Word - DeNormalizing The Normal style crops up everywhere, especially in a new document or a document that has not been styled completely. You start with Normal, select the paragraph, change the font, size, and indentation, maybe change paragraph formatting to add a little space above or below, and Presto! Disaster just waiting to happen! The problem is that Normal is at the base of almost all the other styles, and a change accidentally applied to Normal could automatically affect all those other styles as well. Prevention is the best solution - assign proper styles to paragraphs and text, and keep Normal out of the picture. Here's how to do it.... Open the sample doc at wdsample03.doc. Use the Normal View. Go to the TOC and click to the right of any line. Notice in the font size box on the toolbar that the font size for the TOC1 lines is 12 points, which we set in yesterday's TiP of the Day. The font size for TOC2 and TOC3 lines is10 points. In the style list you can see that we start out nicely with Body Text, Title, Subtitle, more Body Text, some TOC1, TOC2, TOC3, then Heading 1, and... Normal. MS Word threw in a Normal style tag on every text paragraph, where we really should have a Body Text style. We'll fix that in two steps. First, we'll change the properties of Normal to make it a little bigger, because 10 point type is a tad too small. Then we'll change all the Normal paragraphs to Body Text paragraphs all at once, instead of clicking through the document one paragraph at a time to make the change. When we make Normal bigger, all the Normal paragraphs in the document will get bigger - and so will all the paragraphs based on Normal, like TOC1, TOC2, and TOC3! Place the cursor in a Normal paragraph, and go to menu: Format > Style.... We have Times New Roman, 10 point. Select Modify > Format > Font, and set the Size to 11. Click OK, and the document jumps a bit, and resets all the Normal paragraphs to 11 points. On the Modify Style dialog, make sure both Add To Template and Automatically Update are NOT checked, then click OK. Click Close to close the Style dialog. In the document, go to the TOC and click to the right of any line. The font size box on the toolbar shows that the font size for the TOC1 lines is still 12 points, as we would expect, since we specifically changed it to that size. But notice also that the font size for TOC2 and TOC3 lines is now 11 points. Why? Because we changed Normal to 11, and TOC2 and TOC3 are based on Normal, so they went along for the ride because they have no specific font size settings. Check it out - menu: Format > Style.... Select TOC1. You see the description Normal + Font: Arial, 12 pt, Bold. Now select TOC2. The description is Normal + Indent.... Nothing about Font. So the Font setting simply gets inherited from Normal. Now look at the Body Text style. It's Normal + Space After 6 pt. Not bad, but it could use improvement. We don't want Body Text lines running all the way across a page. 65 characters is about all you can read comfortably on a line. So make readers comfortable, and indent Body Text paragraphs from the left an inch and half to shorten the line and give us some white space. Select Modify > Format > Paragraph, and set Indentation Left to 1.5". Click OK, OK, Close to get back to the document. Everything still looks the same. Go down to the first Normal paragraph, the one under the Heading 1 Itnroduction, and put the cursor in the paragraph. Now apply the Body Text style to the paragraph (click the dropdown arrow in the Style box in the toolbar, and select Body Text). The page shifts a little with the added space (the + 6 points), and the text line shifts right 1.5 inches. Just what we want, for now. The revised document from this TiP of the Day is available at wdsample04.doc You can change all the rest of the Normal paragraphs to Body Text the same way you did first one, one paragraph at a time, or you can go to the next topic to see how to make global style changes all at once!