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Unwanted Auto-Changes to Document Styles and Fonts

Anonymous
2022-04-15T11:50:06+00:00

Hello, I know this is a common problem and I have found a handful of support threads dealing with similar issues, but I have been unable to find anything that applies to my problem in particular.

I have a folder that contains hundreds of documents that are all hand-typed.

I emphasize "hand-typed" to indicate that these are not copy+paste format errors.

Every now and again, a few of these documents will present problems when I go back to them.

1 => For instance, today, I was typing in Calibri, and the font reverted back to Cambria twice. I even selected everything from the last bit of Calibri to the end of the document, changed the Style to "no spacing" and then changed the Font to Calibri. Five minutes later, the Cambria was back after a newline.

2 => This happens on maybe 5% of the hundreds of documents, but I will sometimes apply the "No Spacing" Style only to come back to the document later and find that all of the lines with text are still the No Spacing Style while all the lines without text will switch back to the "Normal" Style (which makes it difficult to pick up work on this style of document).

I'm using OWA Word in Edge on a fresh W10. I've had this problem using OWA Word in Chrome before too. It has happened over multiple years and over multiple systems and is not localized to any setup.

The only thing I can think of as to why it may be doing this even after clearing Styles multiple times is that this may have been an older document that was imported into Word long ago. This might be one of the oldest documents out of all the hundreds. I don't tend to have this problem with documents that were generated fresh inside OWA.

Q = Can I copy everything into a new document or will that copy over whatever is causing the persistent formatting errors? Should I copy into Notepad first to nuke out all formatting whatsoever first? Is there a way for me to copy over all my bolds and underlines without having to wipe them out to clear out whatever style settings are causing me trouble?

This particular document is probably best re-typed and re-arranged due to age and clunkiness, but for future reference, how can I clear out all problem-making remnants of previous document versions without having to copy into notepad and then copy into a fresh new document?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Stefan Blom 338.7K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2022-04-15T12:15:51+00:00

    When the font changes during typing in the way that you describe it, the reason is almost certainly that the default font for the document hasn't been defined properly.

    You can change the default as follows: In the Font dialog box (Ctrl+Shift+F), specify the font and size you want and then click Set As Default. When prompted, choose the option for all new documents.

    Note that if you are using several paragraph styles in the document, these may require separate modification, for example via Apply Styles (Ctrl+Shift+S). In the Apply Styles pane, type in the style name (if necessary) and click the Modify button. Make the desired changes in the Modify Style dialog box and select "New documents based on this template" before clicking OK.

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  2. Stefan Blom 338.7K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2022-04-15T16:10:17+00:00

    Your observation is correct: my suggestions are for the full, locally installed version of Word.

    The online versions of the program have limited options for changing formatting defaults. :-(

    If you have the option to create a sample document in the full version of Word, you can use that sample as a starting point in Word Online. I would suggest using a template (*.dotx), but I'm not sure that that file format is supported in Word Online.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-04-15T15:32:38+00:00

    Thank you Stefan for your reply, I appreciate your help and your direction.

    I assume that your fixes would work, but they seem to pertain only to the desktop app version of Office.

    I searched high and low for the equivalent settings on the web app version but was unable to find them.

    I would prefer to not have to use the desktop app at all.

    Is there some way for me to override the default font settings inside OWA Word instead of Desktop Word?

    Is there a way to PowerShell into wherever the OWA Word settings are?

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