I edit science journal papers in Word 365 where I need to apply a certain set of styles. Recently, the style pane is listing many character and paragraph styles in addition to the style sheet I specify. In Style Pane Options, I set Styles to Show as "In current document" and only Paragraph Level Formatting, but it makes no difference. However, in Manage Styles, when I use Import/Export to open Organizer, only the correct styles are listed as the styles in the document.

This means I have to take a lot of time to scroll up and down the style pane to select only my styles.



I've repaired the documents I've worked on; no change. I've reinstalled Office 365; no change.

Is there some setting I can use (other than Style Pane Options) to list only the styles in the style sheet I apply to the document?

No, there isn't a magic bullet setting that hides styles on some arbitrary set of style names.

You can manage styles and hide any that you don't want to see. Those style settings can be imported from a template however any document may have additional non-builtin styles that aren't in the template (so importing from the template won't change those ones).

If it were me, I would be using a macro to hide all styles and then selectively show my list of 'preferred' styles (either in the same macro or manually).

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

The options for showing and hiding styles are not that useful in Word.

As Andrew suggested, you can get full control (well, almost) if you use a macro to explicitly display the styles you want to see.

However, there may be an easier way. Have you tested the "In use" and/or "Recommended" settings in the Style Pane Options dialog box? These often present a smaller selection of styles.

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Thanks for the info and suggestion, Andrew. I'm going to look into a macro solution.

Thanks, Stefan. I'm currently showing the "In use" list, and it does show fewer styles, but not fewer enough for me. I'm going to try the macro route. (Wish me luck.)

There is a macro in this post that hides all styles unless the name includes an underscore.
https://www.msofficeforums.com/171776-post2.html

Adapting that should be relatively painless.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Please be aware that running a macro against all the styles in a document marks them all as "In Use".

Italophile
I don't know that the In Use setting has any value whatsoever since it doesn't actually relate to whether the style is actually in use right now.

I might have to do some experimentation with it to see if:
1. Deleting a built-in style resets the in use setting - that might at least provide a way to clear it
2. Whether the setting can be turned off by refreshing from the template (if it was cleared there)

Perhaps the most direct way would be to edit the xml file to clear it for ALL styles and start from a clean slate.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

I was just pointing that out as Stefan Blom had suggested setting the Style Pane option to In Use may restrict the number of styles shown. Personally, I have never found it helpful.

With a macro solution, there is no need for the "In use" option, I suppose.

I agree that "In use" has limited use, in most cases. For one thing, if you apply a style which hasn't been used before, and then delete the text paragraphs to which that style is applied, the style will continue to be "In use," according to Word.

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Do you have the options set to show formatting as styles?
This lists direct formatting variations in your styles pane.

Side-note: The very last of three options, the one for "Bullet and numbering formatting," may actually be useful because it indicates the numbering level for each paragraph that is part of a multilevel list.

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Thank you Stefan, I never noticed that advantage.
BTW, I, also, find the Styles In Use pretty much useless. It will give you fewer styles than All Styles but that is about it. I usually keep my styles pane set for All Styles and Alphabetical Order; it seems simpler.

I am doing the same thing, actually: keeping all styles displayed and sorting them alphabetically.

The built-in methods for controlling which styles should display are not sufficiently user friendly—or reliable.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional