Create a non-color style in OfficeWord365

Question

I have found a number of superuser.SE and SO questions related, e.g. 360488, but none of the older topics appear to work with Office365.

Quite specifically: I can paste a bunch of color-syntaxed text from code editors such as Notepad++ . Word treats that text as Normal style with color 'overrides' manually applied. I want to be able to apply a Style which does not try to set any font property - I just want to set the text to NoProofing and possibly add background, border, etc.

Is there any way to Define a Paragraph (or Linked) Style that will leave the font properties alone?

Alternatively, is there some way to set the default Style that is applied to the text I'm pasting in? So far as I can tell, pasting formatted text always sets it to Normal.

Answer 1

There is a hack to save the font colors. It turns out that, when applying a Style to a body of text, Word "evaluates" the first text up to the first Paragraph symbol and, if that text is not the default color for the Style in question, changes all the text to the default color. If that first text, or even just the first Paragraph symbol, is the default color, all subsequent text is treated as "exception" and left alone.

So my approach is:

1) Create a custom Style based on "(no style)" - in my case, set this Style's background and specified No Proofing
2) Paste the color-syntax'd text into a document.
3) Select all the text plus one Paragraph symbol above and apply my custom Style.