Undoing a Typeface Change

Denice edited a fifty-page document to which she applied paragraph styles as necessary for her in-house needs. The styles use the Aptos typeface. Denice sent the document back to the author for some revisions and when he sent it back, he had selected the entire document and changed the typeface to Times New Roman. So now, in the Styles task pane, every paragraph shows as similar to "Body Text + Times New Roman." Denice wonders how she can undo what the author did without the need to reapply paragraph styles throughout the document.

The solution to this can be a bit tricky. You may be tempted to think that you can do the reverse of what the author did—select the entire document (Ctrl+A) and then change the typeface to Aptos. This, however, doesn't work. Testing shows that the paragraphs still show in the Styles task pane as something other than a plain "Body Text," even though the Body Text style is set to use the Aptos typeface. And, it won't help if there are paragraph styles applied in multiple places in the document where the styles use something other than Aptos.

That brings us to another suggested approach. After pressing Ctrl+A, you could simply press Ctrl+Spacebar. This shortcut removes all explicit formatting from the selected paragraphs, returning them to whatever is defined by the underlying paragraph styles. This works great, as long as there isn't any other explicit formatting applied within the document—it will also remove bold, italic, etc. within the document. Plus, if your document uses footnotes or endnotes, the footnote and endnote references will return to normal character formatting, meaning they won't show as superscripts.

The best solution is to set the document protection so that Track Changes is enforced. You can do that by following these steps:

1. Display the Review tab of the ribbon.
2. Click the Restrict Editing tool, in the Protect group. Word displays the Restrict Editing task pane at the right side of the document.
3. Under the second step, click the check box for "Allow Only this Type of Editing in the Document."
4. Using the drop-down list under the check box, choose Tracked Changes.
5. Under the third step, click "Yes, Start Enforcing Protection." Word displays the Start Enforcing Protection dialog box.
6. Provide a password (twice), if desired, then click on OK.
7. Close the Restrict Editing task pane.
8. Save your document.

It is this document that you should send to your author for revisions. What you have done is "lock" Track Changes on, so that any changes done by the author will be tracked. This includes formatting changes. As you resolve changes, that means that you can step through every paragraph where the author applied the Times New Roman typeface and reject the change.

There is one thing to note here—resolving the formatting changes may take quite a while. In testing, I found that if the document has footnotes or endnotes in it, Word considers text between note references as a single change, even when selecting the entire document and changing the typeface. This means that the text before footnote reference 1 is considered one formatting change, footnote reference 1 itself is considered the second formatting change, the text between footnote references 1 and 2 is considered the third formatting change, and so on. Depending on the number of note references in your document, this could mean quite a few tracked formatting changes that need to be individually rejected.

The important thing is to make sure that you have Track Changes enforced on any document that you share with others who may be making changes. This allows you to see what changes have been done and provide a way to undo those changes. If you do send out a document where Track Changes has not been enforced, then the only way to solve the issue is to go through the laborious process of reapplying styles when you receive the document back.

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