Saving Styles in a Macro

Raj wonders whether styles can be saved in a Word macro and run later as part of a "sanity check" to make sure that only the template styles are applied to a document and nothing else.

The answer to this question is actually much more complicated than you might surmise. If Raj is wanting to stop the user from adding styles either directly (by creating new styles) or indirectly (by using copy and paste from other sources), then there are actually several things you can try, including a few macros. These have been covered in the following (em>WordTip:

https://wordribbon.tips.net/T012698

Beyond what is covered in that tip, if all you want to do is check to see whether the styles used in a document are on an "approved list" of styles, then it is a relatively simple task. The names of styles can easily be stored in a string array and then compared to the styles applied to each paragraph in a document. You can step through the paragraphs in a document and examine whether the styles are in the approved list using a structure similar to this one:

sTemp = ""
For Each p In ActiveDocument.Content.Paragraphs
    sPStyle = p.Style
    bNotFound = True
    For J = 1 To iNumValid
        If sPStyle = sValidStyles(J) Then bNotFound = False
    Next J
    If bNotFound Then
        sTemp = sTemp & sPStyle & vbCrLf
    End If
Next p

This example is simply a code snippet; your full macro would need to set up a string array (sValidStyles) that contains all the valid style names along with iNumValid which is the number of array elements. When the snippet is complete, the sTemp variable contains the names of all the styles used in the document that aren't in the sValidStyles array. (If an invalid style appears in the document more than once, it will appear in sTemp more than once.)

If you are looking for a macro that will actually do a "sanity check" to see if a style has been modified, then the problem is astronomically more complex. Styles can have scores or hundreds of possible settings and storing each of those settings for each valid style would be a nightmare. In that situation it is better to go with the protection-based approaches detailed in the tip linked to above.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (12959) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021.