Minimizing and Correcting Propagation of Similar Styles

Greg Maxey has developed a macro-based approach to this problem which he calls "style report." It can be foiund here: https://gregmaxey.com/word_tip_pages/style_report_addin.html. This will help clean out unused styles. It has its limtaitons but it gets an awful lot of the way there. I will not try and explain what this does. Greg does that on his web page far better than I could.

Pasting unformatted text into a clean Word shell works, but that will remove all font formatting and the overall look of the doc, which can be a pain in the neck for a highly structured legal doc. It is better to select all text in the "bad" doc and paste it into WordPad (NOT Notepad). WordPad will retain the look of the original doc. Then select all (ctrl+A from WordPad and paste into the clean Word shell on a Normal paragraph marker. Make sure to click on the Paste Options icon that appears at the bottom of the pasted text and select Keep Source Formatting. This has been our team's go-to fix for docs that have become heavily corrupted.

@Art Osgatharp,
The Restrict Editing is loathed by section writers, and I can appreciate why: It's not sufficiently granular. Consider:
1. When you lock down styles, you prevent users from adding, redefining, or overriding a style. But nearly always, the style keeper / locker has...
- overlooked the legitimate need to use a forbidden style (such as a numbered list, or an indented bullet list),
- overlooked the legitimate need to use a character override (such as a superscript or dropout grey),
- and arrogantly assumed that the style was just perfect the way it's been defined, when in fact, their heading styles are missing a "hanging indent," or their the hanging indent gets thrown off by an overlong number (such as 2.13), or a paragraph style mistakenly allows--or fails to allow--autohyphenation.
2. When you lock down paragraph and character styles, you lock down much, much more. People can no longer tweak the structure of a table, whether it's to straddle cells, redefine which rows are header rows, or change the cell padding. They can no longer redefine attributes of the page, even if the page is screwed up. In short, they can't fix what absolutely must be fixed.

Sure, the section writer can appeal to the style keeper. But guess what will happen? The style keeper will quickly, and unfairly, become annoyed, because the section writer is not only taking up his time but also reminding him of his failings.

3. Other reasons that I've overlooked because, as a wise man said, "Whenever you make a list, you accidentally leave something out.

I write this as a technical proposal writer who tried to lock down styles but abandoned the idea after colleagues rebelled.

The accumulation of styles is a real pain, especially when it's been around other language cultures. However, I disagree with your method of selecting all of the modified style(s) and reverting them back to their original.

There are instances where a novice will have modified a style locally to achieve a specific effect. Although not the best way to do it, if you then re-apply the original style you could destroy their attempt at formatting and completely lose the message.

Incidentally, I believe if you delete a modified style, you are prompted to revert to the original anyway.

I truly H A T E editing in Word. It is ok, perhaps, to originate a document, but as above, when it passes through the hands of even 2-3 people before getting to me, it is IMPOSSIBLE.

That said, I'm so grateful for this site. Thank you.

I wish I never heard of Styles.

Also wish I could turn on something like the old Word Perfect where you could see everything. You can't really in Word.

I do not understand why the people who developed Word think all the changes are so wonderful. They are not.... just saying.

In some cases it may be useful to prepare the document ahead of time to limit the styles that people can use when modifying the document, the kinds of changes that they can make, and the portions of a document they can change. This may be done by clicking Review, then Restrict Editing in the Protect group of the Review ribbon.

In the Restrict Editing task pane, check the box under 1. Formatting restrictions, then click the Settings link to restrict what styles can be used.

Option 2., Editing restrictions, may be useful to further control the kinds of changes that can be made.

The Exceptions option may enable you to permit selected individuals to make changes if the document is in an access-controlled environment, such as Active Directory, where authorized users can be specified in the format [Domain][Username].

When the desired settings are selected, click Yes, Start Enforcing Protection under Option 3. Enter a password when prompted, or just click OK if no password protection is required.