I'm using Word 2008 for Mac and have been trying to find out as a matter of user convenience how to manage the list of styles that appear in the drop-down list in the formatting menu. I've built a template with all the styles I want for building an eBook, and it's simple enough to use the organizer and delete most of the styles I have no intention of using for that specific purpose.

But I also use the template to help writer friends with their books, which involves copying and pasting from their manuscripts into the template in place of the Lorem Ipsum placeholder text of the template. A quick selection of "match destination formatting" in the paste options box applies the style and I move on to the next chapter.

The problem is that most of the manuscripts contain a long list of unused styles that is imported into my template along with the pasted text. I learned the hard way that to delete them is a waste of time, because they appear again with the next paste.

So I began deleting them from the source manuscript before the first paste. That works well up to a point, but Word will not let me delete a built-in style. I'm not trying to delete it of course, just remove it from this document. One example had all nine heading styles sitting up near the top of the drop-down list. I couldn't get rid of a single one, and had to scroll past them to get to the styles I wanted.

Another solution is to strip all the formatting out of the source document. I copy all of it, open a new blank document with only the short list of default styles and paste > special > unformatted text. That solves the bloated style list problem, but it also strips out italics, for example, which the author may have used for emphasis or internal thought of characters. I have no idea where it was used, so the document has to be returned to the author rather than being converted as is into an ebook or formatted for print.

One solution that could eliminate all the inconvenience of copy/paste and retain italics would be to change the order of the styles listed in the drop-down menu. If I could put the ones I'm using at the top, who cares how many are out of sight below?

Anyone know if there's a way to do this? Thanks

Tosh