First-time poster to the forum has been unable to solve a problem and requests help. I'm using Mac OSX and Word 2008, although the solution I'm looking for would be most useful if it applied cross-platform and was independent of Word versions.



The documents in question are book manuscripts with about five styles in use for chapter headings, main body text, scene breaks, etc. Normal style is used for the main body text, but I need to change the paragraph attributes for justification, first-line indent, line spacing, and remove widow/orphan control without making any changes to font attributes.

The only solution I've found with my version of Word is to select each chapter one at a time, right click and select "Paragraph" (or option+cmd+m), and make those changes. Time consuming, to say the least, and with many manuscripts to edit, way too inefficient.

On a friend's PC with Word 2007, however, there's an option to make these changes and specify that they are to be used as the default paragraph attributes for the Normal style. That would allow me to make the changes one time and apply them throughout the document without altering the current selections for font attributes. This is an important consideration because although the vast majority if text in a book is regular, italics are often selectively used.

The problem is that with my platform/Word version I can't find an option to set these paragraph attributes as the default for a specific style. If I set them with the Format > Style > Modify > Paragraph dialogue box, it will also apply the font attributes for that style, which removes any italics from the text.

I apologize in advance for the complicated nature of this question and hope that the details of my explanation makes sense. Thanks for any help.

Well, I'm using Word for Windows, and undoubtedly there are differences between platforms and versions. Usually, though, you should be able to modify the paragraph formatting in a style without affecting its font formatting.

The same should apply to font formatting, italics in this case, applied on top of the style as direct formatting--it shouldn't be cleared unless you reapply the style (or explicitly reset the font formatting of course). When you reapply a style, font formatting applied to more than 50% of the paragraph will be lost.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Thank you, Stefan. Yesterday I tried something that seems to be an answer for what I'm trying to do.

I built a template with the font and paragraph formatting desired in the final document with Lorem Ipsum "dummy" text. Then a copied text from another document with different formatting (and that had some italics directly applied), selected the dummy text, and pasted the new text in its place.

At the end of the last paragraph of the new text, the "Paste Options" dialogue box appeared and gave me the opportunity to "Match destination formatting." That applied the formatting from the dummy text to the new text and left the italics, even whole paragraphs.

I had never seen this box before and didn't know I could do that. I also found that Word > Preferences > Edit > Cut and paste options > Show Paste Options buttons is what allows the dialogue box to appear.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond to my question.

Indeed, the so-called Paste Options button is sometimes useful. For more on the various options, see http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/styl...ionsworks.html.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional