How to restore styles in a document to their original format

[Vince]

When a paragraph is based on a style, say "Heading 1", if somebody changes it
then Word 2007 may update the list of styles with a new version of the style
and gives it a new name, say "Heading 1,PRTM Heading 1" and applies all the
user's changes to it. "Heading 1" is now no longer available in its original
form even when show "All Styles" is selected from the style manager.

How can one strip all the modifications and restore it back to the "Heading
1" as it was in the document template?

 

[Stefan Blom]

To restore the styles of the attached template, you can do the following:
First create a new document based on the template in question. Then use the
Insert File dialog box to bring in the contents of your existing file. (To
display the Insert File dialog in Word 2007, click Insert tab | Object |
Text from File.) The style definitions of the target file will take
precedence.

Note that "Heading 1,PRTM Heading 1" looks like the Heading 1 style with a
style name alias ("PRTM Heading 1"). The alias in itself is irrelevant to
the formatting of the style.

 

[Vince]

Thank you for that tip. I tried it and it did work but the "Heading 1,PRTM
Heading 1" alias appeared in the new document after the object insert.

I'll read up on what a Style Alias since this is different from the template
style being altered and an extended version of that style appearing in the
styles list, for example, "Normal + Bold", say.

With extended styles, the Control-Spacebar or Control-Q restores to the
template. For example, like after first using the handy "Select all NN
instance(s)" sub-menu option to highlight the affected text with the altered
style. After repeatedly applying Ctrl-Q and Ctrl-Spacebar as needed the
extended styles eventually disappear from the styles list.

I'm wondering how the style alias appeared in the document. Not many Word
users are familiar with styles and manually edit the formatting of documents
as they go along which prevents any form of consistency. Somehow somebody
managed to append an alias to the built in style, but without editing the
name of the style in the Styles list.

Thanks again for the object insert tip.

 

[Stefan Blom]

For built-in styles, if you change the style name in the Modify Style dialog
box, a style name alias will be created. You can delete the alias in that
same location.