I was told many years ago that I should never use the Normal paragraph style and should use the Body paragraph style instead. Since the person who told me this said that the reasoning was to keep the Normal paragraph style "pristine" and also since it seemed like a very inefficient use of Word's paragraph styles, I ignored this warning and have never experienced a problem due to my "reckless" modification of the Normal paragraph style as needed. I have differently formatted Normal paragraph styles in a number of templates and have never had problems.

Okay, now I have a student who is questioning my suggestion to change the formatting of the Normal paragraph style. She too was told many years ago never to even use the Normal paragraph style and to use the Body paragraph style instead. She was told, however, that the reason for doing this is because if you write a document and then send it to someone else whose Normal paragraph style is formatted differently, the document will get messed up and it possibly could mess up the other person's computer as well.