Italic formatting in styles

I followed your suggestion of creating a second style. Nevertheless, now my caption is in italic even though the respective style is formatted as nonitalic. It works but it is not pretty. Is there a way to tell Word not to format captions (or any other labels) as italic, so I can have my style format the text as italic?

Yes, you can modify the Caption style to remove the italic setting. To do that, start by clicking in any caption that is now italic (without any other formatting applied to it). In the Styles gallery on the Home ribbon, click the bottom one of the three buttons at the right end of the gallery:

which opens several lines of styles. One of them will be the Caption style. Right-click that Caption style and click Modify in the menu.

In the Modify Style dialog, click the button to turn off italics, and click the option button at the bottom of the dialog labeled "New documents based on this template" (that will make the modification in both the current document and its attached template, probably Normal.dotm). Click OK. All of your captions in the document should immediately become non-italic, and the same will happen in any new document you base on the same template. (It will not change any existing documents, which would have to be modified individually if you need that.)

Also, I wanted to change some of my styles to character styles (those that shall not apply to a whole paragraph). Having said this, the mentioned drop-down menu is greyed out for me, any advice on what to do here?

Once a style is created as a paragraph style, it cannot be changed into a character style. (I don't know why, but that capability was never programmed into Word.) During the creation process, though, there are two distinct ways to create a character style.

• When you click that third button on the Style gallery as in the screen shot above, one of the choices is "Create a Style". That opens a small dialog box titled "Create New Style from Formatting".

As it says between the two text boxes, this is for creating a paragraph style; if you change the name and just click OK, you get a paragraph style, and there's no way to change it to a character style. However, if you click the Modify button instead of OK, it opens the Modify Style dialog (misleadingly titled "Create New Style from Formatting") where you can change the style type to Character and select whatever formatting you want.

• You can open the Styles pane (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S). At the bottom of the pane, the leftmost of the three buttons is the New Style button. Although it uses the same icon as the Create a Style in the previous bullet, it uses a different internal command. It directly opens the Modify Style dialog (again misleadingly titled "Create New Style from Formatting") where you can change the style type to Character and select whatever formatting you want.

In Word, direct formatting is defined as a paragraph style override.

Note that you can always revert to the settings of the underlying paragraph style by selecting the text and pressing Ctrl+SpaceBar, which removes direct font formatting.

Hey Jay, the "toggling" behaviour explains my observations, thanks!

However, it seems like "direct formatting" always overrides any preset condition that adheres to "toogling".

I followed your suggestion of creating a second style. Nevertheless, now my caption is in italic even though the respective style is formatted as nonitalic. It works but it is not pretty. Is there a way to tell Word not to format captions (or any other labels) as italic, so I can have my style format the text as italic?

Also, I wanted to change some of my styles to character styles (those that shall not apply to a whole paragraph). Having said this, the mentioned drop-down menu is greyed out for me, any advice on what to do here?

Best, Stevie

Hello, I am Leonielhou, an Independent Advisor and a user like you, I am happy to help clarify any questions you may have.

I am truly sorry about that. It is possible to have a style that includes the formatting of italic and apply it to text that is already formatted as italic. However, it sounds like the issue you are experiencing is that when you apply the style to the caption that is already formatted as italic, the italic formatting is removed. This behavior occurs because Word gives priority to the formatting that is directly applied to the text, rather than the formatting that is specified in a style. To preserve the italic formatting of the caption when applying the style, you will need to modify the style so that it includes both the italic formatting and any other formatting that you want to apply. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Select the caption text that is formatted as italic.
2. In the Styles group on the Home tab, right-click the style that you want to modify, and then click Modify.
3. In the Modify Style dialog box, click Format, and then click Font.
4. In the Font dialog box, select the Italic check box under Effects, and then click OK.
5. In the Modify Style dialog box, click OK.
6. This will update the style to include the italic formatting, and when you apply the style to the caption, the italic formatting will be preserved.

I hope I am able to give valuable information based on what I have understood on your concern.