Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated December 10, 2016)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003
Perhaps you've had this happen to you: You are typing along, and you decide you need to make a formatting change in your document. In this particular case, you want to format a particular paragraph as bold face. You select the paragraph, click on the Bold tool on the toolbar, and all the paragraphs in your document change to bold—not just the one you selected.
Or, you decide you want to add a bullet to the start of one paragraph. You select the paragraph, click the Bullets tool, and bullets appear in front of all the paragraphs in the document—not just the one you selected. What is going on, and how can this be corrected?
When this type of change occurs, you can press Ctrl+Z right away (the Undo shortcut) and Word reverses its action. Continually pressing Ctrl+Z is a pain, however. It is much better to understand the cause of the problem, then you can make the changes you need.
Formatting in Word is based on styles. Even if you don't know what styles are or have made a conscious decision to never use styles, they are still there, working in the background. Every paragraph in your document is based on an underlying style that defines how that paragraph appears on the page. With this tidbit firmly understood, the next time you get a "global change" when you only wanted to affect a single paragraph, follow these three steps to greater enlightenment:
Figure 1. The Modify Style dialog box.
Take a good look at the dialog box. At the bottom is a check box labeled Automatically Update. If this check box is selected, it means that whenever you make changes to the paragraph, in your document, those changes are automatically made to the style that is assigned to the paragraph. Once the change is made, then every other paragraph in your document that is formatted using the same style is automatically changed.
If you are a person that ignores styles completely, or who thinks you don't need to worry about them, this is where you can get into trouble. In most cases, Word uses the Normal style as the default style for paragraphs in a document. If the Normal style has the Automatically Update check box selected, it is guaranteed that you will experience the problems described at the beginning of this tip.
To solve this problem, follow these steps:
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (569) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: One Change Affects Everything.
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2019-04-30 02:14:45
Tamara
THANK YOU! Oh, what a mess I made and couldn't even get "undo" to clean it all up. I so appreciate you sharing this.
2018-09-10 19:51:56
Carter
Wow - I've been using Word for the whole century and then some, and this never was a problem for me. My wife, though, ran into this over and over.
Thank you for helping me fix her problem!
2018-08-26 13:21:14
Christopher
Allen, you are a plus sign to the planet. Thank you for kindly helping all who discover your work.
2018-01-17 20:52:00
Ian
Great tip. Have used styles for years and must never have had the Auto Update option clicked. Thanks for helping me get my sanity back!! :-)
2017-10-31 16:53:56
siobhan
Thank you so much, this was driving me nuts!! Thanks!!!
2017-10-10 04:33:35
ALmir
danke, vielmals
2017-09-30 16:37:02
Jessica
Thank you! This problem was so annoying
2017-01-12 16:38:38
Dan
This has been driving me nuts for months, thank you so much for this simple fix!!!!
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