting only the pilcrow and removing the bold with Ctrl+B.

I know that the pilcrow holds paragraph info. What I don’t understand is why the usual clearing methods didn’t work and why this did. Any thoughts?

Finally, regarding a macro: I wonder if a macro could be written to clear “overlay” styles without removing wanted character styles. Perhaps such a macro would have to specify the paragraph style to be worked on and used one pass at a time, as well specifying character style(s) to be left alone. In our case, we have a bold character style, typically used for lead-in words in a paragraph, but hyperlink might be another to be left alone. I’m guessing there is an if/then condition that could be used. However, I don’t know if this would also strip local formatting, e.g., bold, italic, not applied as either para or character style.