Can't clear hyperlink style

Question

I am having a problem with Word 2013 in a Windows 7 environment. I was asked to check why the Hyperlink style in a Word document didn't consistently transfer into InDesign. When I got into the Word document to check styles and see what was going on, I discovered that I could not clear the default Hyperlink style unless I removed the URL altogether. I used to be able to do this, especially if I cleared formatting or reset the paragraph formatting twice.

I turned on Style Inspector and Reveal Formatting, and found that when I clicked the "Clear All Formatting" button, the Style Inspector shows default paragraph font or nothing, and the Reveal Formatting just shows the font and size. But the text is still the blue underline of the default hyperlink style. When I reapply the hyperlink style, the Reveal Formatting adds the Character Level Formatting "Hyperlink" and the "Blue" and "Underline" to the Font style setting. Even more bizarre, I can change the style to Strong, and the blue text and underline go away, but when I "Clear All Formatting" from that, it reverts back to the blue underlined text and a setting of "default paragraph font" with no character style revealed. I've even tried turning off the hyperlink settings in AutoFormat option, and it still does it. It is behaving like this in newly created documents as well as existing documents, regardless of whether we leave them in the version of Word it was created in or Save As to the most recent version of .docx files.

The other thing that's going on is that when I right-click the Hyperlink style in the Styles window, I can't select all occurrences of the style because it says "Not currently used", even though the cursor is sitting right on top of a hyperlink style.

This is more of an annoyance, because something that looks like it is hyperlink style isn't (the hyperlink still works in both Word and InDesign), but because they style isn't intentionally applied, it evidently isn't transferring over to InDesign. I'm going to have instruct the editors to double check all hyperlinks now to make sure they have the Hyperlink style applied.

Thank you.

Scott

Answer 1

Thank you. Our IT department handles our software updates on a regular basis, so that's not the issue. I was able to replicate the problem on other computers in the office, so it's not just my computer. Thank you.

I did write a short macro to find all hyperlinks and apply the Hyperlink style, so that is my work-around for now.

Scott

Answer 2

Hi Scott,

To address your concern, kindly refer to this link to repair an Office application.

If an Office application such as Word or Excel isn’t working correctly, sometimes restarting it will fix the problem. If that doesn’t work, you can try repairing it. When you’re done, you might need to restart your computer.

Let us know how it goes.

Regards.