You can use your favorite social network to register or link an existing account:
Or use your email address to register without a social network:
Sign in with these social networks:
Or enter your username and password
Forgot your password?
Yes, please link my existing account with for quick, secure access.
No, I would like to create a new account with my profile information.
Tips
How-to
News
Videos
Stories
When it comes to questions about Word, we have an idea that what you really want is someone who comes in the box, maybe with a lab coat and a pocket protector—someone who can provide all the answers you need, whenever you need them. We asked Jonathan to stand in by phone, but he was unwilling to make his cell phone number available.
Without access to Jonathan 24/7/366 (!), we'd like to try a kind of question and answer post. It might not have the answer to your question right now. Then again, it might. Or you might read something that will be of use to you in the future.
I'm starting this effort with the first Q & A blog post. My name is Joannie Stangeland, and I edit help content for Word. I also write some content, and I've been known to pester program managers about various features and how they work.
This time, we're taking a look at styles. We received quite a few questions about Styles in Word 2007. These are not even all of them, and we'll try to take up a few more in the future. We also have some questions about revision marks and page numbering.
Finally, you can find a list of online Help articles that may provide more information or the answers to your questions that we haven't covered here.
Here we go:
You can change the way a particular style looks, or you can change all instances of one style to a different style.
Change the look of a style
The short way:
The dialog box way:
This takes a little more time (one more step), but the Modify Style dialog box provides more information and more options (for example, that New documents based on this template option).
Change all instances of a style to a different style
Let's say that you decide all your Heading 1 headings really need to be at the Heading 2 level. You can make this change with just a couple of clicks—handy when you're reorganizing a document.
I hope that covers it. If not, stay tuned.
By default, Word 2007 doesn't do this. No longer do you see every little formatting change listed in the Styles task pane. However, if the default setting has been changed and Word is listing all of your formatting work, you can change this setting in the options for the Styles task pane.
However, styles are still the best way to ensure a consistent look throughout your document. If you're going to reuse that formatting in other places, consider creating a separate style that you can use whenever you need it.
Press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+S to close the task pane. This key combination acts as a toggle, so you can also use it to open the task pane again.
If you get stuck, and you can't get the style of your selected text to change, click the More arrow in the Styles group, and then click Clear Formatting. It's like starting with a clean canvas.
The More arrow looks like this:
[Edit: Removed an incorrect description of Automatically Update. ]
Comments: (35) Collapse
Word team: not sure if you've seen this add-in, but if you haven't, you should take a look: www.codeplex.com/WordSourceViewer
It's essentially WordPerfect's "reveal codes" feature for Word 2007!
I am having a problem getting Outlook 2007 to set word as the e-mail editor (mail format tab in the options window) it will not allow me to check a box. Please help.
@Tiffany, In Outlook 2007 there is no longer a choice to set the default email editor. The default editor is essentially Word. For more information on Outlook 2007's default editing experience take a look at the whitepaper found here: office.microsoft.com/.../HA102109301033.aspx. Thanks,
Zeyad Rajabi (MS)
I work for a large university system and we recently went to Office 2007 Enterprise.
The issue we are having is that when you open a .doc that is situated on a network drive and then "Convert" and Save it in Word, you get two files.. the old .doc and the new .docx.
When you do the same on the local computer, you only have the .docx left. We want the documents on the network to act like the ones on your local computer. Is this intended behavior and also is there a way to fix it?
@Mark R:
This IS a bug in Word 2007. I guess one of those who will only get fixed if enough companies do a call to Microsoft and complain to them about it. Actually we did this bug call a half year ago and till now I have not even found it documented in the public Microsoft Knowledgebase, though it was confirmed as being a bug by the hotline a long time ago. This IS criticism on the Office 2007 bug handling by MS! It was exactly the same thing with several more Office 2007 bugs passed on to MS Support.
Are there any plans to support typographical ligatures (for fonts containing them) in the next version of Word? For example, typing 'fi' would display the ligature 'fi'. Computing power is at a stage where this would seem trivial to implement, and it would be a nice feature to have.
When is the Word 2007 team going to fix Word so that when the default save format is set to 97/2003 formats, newly created files will start up in [Compatibility Mode]? This is a bug, because not only is it documented in multiple places that it is supposed to work (like the Resource Kit), Excel and PowerPoint DO start new files up in [Compatibility Mode] if the default/save is set to the 97-2003 formats.
I too filed this bug (Convert not deleting the old file) with Microsoft through Premiere support last September '07. I never got an answer as to whether or not they would ever fix it. I guess the most frustrating part is that the informational message says that Convert will replace your file, but as you pointed out, it doesn't happen.
@0,000000001 percent: Here's a paper I put together describing some basic Office 2007 compatibility problems... I've reported all of them to Microsoft through various means (including Premiere Support). These problems have existed since the products release, and were not fixed in SP1. www.slideshare.net/.../office2007-basic-compatibility-issues
@funnybroad:
Thank you very much for your good presentation: Actually EVERYBODY should have a look at it!!! IMHO Office 2007 usability regarding those bugs and issues is a real desaster. Obviously MS did not nearly test enough for usability and functionality in the compatibilty, migration and interoperability areas :-( I hope for MS they will do this now and fix those issues really very soon so it will work OUT-OF-THE-BOX. If they do not, many companies WILL deeply investigate how to migrate to competing Office suites. The more issues in Office 2007 I see occuring I feel like this as well... So is Office 2007 just a product for students and home users? Or was it simply put to market maybe 1, 2 or even 3 years too early and is not being really ready for office use yet? Btw I read this comment in another blog:
"Really if Apple took it over at least it would work. MS has become a disaster instead of fixing or enhancing features they remove them. Instead of fixing bugs they start on the next version." It's the same way I often feel about Office 2007. :-(
As one of the Program Managers on the Word team, I value the information that we see come through the comments on this blog. This is our opportunity to hear what you are thinking about our product and to provide some context for the decisions we made in crafting the currently available version. I’d like to address the points that were raised about compatibility to hopefully give you some information for moving forward: * Not being able to have a new document created in the *.DOC format is indeed a design limitation in Word 2007. It’s one we hope to address in future releases. You’re right that the experience that we created of changing the file format on Save is not sufficient for users who for whatever reason prefer not to move to the new file format. * Not deleting the DOC file on Convert when the file is not on a local drive is actually a design decision that we believe is still the right compromise. When the file is local, the text in the dialog is accurate (the DOC file is deleted after the DocX file is created). However, we determined that when the file is not stored locally, it’s more likely that a link exists pointing to that file (because it’s quite possible that the reason that the file isn’t local is because it’s on shared resource). Therefore, we decided that when the file was stored remotely, it was better to preserve the DOC rather than create broken links—and our early testing indicated that having the dialog box distinguish these two cases just seemed to confuse users more than provide clarity. * The file format of a document and the layout compatibility of a document are two fundamentally different concepts in Word (unlike PowerPoint or Excel). From the beginning, Word has had a concept of maintaining layout compatibility with previous versions. The Convert button in Word 2007 does two things—it upgrades the file format to the newest standard and clears the compatibility options so that the layout is as if the document were created in Word 2007. That’s why when you work on a DocX file in an earlier version, it’s back in compatibility mode—not because of the file format but because of the layout constraints imposed by working on that document in an older version. To see the wide range of factors that are part of layout compatibility, check out Word Options->Advanced->Compatibility Options->Layout Options (way down at the very bottom of the dialog. I hope that this information helps provide some context for the decisions we made for the last two items and trust that we’ll address the customer need identified for the first item. -Stuart
FYI - We've extended the duration for commenting on this post. -Jonathan(MS)
Hi Stuart, thank you for pointing out your reasons to not delete the DOC file after selecting convert. There are two things I disagree with: - I'm doing Office support in my company and I always try to avoid to tell people wrong things. Telling wrong things would some day stop people from trusting me. It's the same thing with the dialog. If it tells wrong things (even with the good intention not to confuse people) people WILL lose trust in Word. And what should I tell people who tell me Word, doesn't do what they're reading in the dialog. Should I tell them it's no bug but a design decision by Microsoft to tell end users definitely wrong things in dialogs because they think this would improve clarity for them??? Would you trust in a system which gives you wrong information? If you once find this out this is an user experience with the system you'll never forget. And you'll never believe in any dialog of the system again. So for users giving wrong information is WORSE than giving no information. - You say deleting the doc file would break links. That's true but there are a lot of cases I can imagine where a link to an outdated document will cause MUCH MORE trouble than a broken link: With your "solution" people FEEL like everything's working but they actually open outdated information through links, and might even take wrong decisions based on it. This might not be discovered soon but WHEN it's discovered it leads to a lot of mistrust in reliability of the system (and trouble for IT departments) So please discuss your solution again!!! Furthermore the automatic deletion of the DOC files after conversion to DOCX seems to me the only practicable way to migrate files to the new file format on a network. I know of OFC.EXE from ORK. But this tool is NOT really suited for mass conversion which is btw only possible after roll-out. Actually IMHO it SHOULD convert (including deletion of .doc) all the files it can to the SAME locations with the same file system rights as before and leave unconvertable files untouched. Currently it only converts to a different folder just leaving out all the files it CANNOT convert. So what's missing is a secure way to replace all convertable files with .DOCX files. Like it's now you will never get rid of the duplicate DOC files on a big network storage causing storage waste and confusion among users, since they will often continue to work with the DOC accidentially. This is the reality I know of from daily user support. 0,000000001 percent
0,000000001 percent-- All of the points that you raise are extremely valid and definitely things we need to continue to consider. It's difficult to come up with a solution to come up with a solution that will please all of our customers. In this case, we went with the combination of options that seemed to best meet the customer goals reported to us. We certainly continue to evaluate this but so far the majority of customers seem to support the current implementation for the reasons I provided. As a possible workaround for your last point (wanting to remove DOC files for which DOCX files with the name file name exists), our feedback from customers included reports that most network administration tools provide mechanism for automating such a task. Implementing such a solution would then give you control over the process. But we are listening and do respect the points that you've raised. If you do have a support agreement with Microsoft and have not already, then you should also convey these concerns via that route. --Stuart
Comments: (loading) Collapse