Phantom Char Char style (2002)

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The attached file has what seems to be a paragraph style named ” Char Char”, but, try as I might, I can’t remove it. Can anyone suggest anything.

I’ve tried everything I can think of, including saving it as an RTF file and deleting what seems to be the relevant part using a text editor, but once it’s saved as a DOC file again the style re-appears (after closing and re-opening the DOC file). With VBA, the following line produces a 5941 error, supposedly because “The requested member of the collection does not exist”:

ActiveDocument.Styles(” Char Char”).Delete

I’ve no idea how the style was created in the first place. I inherited the file, and have since been trying to remove the styles that aren’t used (it did have text originally, but I removed that as its existence seemed to make no difference).

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Have you tried one of the macros in this thread?
http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/showflat.p…ew=&sb=&o=&vc=1%5B/url%5D

If you do a search for ‘Char Char’ in this forum you will find various threads discussing this bug.

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Oh yes, I’ve tried them all and none of them work.

I suspect that this file and the other ones I’ve got have simply become corrupted. It’s just annoying when you can’t do something that should be simple.

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I got rid of ” Char char” by first deleting the opening space from the style name and then deleting the style from the Style dialog or sometimes from the styles pane (but not the organizer) as long as I click in an open area of the pane after the delete.

A couple more things.
(1)The problem seems to be changing. At first char char was only appended to a paragraph style name, like Heading 1 Char. These are the styles that the char char removal macros can clean up. About a year and a half ago I began to see styles named “Char” and “Char Char” on their own; they showed up in alphabetical order in the styles list. If they are present, the removal macros don’t work, but if you delete them by hand, the macros will (well, for me, the one from Word Hacks did) work on the rest. About 7 or 8 months ago, I began to see ” Char” and ” Char Char”–note the opening space. These were even harder to detect and delete: I had to select them from the Styles to be visible section of Format settings. When they do show in the styles list they are at the top. I tried a variety of things to delete them, including changing the link to none, but nothing worked consistently until I read in another forum about deleting the leading space. Just last week, I received another Char Char variation: a file from a customer in which about half the paragraphs had a blank style name, but it was a linked style. Fortunately, it was teh only abnormal style in the doc and was easy to delete. Has anyone else noticed these changes?

(2) A previous poster post 604,042 commented that in Word 2007, one cannot delete linked styles. But I was able to easily delete your ” Char Char” style today in my evaluation copy of Word 2007. Also at the bottom of the pane, there’s a button to “unlink styles.” I didn’t have a file with linked styles to test the feature, so I’m hoping someone else can.

Pam

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Pam

Thanks for that.

I had previously tried what you suggested, but after saving and closing the file, the ” Char Char” style is still there once I open the file again. I’ve also tried re-naming the style, using the Organizer, but that merely adds the re-named style (plus ” Char”) as an alias of “Default Paragraph Font” – which doesn’t seem right, and makes me think that corruption really is the culprit here.

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Sorry it didn’t work out. Did you also delete the default paragraph font style and any other style that has misbehaved? I usually repair the file after deleting the char styles and the default paragraph font. Though I have sometimes had to delete again and repair it again. (I usually open and repair until I get no errors, anyway.) Also, make sure that the bad styles have not gotten into your normal.dot.

Regards,
Pam

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I just saved the file to xml format (using Word 2003) and when I reopened it the style was gone. This is a common method of removing corruption from files in the more recent versions of Word and appears to have more success than the RTF path.

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For the benefit of anyone else who encounters this problem and who uses Word 2002, say, rather than Word 2003 or 2007, I’ve found that it’s possible to manually remove a ” Char Char” style from an RTF file if the DOC file is saved using the “Word 97-2002 & 6.0/95 – RTF (*.doc)” option rather than the “Rich Text Format (*.rtf)” one.

I don’t know why this works using the hybrid(?) format, but then I still don’t know what causes the problem in the first place! There’s probably a risk that you might lose something if you save a file using either of these options, but that didn’t happen with my files.

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