I don’t know when this started happening – possibly when I switched over to Microsoft Word 2007 – but I find on both my PC at work and my Mac at home a really annoying feature.
When I select a portion of text – I’ve noticed it when doing it with an entire paragraph – and I make some kind of formatting change, such as boldface (or anything in the font menu) or margins – it applies the change to the entire freaking document instead of just to the selected text.
If I immediately do an “undo” it reverses this and keeps the change only in the selected text, but I want a way to turn off this pointless and annoying feature. I haven’t been able to find anything in the preferences menus.
Who ever thought it was a good idea to apply formatting changes to the entire document when only a portion of the text is selected?
I’m not going to be much help… but somehow you’ve set up your document so that this will happen. I come across this with some foundations that I apply to. If most of the “ribbon” is grayed-out (i.e., you cannot change the paragraph formatting, etc.) then this is what you have inadvertently done. When a document is set up this way, you can only select and change blocks of text.
Does this happen EVERY time you set up a new document? If so, you have some default checked that you need to find and uncheck. I hope some Word guru will step in here and help out.
When I had to switch to Word 2007 I hated it with the intensity of 1,000 suns. Now I only hate it with the intensity of 492 suns. It makes simple things very complicated.
There are some sites that take you through the changes to Word 2007. I spent some time looking at those and cursing when it first came out.
Sorry I couldn’t be more help. But there IS a way to set up a normal document like you’re used to and make the formatting changes as in days of yore.
I’m pretty sure I haven’t. Other people around here have noticed it too. Every time they apply some kind of formatting change to a paragraph, it affects the whole document unless they immediately follow up with an “undo.”
Nope.
No, it happens with every single document regardless of the source, whether I started it myself or someone else did.
Glad you found the answer. If Lewis Carroll had attempted to write ‘Through the Looking Glass’ in Word2007, he never would have found his way back to the real world.