MS Word: How do I keep MS Word from automatically changing a style?

Factual Questions
1

I’m so sick of this @#@#!$ program!!

Okay, I’m copy and pasting text from one document into another. The first document has lots of formatting like subscripts, italics, etc. I want to keep all that. But I want to paste this information into the new document without the original document’s font/style formatting. After pasting it, I want to give it a style that I have established in the new document. Seem simple enough. But this is Word. For some bizarre reason, when I paste it into the new document and apply the new style, it CHANGES THE STYLE to something different (a style from the original document), and gives it a new name. WTF! I don’t understand what the hell is going on here, and I’m really hoping someone can help me. I just want to paste text, including subscripts and italics, but without any style information, and I don’t want residual style BS getting in my way. Is that so much to ask for??? Thanks for any help.

2
      • Try using OpenOffice Writer, and saving as a Word doc. I’ve heard of a few occasions where something would not work in Word due to a bug, but would work just fine in Writer. Writer may not support the lastest OfficeXP-interoperability features of the newest version of Word, but it can easily handle basic text formatting. Sometimes better than Word itself can.
        ~
3

Did you copy the entire document, or just part of it? If you copy the last paragraph mark, you’ll copy all sorts of formatting. Don’t do that.

4

Wouldn’t you just be able to use the Formatting Paintbrush tool to correct the fucked up formating in like two seconds? I don’t know if I understand which formatting you want and what you don’t want.

5

I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, but here’s my guess as to the best way to do it:

  1. Create a new style for whatever you want, based on the current style that matches your needs. Give it a unique name that you know won’t exist in the old document.
  2. Copy the text over.
  3. Apply the new style.

Option 2:

  1. Copy the text over.
  2. Save the document as an .rtf. This gets rid of most formatting stuff beyond the basic (I don’t know if it’ll work for you, because it may get rid of more than you want).
  3. Close the file and reopen it.
  4. Apply the style, and save it as a .doc.

Daniel

6

Strange, for by right, when you copy stuff from Document A into Document B, it shall uses Document B’s style, instead of Document A’s. Have you tried defining styles for Document B, then copying it from A?

Another alternative is use the Paste Special function, and chooses “Paste as RTF”.

7

Office 2003 lets you choose which style you want to use: the original style, or the style in the new document.

Word is just following standard practice. Quark Xpress used to have the same issue, which made even less sense: you were using Quark to format the document, so why keep the original formatting?