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.

I have no formal training in MSWord but, having used the software over the years I have never used the "Normal" style simply because I format my material based on the documents that I prepare/use. However, regardless of style used it should not matter how the recipient of a MSWord file have "their" preferences set up. What matters is how the "originator" prepares the file because that is how the recipient will receive it.

(Either this was too simple or I did not interpret the question properly.)

Since Normal style is the "parent" (or based-on) style for most other styles, I'd recommend not making any changes to it. See http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting...BodyStyles.htm.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

As Stefan says, all Styles are based on the Normal Style. So, if you change anything in that Style, it can affect many other Styles in the document. This might be a good thing, it might not, depending on what your intentions are.

When MS used to produce printed manuals to go with Office, the Word manual actually included a chart that showed the Style hierarchy for the supplied Styles.

So, provided you understand what you're doing, there's no harm in using the Normal Style. Generally, though, there's no need to and, because of the risks of unintended consequences, it's good practice not to.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]