Paragraph styles not working properly

Rich is correct: the two products are almost unrelated.

I am going to take a wild guess here that your issue has sprung from the Linked Style bug (sorry: "feature").

Since you know styles well, you will know that they can be of multiple types, and those types determine which properties they can contain.  The three types in play here are "Character", "Paragraph", and "Linked".

As its name implies, a Character style can store only font properties, such as the name of the font, bold or italic, etc.

A Paragraph style can store all of the paragraph properties: such as space before and after, line height, etc.  It can also store the "Style for following paragraph" property that you are relying on here: a Character style cannot store or use that property.

Now we come to a "Linked" style type.  Microsoft considers it a feature, many others consider it a bug.

A linked style is a composite style that contains a Character style and a Paragraph style linked together.  If you change the font name in the paragraph style, it will also change in the character style of the same name.  Any paragraph style can be a linked style.  Any paragraph style can BECOME a linked style if it is used a certain way.  When you apply a linked style, you are never very sure whether you have applied the whole thing, or just the Character style half of it. You can't prevent the change, control it, or undo it.

What happens depends on the selection you had when you applied the style. If your selection is simply an insertion point ("no" selection) and you apply a paragraph style, you will get a paragraph style. If your selection includes the paragraph mark at the end of the paragraph, you will get a paragraph style. If your selection is more than one character, and does not include the paragraph mark:  1)  Word will instantly split the paragraph style in two and create a Linked Style with two halves.  It will 2) apply only the Character half to the selected text.

From that point on, you can never be quite sure what you have in your document, and the style is permanently changed into a style of type Linked.  You cannot change it back again.

Let's assume that when typing the NAME in your example, you did not have your paragraph marks and other non-printing characters displayed.  So you did not see that you have not selected the paragraph mark at the end of the name line.  You applied the Name style.

Word would instantly split the Name style into Character and Paragraph types, and apply ONLY the Character half to the text.

Now you hit Enter.

Word will create a new empty paragraph: at this instant it has no formatting properties at all contained in the paragraph (Word shows this kind of paragraph as a "Normal style" and copies all of its properties from the document defaults).

Word will then read the style applied to the previous paragraph to decide what to do.  It's a Character style of name "NAME" (remember: Word made your Name style a linked style and applied only half of it). Because a Character style can't contain paragraph properties, there is no "Style for following paragraph" property. So Word simply continues the Character style Name for the paragraph, setting its paragraph properties from the Normal style.

Are we having fun yet?

If you were to notice the error, triple-click the paragraph, and re-apply the Name style, next time you hit Enter it would work.  Because this time you DID have the paragraph mark selected, Word applied both the Character and the Paragraph halves of the linked style, the paragraph properties including the Style for Following Paragraph have been correctly applied, and will work.  Until next time.

Around year 2002, I called this the "Partially applied styles bug".  I complained long and hard during the beta. I tried desperately to explain that a document professional needs to KNOW exactly what their styles contain, needs to know exactly what is being applied to the text, and needs to know that only he or she can change the style.

I was ignored.

Leading to the "Corrupt style table" bug, in 2007.  Internally, Word indicates a "Linked" style by appending the label "Char" to the end of the style name. You can still sometimes see these labels if you look at the style table in the Organizer. What can happen is that each time the user mis-applies a style (because they have their paragraph marks switched off...) Word copies from the current linked style, and simply appends another "Char" flag to the end of the name.  I have seen nine "Char Char Char Char Char..." applied. Eventually, the space for the style name overflows (I think it's 127 characters, doesn't matter exactly how long...).  from that time on, the style is corrupt.  You can apply it to text, but you can't change it (it goes read-only).  It appears your changes are made, but they are silently ignored.  You can't re-name them or find them.  If you delete them, everything they were applied to reverts to Normal style.

The "Char char char" part of the bug has now been fixed (Word will resolve the name back to only one Char label).  But the original Linked Styles bug remains.  It's a design bug.  A mis-feature. It causes the problem you are reporting.

And it won't be fixed because they think we LIKE it that way. Because whenever Microsoft asks about it, nobody knows what they are talking about.  Rather than admit they have no clue how styles work, everyone just says "Yeah they're fine".

Sorry for the long answer, but I think this is the source of your problem.

In which case, the 'cure' is ensure that you always have the whole paragraph, including the paragraph mark, selected when applying a style. While your document style table will remain ruined, at least your styles will then do what you expected.

Given that having to triple-click every paragraph to ensure you have a whole selection is a pain, I made a series of macros that do the same thing.  Here is one:

Sub ApplyGraphicStyle()

' Apply Graphic Style

Selection.Paragraphs.Style = "Graphic"

End Sub

What that simply does is read your selection, note which paragraphs are in that selection, then apply the style to each of those paragraphs.  So it can apply the style ONLY to the entire paragraph, regardless of what you have selected.

Hope this helps

Hi John,

I can't imagine either. For resumes, I have used the same style definitions and templates for quite a few years. Just suddenly in the later releases of Office 2011 it began to show up and became more and more frequent until with the update to 2016 it failed consistently. You know, I sometimes get the same kind of response when a prospective resume client asks what kinds of disciplines I specialize in. I don't specialize; no resume writer can and make a living. But in nearly 30 years there aren't many occupations I've missed. That doesn't satisfy some people, though. Again, thanks for your help. I'll keep an eye on your posts. And since Office 2016 doesn't offer the capability of easily customizing the Quick Access Toolbar, I'm considering going back to Windows as my main work platform.

Best,

Hi John,

I also replied to Rich, with a screen shot of one "Modify Style" dialog. As I noted, the problem seems to have fixed itself as I was unable to duplicate it for the 2nd MS support person in a sharing session. I can't explain that, but your discussion of how styles can be applied and how the selecting the paragraph can affect how that works seems reasonable. But...

I don't often apply styles to paragraphs after creating them unless I decide midway or at the end in a document that I need to reorganize it. I apply the style and then do the typing. The "following paragraph" just saves a lot of keystrokes or mousing for me. So when the "following paragraph" feature began not to work, it really slowed me down.

When I do have to reorganize a document and apply different styles, I usually just click once in the paragraph and apply the style using a keyboard macro I recorded for applying that style. Most of the macros I use are for applying paragraph styles.

By the way, John, back in 1998, when I was doing a tech writing gig for Tivoli/IBM, I had to learn Word (I had been a WordPerfect shop). I found your discussions of using styles to create stable documents very helpful. I still use your suggestions in every document I create, and you won't find an instance of a NORMAL paragraph in any of my Word documents. All my docs are based on BODY TEXT, which is based on NO STYLE to be sure I've entirely broken the link to "normal.docx".

Thanks to both you and Rich. I'll let you know if the problem reappears. But I've now tested several new documents and everything seems to work properly. No idea why, though.

Hi Rich,

Thanks for your reply. Here's a screen shot of the NAME style that usually begins my documents. My core business is writing resumes, which are fairly heavily formatted documents, although I also do a good bit of other writing and editing.

Normally, when I create a new document, I begin by applying the NAME style and then populating that paragraph. I then hit RETURN. Until one of the more recent updates to Office 2011, my style definitions worked perfectly, and the next paragraph was assigned to the correct style. Then, it they began to fail to work, although not on every style. I had hoped that when I upgraded (?) to 2016 this problem would have been fixed. Instead, it was worse, it did not work with any of my paragraph styles. So I got on the phone with Tech Support, and we ultimately reinstalled Office 2016 (I have a 365 subscription, so have it on more than 1 device - both PC and Mac, but Mac has been my main work machine since Vista drove me away. When I tested a document, there was no joy, so back to the phone to MS support. Then....

Oddly, the problem I wrote (and called MS) about seemed to have gone away. At the time I called again, the reinstall had not fixed things, but when I tried to show the tech what was happening, suddenly I couldn't make it happen anymore. It applied the correct style for the following paragraph when I hit RETURN, and all the styles seemed to work correctly from then on. I can't explain that, because I didn't change the way I do things. But in any event, I am no longer able to duplicate the problem. And, since I've replaced 2011 with 2016, I can no longer show you screen shots of paragraph styles that work and those that don't. But all my paragraph styles were created the same way and ended with "Following style: Style name" as this one does.

So, I guess I'm good for now. Thanks for your help.

Hi Dan,

Let's get the first thing out of the way. Don't compare Office 2016 for the Mac to Office 2016 for the PC. They are different products, different Operating Systems controlling them, and though they may share some code, the name was determined by MS Marketing, whose concepts and proclamations have never been based on reality. In other words... don't compare the products... they are absolutely not the same!

Now to get down to business of your problem... since we cannot see how you have setup these styles we need to see screen clips of the Modify Styles dialogs both for the Style that you say is not passing the "Style for the following paragraph" setting over to correctly and the Modify Style dialog that shows the settings on that next paragraph.

Once we've got those then maybe someone will be able to see what's causing the issue you are having.