Can't get rid of Styles in Word97

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tom Duprex
  • Start date Start date
T

Tom Duprex

In attempting to learn Word97 Styles I created several test styles.
Now I want to get rid of them. I go to FORMAT/Styles, then click on the
test style I want to delete, then click on YES to "Do you want to
delete style TEST!? I then click on Apply and Close. I exit Word, then
restart it and the TEST style still shows up in the Styles: column.
What am I missing to get rid of these test styles?

TIA
 
It sounds as if you must have saved these styles in Normal.dot instead of
just creating them in a document. After deleting them, did you resave
Normal.dot?

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
Hi Tom

When a document is created, it inherits the styles of its parent template.
Unless you do something explicit to copy styles from document to template or
vice versa, then, from the moment of its birth, a document has no further
relationship with its parent template's styles. Any changes you make to a
style in a document have no effect in the document's template.

What you've probably done is to save your test style in the normal.dot
template. So you can delete it from an individual document till the cows
come home, but it won't make a jot of difference to the template.

You'll have to delete the style in the template itself, and for that, follow
the techniques described at
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CustomizeNormalTemplate.htm

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word
 
Hi Tom

When a document is created, it inherits the styles of its parent
template. Unless you do something explicit to copy styles from
document to template or vice versa, then, from the moment of its
birth, a document has no further relationship with its parent
template's styles. Any changes you make to a style in a document
have no effect in the document's template.

What you've probably done is to save your test style in the
normal.dot template. So you can delete it from an individual
document till the cows come home, but it won't make a jot of
difference to the template.

You'll have to delete the style in the template itself, and for
that, follow the techniques described at
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CustomizeNormalTemplate.htm

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word
Click to expand...
Shauna:
I found my normal.dot file at D:\program files\microsoft
office\Office\ but I can not read it. I followed the instructions
contained in the word.mvps.org link you provided to open the normal.dot
file in Word and Explorer. It contained my name followed by a string
of foreign looking y's that had two dots on top. That was it. I saw no
styles, nothing....I repeated the process several time ensuring that I
followed the instructions. Just for the heck of it I opened
normal.dot in Notepad and a whole bunch of mostly unintelligible
characters showed up, so there is a lot of something in there. Any idea
why I'm not able to read normal.dot in Word?
 
Hi Tom

So you know where your normal.dot is. In Word, File > Open. Make sure the
Files of Type box is set to All Files or All Word Documents. Now, navigate
to the folder containing your normal.dot. Click it and click Open.

Does that open normal.dot? In the highlighted bar at the top of the window,
does it say normal.dot?

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word
 
Hi Tom

So you know where your normal.dot is. In Word, File > Open. Make
sure the Files of Type box is set to All Files or All Word
Documents. Now, navigate to the folder containing your normal.dot.
Click it and click Open.

Does that open normal.dot? In the highlighted bar at the top of
the window, does it say normal.dot?

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word


Shauna:
Click to expand...

I Opened Normal.dot in Word as you instructed. However, it still shows
a white empty page. The highlighted bar at the top says "Normal.dot".
There should be a lot of information in that file. What shoul I expect
to find in a normal.dot file? When I right click on normal.dot and
chech properties, under Statistics tab it shows 1 page, 1 paragraph, 1
line. Under Genereal Tab it shows 28,672 bytes used.

When I do a find for Normal.dot, another normal.dot file appears on
c:\Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates and when I open it in
Word it shows the same thing.

When you open your normal.dot what do you see?
 
I Opened Normal.dot in Word as you instructed. However, it still
shows a white empty page. The highlighted bar at the top says
"Normal.dot". There should be a lot of information in that file.
What shoul I expect to find in a normal.dot file? When I right
click on normal.dot and chech properties, under Statistics tab it
shows 1 page, 1 paragraph, 1 line. Under Genereal Tab it shows
28,672 bytes used.

When I do a find for Normal.dot, another normal.dot file appears
on c:\Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates and when I open
it in Word it shows the same thing.

When you open your normal.dot what do you see?
Click to expand...

Shauana:

After reading some knowledge base articles on normal.dot I renamed both
normal.dot files to normal-1.dot one at a time and started Word. The
normal.dot in the Office/Office file is the one that is being used.
When I started Word after renaming that one only the original Word
Styles show up in the drop down list and a new normal.dot file was
generated. This is okay for me because I had only been learning Word
and generating practice documents. I'm still trying to understand how
I could open the normal.dot file though should I really do something I
need to correct.
 
Shauna:

I've found what might be helpful to others in this aritcle Normal.dot
Template Explained
ttp://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=151 which
describes using the Style Organizer to see what you've got in
normal.dot and correcting/editing whatever you might need.
 
You should not be seeing anything. It should be blank. Normal.dot represents
the blank document you get when you click the New button. If you go to
Format | Style in Normal.dot, you get the same list you do in a document,
and you can deal with it in the same way. Note that you should not have more
than one Normal.dot (some of the things that look like Normal.dot are just
shortcuts to it, however), as this will cause Word to be flaky.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
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