Preventing Styles from Changing

Don has run into a problem in his office regarding styles. It seems that when there are multiple authors using a single document, the styles sometimes change unexpectedly. If Don saves a file with certain styles in place and someone else with access to the server opens and saves the same file, then when Don subsequently opens the file, invariably the style definitions have changed.

There are a couple of things to check when this happens. First of all, you need to check to make sure that all users have dynamic style updating turned off. This feature of Word causes changes to a style definition when someone applies an explicit formatting change to something in the document. Thus, with the feature turned on, if someone makes a change to an individual paragraph, the change is also applied to the underlying style, which in turn affects every other paragraph in the document that uses that style. To turn this feature off, all of the users will need to perform these steps:

1. Make sure the Home tab of the ribbon is selected.
2. At the bottom-right side of the Styles group, click the small icon that looks like an arrow pointing down and to the right. (You could, instead, press Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S.) Word displays the Styles window.
3. Hover the mouse pointer over a style name in the Styles window. You should see a down-arrow appear at the right side of the style name.
4. Click the down arrow and select Modify. Word displays the Modify Style dialog box. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Modify Style dialog box.

5. Make sure the Automatically Update check box, at the bottom of the dialog box, is clear. (If there is no Automatically Update check box, then Word doesn't offer that option for the style you have chosen.)
6. Click OK.

Notice that these steps affect only a single style in a document. That's right—Word allows dynamic style updating to be set on a style-by-style basis. This means that you will need to go through each and every style in your document and follow these same steps. That can obviously get rather tedious if you have a lot of styles in the document. In that case, you may want to use a macro to go through all the styles and change the setting. The following macro will do this rather nicely:

Sub RemoveAutoUpdate()
    Dim s As Style
    For Each s In ActiveDocument.Styles
        If s.Type = wdStyleTypeParagraph Then
            s.AutomaticallyUpdate = False
        End If
    Next s
End Sub

The problem could also be related to the template attached to your document. If, for instance, the document uses the Normal template and each user's Normal template is different, then this can affect the appearance of the document. The way around this problem is to make sure that the document uses a template other than Normal (preferably one stored on the server and accessible by all users) or that everyone's Normal template is the same.

You might also check to make sure that all of the users have the same fonts installed on their systems. If a document uses a font that is on your system, and then that document is opened on a system that doesn't have the same font, Word will substitute a different font for the missing one. This can affect the appearance of the document, even when you subsequently open it back on your original system. To stave off this issue, make sure that you have Word configured so it will embed TrueType fonts with the document:

1. Display the Word Options dialog box. (In Word 2007 click the Office button and then click Word Options. In Word 2010 and later versions, display the File tab of the ribbon and then click Options.)
2. Click on Save at the left side of the dialog box. (See Figure 2.)



Figure 2. The Save option of the Word Options dialog box.

3. Near the bottom of the dialog box, make sure the Embed Fonts in the File option is selected.
4. If you will be using a small number of characters in a particular font, choose the Embed Only the Characters Used in the Document check box.
5. To save space in the document, choose the Do Not Embed Common System Fonts check box.
6. Click on OK.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (997) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Preventing Styles from Changing.