MS Word experts: a question about editing other people's docs (esp. styles)

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)

For quickly removing formatting from other people’s stuff, I select all, copy, paste to Notepad, select all and copy again, then paste to a newly-opened Word document.

An imperfect solution, and it may not answer all of your questions. As for turning off things like auto-indent, maybe try going to Tools | Options and then unselecting as many features as you can find.

Also, you can remove styles from an existing document by going to (IIRC) Format | Styles. I believe when you remove a style that’s in use, the associated text reverts to the default formatting.

Sorry, i should have been more specific.

I’m aware of the Notepad cheat for removing all formatting. The thing is, there are some basic formatting things that i’d like to keep, such as italics for book titles. Also, the document is footnoted, and cut-and-pasting to Notepad would mean having to go through and re-insert all the footnotes manually. I want to keep this basic stuff, but get rid of the extra styles, etc.

That’s true, and i think it’s probably the best way to go about it. The problem is, i have to be careful because if i miss one of the instances where the text reverts to default formatting, i might miss something like an italicized book title.

I probably just have to suck it up and accept that i can’t automate as much of the process as i had hoped.

Thanks for your response.

It sounds like your main problem is a Word setting that creates a new style everytime you apply manual formatting. Go to Tools > Options. On the Edit tab, deselect the “Keep track of formatting” option. After you’ve done that, you’ll see that everything in the document is probably Normal (whether or not it has manual formatting applied).

Thanks a lot! That sounds like exactly what i need; i try it out later on when i’m ready to get back to work.