using office 2010 professional version. Have two full installs, one at work and one for my home office. They are completely different installs from different source discs. The issues described below are identical for both installs.

Trying to set up a stable style set based on the normal.dotm. located at
C:\Users\myuser.domain\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\T emplates at my work office. Have reset it and added in some custom styles that I have done that are just what I want using the import/export function from both the developer tab and the style manger.

However, the style keep changing, ie one time styles disappear, one time they loose their formatting and more. And yes I know about the show and hide buttons on the recommend tab, been there done that maybe 100 times. Maybe 20 times for just one style. From my experience this appears to be buggy software. What other reason would there be for getting different results doing the exact same things multiple times, to include re-installing the complete OS from scratch on two different machines, and redoing step by step to point of insuring consistency.



Questions: Is there a way to get a stable style sheets based on the normal.dotm or some other method or realistically do I need to start looking for new software? Maybe office 2013? or some other software entirely?

Thanks

Quick style sets are saved in separate files. If you want to use one as the default you will have to open your template as a document, apply the style set, save and close the template.

It's actually a lot easier to set up simply a template with the styles that you want.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Stefan,

Thank you for the reply.

1. Been looking for where the Quick style sets are saved. Would like to delete a couple that I have tried to get right. They have exhibited the same behavior as the default template. Where are they located in a stock install?

2. So you are saying that I should open the normal.dotm via file>new>template>blank document or file>open< select Micorsoft Word | templates on the left hand navigation pain>Normal.dotm (assuming these are the same .dotm file ) and then I need to apply the style set as in Change Styles > Style Sets > Reset to Styles From Template?

Still not addressing the idea that I can't get the default template to be stable. IE in my sample document I set up 8 custom bullet lists and 9 custom Ordered lists. They work great in that document and after resetting my normal.dotm template and importing them, they worked like once. Then I close word reopened and bullet1 disappeared. Then I closed it again reopened and all the formatting for all the bullets were gone. The automatically update radio button is unchecked in the modify styles edit tab for each style.

3. Any ideas on that?

1. By default, you'll find any custom style sets in the C:\Users\Your_User_Name_Here\AppData\Roaming\Micro soft\QuickStyles folder. They are saved as *.dotx files, and the names are identical to the style set names. (The built-in ones are in the program files folder.)

2. If you are adding a style set to the Normal template, using Home | Style Sets | Set as Default should do the trick. Just remember to save the template if you see a prompt.

Whenever you want to add a style set to a custom template, open it instead. And, yes, you should open the template as a document, so that you see its filename on the title bar (not "Document 1" or something similar).

Important note: Numbered and bulleted styles may not work properly when you add them to a style set. Number/bullet formatting may not be predictable.

Since the style set is simply the set of styles displayed on the Home tab for a given document or template, what you see will be different depending on the open document. In particular, if you modify the style set for a template, existing documents based on that template won't be affected.

You can always choose to set up a template instead, with the desired styles, and ignore style sets.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Stephan,

Thank you for your reply.

1. Did find the template plus macro *.dotm and the quick set files *.dotx in C:\Users\myuser\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\([Templates][QuickStyles]). You can cut and paste or delete those files there to remove templates/style sets or save one to a backup location that you have gotten just the way you like it.

I'm sure you are aware of this but spelling it out so that maybe others can find it in a search. Have done maybe 30 google and bing searches trying to find that information and got a lot of useless baloney.

I am trying to reformat a large document, 300 pages, that already exists. This document has maybe a total of 300 un-ordered lists (bullets) and ordered lists. The unpredictability of the formatting of the lists , which lead me to redo two workstations from scratch, was the reason I was thinking buggy software, which in some sense appears to be true.

What did work for me was to create a template then open a new document using the template. Open the original document, do a select all then copy and paste it into the new document from the template. Using the replace function with the more > styles option I was then able to start changing the source document styles to my custom styles.

Thank you again for helping me get back on track.

I defer to Stephan's expertise, but unless I am misunderstanding, there are two places that might be contributing to instability: "Automatically update" may be enabled in the Templates and Add-ins dialogue, and/or individual styles may have "Automatically update" checked.

Assuming that you have set up your numbered and bulleted lists with paragraph styles, you can create a template with the desired styles. Be sure to use the same style names as those of your existing document. Then create a new document based on the template and import the existing document via the Insert File dialog box.

To open the Insert File dialog box, do the following: Insert | Object | Text from File. (Note that "Text from File" is misleading; it's actually the good old Insert File command from Word 2003.)

It should be noted that, as far as I know, Microsoft has never confirmed that quick style sets are unpredictable with numbered and bulleted styles. I have seen the problem at a number of times (it may not be 100% reproducable, though).

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Indeed, those two options should (usually) be turned off.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional