Unwanted Styles

Rhana Pike asked for a way to remove unwanted styles from the Style drop-down list on the Formatting toolbar. There is no easy way to do this; in fact, some styles are included on the list by default. For instance, Normal and three Heading styles are always visible. If you have additional styles showing up which you know you don't use and should not be there, then the only successful way to remove the styles from the drop-down list is to effectively recreate the document. This is not quite as drastic as it sounds however; you can follow these general steps:

1. Save your document in RTF format, but append the .TXT extension. Then close the file.
2. Open the newly saved document file in a text editor (such as Notepad) so that you can see the RTF code. Here is a sample of the RTF code for a footer:

{\s242\tqc\tx4320\tqr\tx8640 \fs20\lang1033 \sbasedon0\snext242 footer;}

3. Note that the definition for the style is contained between curly brackets.
4. Use the text editor's Find command to search for the unwanted style's name. Thus, if you wanted to get rid of Heading 5, you would search for "Heading 5".
5. Delete all information between the brackets, as well as the brackets themselves, for the unwanted style.
6. Save and close the file.
7. Open the file in Word. Allow Word to convert the RTF file into a Word document file.
8. Look in the Style drop-down list to verify that the unwanted styles are missing.
9. Save the file as a Word document.