Could that thread title have been any more awesomely unhelpful?
Here’s the deal: say I have a document and all the text is black Times New Roman. I want to go through and add some different text, and I want it all to be, say, red and bold. But every time I place the cursor somewhere else, the font jumps back to the default black Times New Roman. Is there a way or ways to make the font persistent so that it resists changing back to conform with the surrounding text?
I’m pretty sure there’s a way to do it through reviewing comments, but that’s not exactly what I want, I don’t think. Or is it?
Once the text you wish to alter is highlighted, change the font to that desired, as well as effect color changes. Depending on the version of Word you’re running, the drop downs and location of selections may differ, but that’s about it.
No, I don’t think so. 99.95% of the time, this would be the wrong thing to do, so I don’t know of any way to support it.
However, you can make it a little easier: once you’ve defined a font/color combination you like, define a hot-key to change to it. Now you have to click + hit one key. Not perfect, but not too bad, either.
It’s also possible that there’s a built-in feature to help with whatever task you’re trying to accomplish. What are you attempting to do that requires this somewhat odd behaviour?
It’s actually a friend of mine’s problem, and I did give her the macro idea already, TimeWinder, so the problem’s been at least mostly resolved. Basically, she’s looking to be able to take a big document of class note-type-stuff, and go through and add her own words. But she wants to be able to make clear the distinction between stuff from class/textbook and stuff she’s putting in there as her own thoughts after the fact, and there are a lot of notes to work through, so she was getting tired of repeatedly changing the dropdowns, I think. Oh, well.
I guess you’re right; it’s not a functionality a lot of people would want, but I figured if there was a way to suppress the feature, or like you say a different feature to handle the same problem, somebody here’d know it.
In Word, the ‘default’ font is the one that is defined for the document. When you click in various parts of the text, because there is nothing saying otherwise, Word sets the font and formatting, etc to the font set for that part of the document. You have to explicitly select another one if you want to change it. When you do that, Word inserts an invisible font command which “surrounds” the text you type. That’s so the unselected text retains its font rather than changing to what you have selected.
For what your friend wants to do, I’d suggest that the reviewing tools are the way to go. She should be aware that once you set reviewing for a document, it’s hard to get rid of comments and changes that are stored in the document, except by saving as a text only doc, and reopening the text.
If that’s what she’s trying to accomplish, she can insert a comment. It’s part of the reviewing tools, but instead of being marked as an insertion, it will appear in the margins in a comment balloon, with an arrow pointing to the text the comment refers to.
She can put the cursor where she wants the comment to go, and use the keyboard shortcut Alt-Ctrl-M. A comment balloon will pop up, and she can type in it.
Yeah, what she wants to do is basically the purpose of the reviewing tools (adding your own words to an existing document, and making it clear where you added them). Those aren’t designed to give you a lot of control over what the inserted text looks like, but it will accomplish what she wants.
The OP preferred not to use these for some reason, though, in which case the various suggestions here are going to be the best you can do.
If I correctly understand what the OP’s friend wants to do, here is an easy work-around: start by typing an inoffensive character - maybe an asterik or something - and formatting it to taste with size/font/color etc. Highlight and copy.
Now, everytime you want to insert a comment in the text, click your cursor where you want to start typing, begin with cntrl-V to insert the formatted asterik, and keep on typing. Your new text should keep the attributes of the asterik.
Then, if it really bothers you to have asteriks in the text, when you are completely finished just go back and use the find/replace function to delete all the asteriks.
Sorry if this is completely irrelevant to what the OP is asking about.
I hate the “track changes” and “comments” functions – they are great to have if you really need them, but I prefer to avoid them whenever possible by using tricks like the above.