Neat Word Trick for Finding Bogus Styles

I didn’t know you could do this in Word…

O’Reilly provides authors a Word template with specific styles in it.  Pasting in formatted text from another source can be a complete PITA in Word because odd styles get carried over if you’re not careful — and now you have to go and find those nasty styles and fix them up.

Word’s “Find” will actually search out style occurances for you.  Pull up the Find dialog with Ctrl-F and make sure you’re displaying “More” options via the, uh, “More” button.  Click the “Format” button at the bottom of the dialog, then select “Style.”  Select the troublesome style in the list you’re presented (“CellCode Char” in our case) and click OK. 

Make sure you clear out any contents from the “Find What” field, then click “Next.” Off to the races you go.  Notice you can leave up the Find dialog while you’re fixing up the bad, bad, bad styles in your document.

Shiny.