Minimizing and Correcting Propagation of Similar Styles

Tim notes that when editing an older document that has been through many hands (hands that belong to people who generally haven't a clue about styles), the document invariably ends up with loads of very similar styles, all with minor tweaks. He wonders about the best way to minimize this problem and get such documents back to a single set of sensible styles.

This problem has been a frustration to editors and other heavy-duty Word users for years and years. Unfortunately, there is no easy way around this frustration. The real problem is that styles (as you know) are very powerful, and with that power comes a need to use them properly. If you have users who don't use them properly, then that can cause havoc with a document over time.

The solution, then, is to educate users on the proper use of styles. This, however, is not always feasible; you can't always expect your users to become experts in this area of Word.

It takes a bit of work to get rid of the similar styles that show up over time. By way of example, let's say that you send out the document using a custom style called MyStyle. When the document comes back you see it contains variations on the style such as MyStyle1, MyStyle2, MyStyle+Bold, MyStyle+Centered, etc. (There could be any number or variety of these similar styles.) To get rid of them, follow these general steps:

1. Display the Style task pane. (Display the Home tab of the ribbon and click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Styles group.)
2. In the list of styles, locate one of the "similars" that you want to get rid of, such as MyStyle2.
3. Hover the mouse pointer over the style and a down-arrow appears at the right of it.
4. Click the drop-down arrow and you should see, in the resulting choices, something like Select All X Instances, where X represents the number of times the style is used in the document. Click this option. Word selects everything in the document that uses this style.
5. In the Style task pane, click on the actual style you want to use, such as MyStyle. This applies the correct style (MyStyle) to all the selected text (MyStyle2).
6. Click the style's drop-down arrow again and you should see a grayed-out option that says Select All: Not Currently Used. This lets you know that the style is not currently in use in the document and you can select the Delete option (again, from the drop-down menu) to get rid of it.
7. Repeat steps 2 through 6 until you get rid of all the similar styles you no longer need.

As you can tell, this process is very tedious, and we've never been able to find a macro-based solution to make it less tedious. You can, of course, simply "start over" by opening a brand new document that uses your preferred style sheet, copy all the text from the messed-up document, and use Paste Special | Unformatted Text to get it into the new document. You would then need to go through the pasted text and reapply all the styles as they should be applied.

Which approach is easier (delete unwanted styles vs. reapplying all styles) depends on the length, complexity, and number of unwanted styles in 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 (13394) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365.