Formatting applied to one paragraph affects the entire document

Article contributed by Suzanne Barnhill

If you are a Word 2002 user, you may have had this experience: you click in a single paragraph or select several paragraphs and apply italics, bullets, numbering, or some other type of direct formatting and the entire document (or at least more paragraphs than you had selected) becomes italic, bulleted, numbered, etc. If you press Ctrl+Z or click on the Undo button, the change is reversed for all but the originally selected text. What’s going on here?

The problem

If you look at the Undo list before pressing the button (by clicking the arrow beside it), you’ll see that the last recorded action is “Update Style.” Unfortunately, many styles  are set to update automatically. This means that if you change the formatting of one paragraph in the style, you change the style itself, and the change is applied to all other paragraphs in that style. This sometimes occurs with list styles (the List Number and List Bullet series, for example), and it is always the default for TOC styles (the ones used for entries in a table of contents).

This is sometimes helpful. And if you use appropriate styles for varying types of paragraphs, it will not cause that much of a problem. But if you use Normal style for most of your paragraphs and apply direct formatting to change the appearance of specific paragraphs, you absolutely don’t want Normal style behaving this way, yet that is what it often does in Word 2002. (It’s not entirely clear how the Normal style becomes set to “Automatically update,” but this seems to happen far more frequently in Word 2002 than in previous versions.)

How to correct it

As stated above, if you press Undo, “Update Style” will be undone, leaving the formatting applied to just the text you meant to format. But this does not solve the underlying problem. To do that, you need to modify the Normal style directly.

In Word 2002

1. If it is not already displayed, display the Styles and Formatting task pane (using the toolbar button or Format | Styles and Formatting).
2. Select the style you’re using (presumably Normal) in the task pane and click on the down arrow to display the menu.
3. Choose Modify.
4. In the Modify Style dialog, clear the check box for “Automatically update.”



5. Check the box for “Add to template.”
6. Press OK to close the dialog.

In previous versions

1. Go to Format | Style and select the style that is misbehaving (it will already be selected if the insertion point is in a paragraph in that style).
2. Press the Modify button. The display will be similar to the Modify Style dialog above.
3. In the Modify Style dialog, clear the check box for “Automatically update.”
4. Check the box for “Add to template.”
5. Press OK, then Close to close the dialog.

Existing documents

Note that checking the “Add to template” box will ensure that new documents you create will not have the given style set to update automatically, but the style will not be changed in existing documents. You will have to repeat the steps above (except for “Add to template”) in existing documents that are affected.