After I posted that, I reviewed my statements there and modified them. I was mistaken in that the normal template acts like other templates for styles.

1. A document gets the styles from its template when created, whether that template is the normal template or another template. What is the relationship between a Microsoft Word document and its template?
2. Styles in the normal template are not available to documents unless they were created from that template, and then, only the styles that were in the template when the document was created. Generally speaking all templates, at some point, started based on a normal template and contain all those styles that are seldom used.
3. Changing the normal template does not change or update the styles available in the document unless something else happens to update those styles. (i.e. Macros to Copy Styles from the Normal Template)
4. Attaching any template (or re-attaching a template) to a document with the box checked to update styles both updates existing styles in the document to match the template and imports any new styles that were created after the document was created. It does not delete styles in the document that are not in the template.

Charles,
Thanks. FYI, I did some experiments, and they were consistent with your last post.

Word's use of templates is very complicated, and Microsoft doesn't seem to document the complexities. At least, I haven't seen any Microsoft documentation, except for very simple use-cases.

This is not uncommon though for Microsoft's software. They seem to rely on users figuring-out the details for how things work, and writing articles and forum-posts to explain these details.

Word software-developers at Microsoft must have to keep all of this knowledge in their head, as they also have to deal with this lack of documentation. In my experience, most programmers hate writing prose, including documentation. It's no wonder then that Word is buggy.

Jim