STYLES Forever! (??)

[ChrisGreaves]

I've just created yet-another-style, this time a character style csSubscript, in my Normal.dot, and am moved to question:

Is there any reason (apart from laziness etc) NOT to create a style - paragraph or character - to use in place of initial local formatting?

Unlike Excel (where styles are additive or cumulative), Word application of a character style overwrites the previous character style, so if I want superscript AND bold, I must apply the bolding locally, as far as I can see.

I'm not (yet) at the stage of removing the Format, Font system from everybody's menu, but am more interested in the philosophical question: Is there a reason NOT to replace all INITIAL local formatting with application of styles?
I can't think of one.

[HansV]

Styles let you apply formatting consistently and modify it easily across a document. If I apply a character style "Strong" that makes text bold, then decide tomorrow that I'd rather draw attention to text by making it red and italic, I only need to modify the style. In such situations, being lazy is actually a good incentive for using styles.
Word comes with a whole array of ready-to-use character styles, so there is little reason not to use them.

(But I still use Ctrl+B etc... )

[ChrisGreaves]

Styles let you apply formatting consistently ... (But I still use Ctrl+B etc... )

Agreed and agreed and agreed.
I am a bit of an extremist here.
I'm asking really what would be the impact (apart from initial surprise) if, say, MSWord refused to let us Format, Font any text that wasn't yet in a style other than (P)Normal or (C)Defaulr paragraph Font.

Your "ctrl-B" is a bit of red herring, surely.
Like me you have Ctrl-Shift-B assigned to the character style csB, right? (Just nod your head and mumble "yes", Hans )

[HansV]

People use Word for all kinds of things - novels, corporate reports, love letters, short memos etc.
For some documents, consistent formatting is a must. For others, it's irrelevant.

[StuartR]

For me, the biggest irritation with character styles is that Control+Space removes them and applies the character attributes of the paragraph style. This makes them much less useful than they should be as there is no easy way to remove all manual formatting while leaving all style based formatting.

[ChrisGreaves]

Control+Space removes them

Hi Stuart; I quite agree with you.
It would have been nice to have a set of "unformat" options

• remove only all local (non-styled) formatting
• remove only all character-style formatting
• remove only all paragraph-style formatting

If *I* were developing a word processor, that's the way *I* would have done it (grin)

That said, the lack of finesses doesn't invalidate the use of character styles in place of local character formatting, and for my money, I still can't see an argument against implementing all initial character formatting in character styles.