I use Word a lot, but am far from being an expert. I’ve never taken a course, and much of what i know has been accumulated through trial and error. I have arrived at a level where i use styles consistently, and my own documents at least look pretty clean, without a whole bunch of extraneous formatting.
Anyway, i’m doing a bit of research work on the side for someone else, and part of that involves cleaning up some documents for delivery to an academic press. Of course, the author for whom i’m working seems to just whack whatever formatting seems to work into her documents, with the result that every document has at least a dozen redundant styles (usually more), most of which apply to one single instance in the document.
I have a couple of questions, one general, one specific:
First, does anyone have any general tips for editing other people’s documents in cases like this? As i said, i’m pretty good at created my own clean documents, but fixing other people’s isn’t my forte.
Second, am i right in assuming that it is not possible to actually turn off styles in Word? The manuscript preparation guidelines sent to me by the academic press ask for as little formatting as possible, and says “Do not use styles, if your word processing software has this function.” For indenting the start of a new paragraph, it says to simply use one stroke of the tab key; it says to use only a single font type through, and not to use any font changes other than italics and underlining.
That’s fine, but of course when i italicize something, and when i use the tab key to indent, Word creates a style for the document, based on that action. I assume this is unavoidable, and that when they say not to use Styles, they mean “Don’t use any more than the minimum number of styles.” Is that right, or is it possible to turn off Styles altogether?
(Office XP/2002)