Word auto-format entire file

[GMcFly]

Hi everybody,

I've got a problem in Microsoft Word 2002 (Office XP). I'll give you an example. I have a one page document and I want to format the title to set the font size at 16. When I select the title and change the size, it does it for the entire document! When I press "Undo", everything returns to the size before, except the title which will stay at 16. So each time I want to change something to the formatting, I have to press undo. This creates another problem: some one or two page documents can become 1 or 2 Mb files. Does anybody how I can solve this?

 

[Dreamboat]

Click on the text. What style is applied to that text? You need to go to Format-Style and change the property of the style to NOT "update automatically"

My advice? NEVER use Autoformat in Word or Excel.

Anne Troy
Way cool stuff:

http://www.cafeshops.com/OfficeExperts

 

[RichAtAPS]

One other note in regards to the file size. Make sure you turn off Fast Saves (under Tools>Options>Save, uncheck Allow Fast Save). Fast save seriously increases the size of your document.

 

[Korach]

A cute tip for file size:
When I did large documents, sometimes they weighted 100MB+.
So, I opened a new blank document, went back to the original and copied everything (CTRL+A, CTRL+C). Then I pasted it in the new document and saved it. I was surprised to see that the new document weight was 20% from the original. I don't know why, but it worked!!!

 

[fumei]

Totally agree with Dreamboat. NEVER use AutoFormat. And to add my own pet peeve...never use Normal style either. You should use a Title style, and make it different from your MainText style, or whatever you name them. Proper use of styles solves a lot of these problems.

As for korach, yup, that is a habit I have done since Word 6.0. Remember that one? If you left it alone with Fast Save on, it eventually used up ALL available memory and hid it as temp files. So much so, that if you had a Word file open and waited long enough Windows itself would run out of memeory and die. Weird.