Deleting Unused Styles

Veronica has a document that has been edited, on and off, for years. Various editors have copied text from other documents into the document and, in the process, copied lots of different styles. Veronica needs a quick way to delete all the styles that are not used within the document.

When it comes to deleting unused styles, there is no such thing as a "quick way." It would be nice if Microsoft were to provide such a method, but such is not the case. You can try to create a macro to do the work, such as this one:

Sub DeleteUnusedStyles()
    Dim oStyle As Style

    For Each oStyle In ActiveDocument.Styles
        'Only check out non-built-in styles
        If oStyle.BuiltIn = False Then
            With ActiveDocument.Content.Find
                .ClearFormatting
                .Style = oStyle.NameLocal
                .Execute FindText:="", Format:=True
                If .Found = False Then oStyle.Delete
            End With
        End If
    Next oStyle
End Sub

This is actually a macro I published years ago, way back for Word 2003. There are limits to what such a macro can do. It steps through every style in a document and, if the style is not built-in, it uses Find and Replace to try to locate the style. If the style isn't found, then it is deleted.

The "limits" of which I spoke have to do with the fact that there can be hundreds of styles in a document, especially in documents like Veronica describes. If each style has to be searched for, then the macro can take a very long time to run—on the order of an hour or more. Plus, if the document is quite complex, the macro can actually hang and never finish running. You can see all of these ills described in the comments to the old tip I mentioned:

https://word.tips.net/T001337

Rhonda Bracey described her attempts to delete unused styles on her blog several years ago. She even mentioned the same macro I show above. You can find a very helpful recounting of her efforts here:

https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2022/02/23/word-deleting-many-unused-styles-at-once/

Does all of this mean that a macro to do the deletion could not be developed? No, not really. You could develop a macro, but it would be much more complex than the simple one shown above. If you take the time to read all the comments to my old macro-based tip mentioned above, you can see such attempts.

There may be a simpler, non-macro approach that could be used, however. Here are the general steps that could be tried:

1. Open a copy of the document you need to work with.
2. Display the Home tab of the ribbon.
3. Click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Styles group. Word displays the Styles task pane.
4. Click Options at the bottom of the pane. Word displays the Style Pane Options dialog box.
5. Using the Select Styles to Show drop-down list, choose Styles in Use.
6. Click OK to close the Style Pane Options dialog box. The task pane should only show those styles currently in use within the document.
7. Make note of all the styles in use. Jot their names down, making sure that you get the full names, as shown in the task pane.
8. Open the Organizer. (Display the Developer tab of the ribbon, click the Document Template tool, then click the Organizer button at the bottom-left of the resulting dialog box.)
9. Use the Organizer to delete all the styles you didn't jot down in step 7.

These steps are feasible if the number of styles you see after step 6 is relatively short. If it is not short, there is one other thing you can try. Use Save As (F12) to save your document in RTF format. The export process used by Word should only include those styles actually in use in your document. Then get out of Word entirely and restart the program. Now, load the RTF file and again use Save As to save it as a Word document. The resulting document should only include Word's built-in styles (which you can never delete) and those custom styles in use within the document.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13342) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365.