Word 2004: Formatting settings in style definition changed when moving styles around with Organizer

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
June 19th, 2004 • 1:13 am

This one is another one that irritates me to no end.

I work as a translator and make full use of Word’s multilingual capabilities. More specifically, I have templates and styles that use the “English (US)“, “English (UK)“, “French“, and “French Canadian” language settings. (I am still waiting for Microsoft to finally acknowledge the existence of “English (Canada)”. But that’s another story. And don’t ask me why “French Canadian” is not called “French (Canada)”…)

The problem is that I also use Word’s ability to define styles based on another styles. All of my styles are based (directly or indirectly) on the “Normal” style, and the “Normal” style is the only one that contains the default language setting for the document or template that I am using. In other words, I have a template for French-language documents in which the “Normal” style has the language setting “French Canadian”, and most other styles, such as “Heading 1”, “Title – Big”, etc. have no language setting, because they are based on the “Normal” style and will take the language attribute of that style by default.

But then I go to the Organizer and try to transfer a style such as “Title – Big” from my French-language template to my English-language template. Remember: the “Title – Big” style definition has no language setting, because “Title – Big” is based on the “Normal” style. So I transfer the style from the French-language template to the English-language template (where the “Normal” style has the language setting “English (UK)“) and I look at the style definition of the newly copied “Title – Big” style.

And guess what? It has a language setting that says “French Canadian“. In my English-language template. Where all styles are based on the “Normal” style and have no language setting of their own. Even though the “Title – Big” style had no language setting of its own in the French-language template that I copied it from.

So now I have to edit the newly copied “Title – Big” style in order to remove that language setting that is wrong and that I never asked Word to include in the first place. And I have to do that all the time, for every style that I might transfer from template to template, or from document to document. If the language setting in the “Normal” style in document A is different from the language setting in the “Normal” style in document B, then if I transfer another style from document A to document B, Word will add to the style definition the language setting of the “Normal” style, even though I never said I wanted it to.

This problem is not limited to language settings. It actually occurs with other formatting settings as well. If the font setting in the “Normal” style in document A is different from the font setting in the “Normal” style in document B, then if I transfer another style from document A to document B, Word will add to the style definition the font setting of the “Normal” style, even though I never said I wanted it to.

Why is it wrong? Because it modifies the style definition when copying it without asking for the user’s permission, plain and simple. The key thing in a user interface is user control. If a style consist of a definition of its formatting attributes, then copying a style should copy the definition of its formatting attributes without modifying them based on unknown rules that are not explained at all in the interface.


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