I´ve been through a number of the late MVP Shauna Kelly´s articles on styles and templates (a great website!), as well as similar stuff from other writers. One or two phenomena, though, are still causing me some trouble. I use Word 2010 with Windows 7.

I´ve created a fine template for my book, opened a new file based on this template, and now I´m going to copy-paste into this file the whole content of my "old" source-file, which is based on normal.dot. Since I need to keep a lot of direct formating from the sourcefile (bold, italic etc.), that would cost me a lot of time to reestabilish, I have assumed that choosing the option “merge formating” would be ideal, and it has worked fine for me in smaller test-files, that I´ve made earlier in the process. However, when I try to copy-paste the whole content (aprox. 300 pages of text), the text seems to want to bring along with it some of the styles from normal.dot. I can see in the styles menubox, that a number of styles are added, when I paste with “merge formating”. I don´t want this to happen, of course. Is there a way around this?


Best wishes Stephen

When pasting text from another Word document, styles that don't exist in the target will be added. Have you considered deleting those unwanted styles in the source document before pasting?

Or you could use Find and Replace after pasting to find and replace the unwanted styles.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Hello Stefan
Thanks for your quick answer. Some of the styles that were brought into the new file, had to do with direct formating. So if I delete them in the source document, won´t the direct formating disappear then - in the source text?
I have managed to take an easy way around this problem by moving smaller parts of the text one after another, in which case - for some reason - no styles were brought along. But since I have more similar books to come, I would like to find a practical solution.

Direct formatting may be lost when paragraphs are reformatted in Normal style; that is true. The rule is that if more than 50% of a paragraph has direct formatting, that formatting will be cleared when a different paragraph style is applied.

Copying the text in smaller chunks has advantages, as you have noticed, because it gives you more control. Of course, it may be time-consuming!

On the other hand, if there are undesired styles in a source document, and those styles are not applied to text, you avoid bringing them into a target document by omitting the final paragraph mark (¶) of the document when copying the text.

To show/hide paragraph marks, as well as other nonprinting marks, click the ¶ button on the Home tab.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

I have noticed the 50% rule in other cases, yes, and thanks for reminding me of the importance of "the final paragraph mark" - at some point I remembered having read about that detail, but it slipped my mind again - I´ll try omitting that mark next time.
Thanks a lot for this help! Working with styles and templates is actually great once you get to know about it!