I have just taken over a technical writing position and I'm working with very complex documents. I understand styles, or thought I did, but I'm having a problem.

According to the directions I was left, it's very important that all text that's not a heading of some kind or something special needs to be formatted as normal text. And it is. But it doesn't look the same, and when I try to apply the normal style, it doesn't change. I don't think much of it adheres to that style, in fact. The differences are subtle, but they're there.

Is it because it's Normal? Other Styles seem to work. I'm not sure why it's so important that the body text stays Normal. With all the macros, etc. built into these documents, there's no telling, but I need to find a solution to this problem.



I'm guessing that Normal style, being the basis for all the others, might work differently when applied to text and I may need to create a body style? Any ideas? Thanks.

What often happens is that people over-ride Style definitions with hard-formatting, so text that has a particular Style attached doesn't look the same as other content in the same Style. The same can happen if text is copied from elsewhere and the user uses the 'keep source formatting' paste option.

Your can remove character-level hard-formatting by selecting the paragraph and pressing Ctrl-Space. You can remove paragraph-level hard-formatting by selecting the paragraph and pressing Ctrl-Q.

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

Thank you very much. That helped me discover which was the true normal text in the document. Very helpful.