Forum Discussion
Styles set but with Direct Formatting
Styles are predefined in a document template but as users started using it, they like to add small direct formatting over the text using the style.
For examples Style A has font size of 10 and after the user apply it on the text, they will manually format the paragraph to font size 12.
When I activate the display of style area pane using draft view mode, I can see that the paragraph is using style A but nothing is telling me that it is "modified".
The only way to see that is when I open the style investigator > reveal formatting. But this means I have to manually go through EVERY paragraph in a document to find that.
Is there a quick way to find out which paragraph is using predefined styles but modified via direct formatting?
4 Replies
What is the end result you want to achieve? Do you want to change the format of the paragraphs if users have applied direct formatting? Or what should be done with the text?
For example, if you want to remove all direct formatting, select everything in the document and press Control+Q (removes para formatting which is not in the style) and then press Control+SpaceBar (removes font formatting). These shortcuts work on both Word for Windows and Word for Mac.
The objective is to review the direct formatting and if the result is something that is already available in existing style, then to remove the direct formatting. If the direct formatting result is something that happens often, then to create a style for it so that future document does not need to do such direct formatting.
To remove all direct formatting is not ideal because I need to review them.
Thanks for the follow-up. What you are describing is a manual task, I'm afraid. You can't really automate it.
Word has some tools to help simplify the job, though. In Word for Windows, you can instruct the Styles pane to show direct formatting as styles and then you can select that direct formatting in one go.
In the Styles pane (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S), click the Options button and select the three options under Select formatting to show as styles.
Once that is done, you will see entries for direct formatting in the Styles pane and you can choose to select all instances of a particular format. See some examples in the screen shot below.
How about using Marcos to detect direct formatting:
Sub FindDirectFormatting() Dim para As Paragraph For Each para In ActiveDocument.Paragraphs If para.Range.Style <> para.Range.get_Style() Then Debug.Print "Paragraph with direct formatting: " & para.Range.Text End If Next para End Sub
