Styles in word 2016 not working properly

Hi Doug - thank you.  I will give this a try.

With warmest regards,

MM

Hi Richard - great to hear from you!  I am still at Cisco but when not working I am writing a book and continuing the work on the NOE Theory which is now close to 400 pages with over 300 footnotes. I did try copying into a clean file - that didn't work. 

I have been using the workaround but it is cumbersome. My undocked pane is at least 4 columns.  Fortunately I have multiple monitors which helps. I load the pane onto one monitor and work from another.  The problem here is that the pane disappears and becomes transparent frequently forcing me to stop work to get it to re-materialize. I can't keep going this way so I will look for the Sept 2015 release of Word if MSFT doesn't release a patch soon. The previous version number is 16.0.4266.1003 and can be found here

• http://microsoft_office.en.downloadastro.com/

The corrupted version number is 16.0.6366.2036

It says that it is a free trial and I am assuming that it will download the previous version NOT the recent corrupted version. I have been too busy to try.  Can you let me know if the version works?

With warmest regards,

MM

Hey Madonna-Megara,

Your ole' buddy Richard from Cisco Systems here...........

I've been working with this problem since a major Windows 10 update Dec 10, of which there are multiple issues with Word 2016, the main one is corrupted Styles pane. I've been in contact with the MS tech team and a rep from the MS Word team. There are multiple posts as to this bug.

There are a few suggested workarounds. The best being: "Undocking" the Styles pane (Ctl>shift>S) so that the Styles pane is floating or pick Styles using the Styles on the Home tab.

When you dock the Styles pane that's where the bug is, causing a picked Style to be wonky, where it goes to what seems as random styles ...the picked Style is really following a hierarchy of 4 Styles before returning to the original picked Style........and then it just does nothing ......Kaput!

Also, you can copy an existing doc into a new blank doc (sans the last paragraph mark) where sometimes that works sometimes not. And then there is a saving issue, where you make a change in that doc, close it, open it......and Word opens a window as to Read-Only .......this is a bug too.

You can also roll back to Word 2013 and everything works properly ........but you have to uninstall Word 2016 and that's a pain ...........

I haven't tried rolling back the system to before December 10 ,.........but I'm told that may not work.

Richard

As a work around, I have created a Styler.dotm Add-in that provides a custom Styles dialog that can be downloaded from the following page of my One Drive:

http://bit.ly/1hduSCB

The Styler.dotm file needs to be saved in the Word Startup folder.  In Windows Vista and Windows 7, 8 or 8.1, and 10, the default location for that folder is

C:\Users[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP

If you do not see the AppData folder: -

In Windows 7, - In Windows Explorer, click on the Organize drop down and then on Folder and search options and in the Folder Options dialog, go to the View tab and select the item "Show hidden files, folders, and drives".  While there, it is a good idea to uncheck the box for "Hide extensions for known file types".

In Windows 8,  8.1 or 10, in the File Explorer, click on Options on the View tab of the ribbon and then on the View tab in the dialog that appears and select the item "Show hidden files, folders, and drives".  While there, it is a good idea to uncheck the box for "Hide extensions for known file types".

When that has been done and Word is started\re-started, a new group will be added to the right hand end of the Home tab of the Ribbon:

When you click on that button, the following dialog will appear

By selecting items from the list on the left, and then using the Add Selected Style button, you can build up a list of the styles that you want to use in the list box on the right.

Clicking on the Save My Styles button will cause that list of styles to be saved to the registry so that it will once again be displayed if the form is dismissed and then re-opened.

You can apply a style from either list to the selected text, by Double Clicking on it.

The form appears in "modeless" fashion, which means that it can remain open while you work in the document.

Let me know if you run into any issues.