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Word's Formatting Nightmares

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by pjalexander

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Through three versions of MS Word, I have found problems with formatting. Typically, I change a phrase to BOLD, and the entire document becomes bold. If I click UNDO, everything goes back to what it was except for the specific phrase I wanted to be in bold.

Sometimes, though, it is even worse than that....change something to bold, or underline, or left alignment, or center alignment, and everything follows suit, and when you click UNDO, it may fix that problem, but along the way, all the earlier formatting changes have disappeared.

Then there are bullets....bullet a sentence, and the entire document gets bulletted. UNDO fixes it, but meanwhile you've had a small heart attack.

Then there is this newer problem. When you open up an existing document, or start a new one, the header and footer formatting disappears, and the cursor is up at the top of the page. If you go into the Header, and then into the Footer, and then back into the main part of the document, the formatting gets back to normal, with the proper footer and header spacing. However, since this started happening a couple of months ago, the Word templates for labels have too much header, and the bottom row of labels is on the next page. I've figured out how to juggle with the page setup to get it to print correctly, but it is a pain.

This is not only on my computer, but on all of the other work stations attached to our server. Ditto for the bold, underline, bullet formatting problems.

When I open my normal template, stored on my C:\ drive, the cursor is in the right place. It is only when I start a new document based on the normal template (or any of the templates in the shared template folder.

9 replies

by dc_guy

The problem you're having with bullets is a little more extreme than anything I've encountered. But it's hopeless to try to get a long document properly bulleted or numbered. I just type it all up as plain text and then do all the formatting as the last step. That way if my document gets hopelessly screwed up I can fall back to a saved older copy and start over.

You have some interesting problems I've never had, but this is Seattle Sludge we're talking about. The only sludgeware I have any respect for is Excel, but don't get me started about my particular nightmares with print formatting.

I thought my Word nightmares would be over when I got my Macintosh and downloaded Nisus. It doesn't seem to have any bugs, but it's a pretty primitive word processor. At least the Panther Version is. I understand the old Jaguar version is more complete.

Wouldn't everyone love to have WordPerfect back? The 1990 version of WordPerfect worked better than any version of Word. And while I am not a propellerhead, I did very much appreciate the REVEAL CODES mode. What's so hard about providing that?????

by wordworker

This is a Word 101 problem. When you bold something and the whole document changes, doh! Your Normal style is set to auto-update. Go to Format | Style, choose normal, click Modify, and deselect the Automatically Update box.

Formatting in Word isn't rocket science. Have you met your good friend the Format Painter on the standard toolbar?

by r_ecs

I was having the same problem with one of my workstations - and of all workstations it had to be my bosses! Anyways, I deselected the Automatically update box and it worked!

Thanks!

by astarimci

Yes!
Cancellation automatically Update in format / style / normal solution works.
Thank you.

by wulfe51

Would that it was a fraction of that exacting.

I have automatically update styles turned off, always have, and it still inserts bullets where I don't want them.

by synthetic

One of my biggest gripes with Word (outside of MS) is the lack of a format editor like Word Perfect has used for years. I am not a Word guru, fixing issues with templates and the like is no big deal, but I am a LAN man. and becoming a MCP is less appealing than getting the new CNE cert. So I learn and pick-up on the fly. Having an editor widow, so I can see the exact process of formating allows for greater control, and limited trail and error. Should you find yourself totally flummoxed and fed-up with Word, try Open Office at openoffice.org it is an exceptional program, free, cross platform, and has better control than Word, in my humble opinion. Good luck.

by wordworker

Why on earth would you recommend someone go to Open Office and open a brand new can of training and support worms? If you can't figure out how to format a Word document, you don't deserve to be seated in front of a computer.

by maxcobmara

Ive been using computers since the Apple IIe, can programme in several languages, fluently, design databases from the desktop to SQL& AS/400. But I just cannot get around Word's document formatting. During our early corporate evaluations it was, AmiPro vs WinWord 2.0, migrating from Wordstar 5.0. AmiPro was easy, and WordPro got more features without the extra complication.
I can set-up my document formatting, 8 levels deep, set ALL paragraph styles and formatting including corresponding numbering/or bullets.

Plus I only need to do this once, and save as a stylesheet (Smartmaster in Lotus speak).

I cant use word to save my life, I cant understand why it puts a number where I wanted a bullet, and keeps aligning my paragraph, even with global style editing.

If you are doing long documents, 50 pages plus, go and get Smartsuite of e-bay or from IBM. Your documents look better and consistent and with collaboration and versioning tools I can get several people add things to the doc and track them all.

Please stop this OO vs Office bull. Smartsuite is tops, and its the only reason why I still use windows rather than Linux/Mac

by mblessing

I am having problems finding the "Automatically Update" feature in Format / Style / Normal in Word 2007. Can someone help? I realize this post is pretty old?

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