Click the Styles group’s dialog launcher to see even more. You inherit the maintenance of an older document that needs some cleanup work.įigure A shows the Quick Styles gallery for the demonstration document.Doing so will make it more difficult for recipients to change the formatting, which might mess up the entire document. It’s a good idea to removed unused styles in a Word document that you plan to distribute to a lot of people.It’s not as big an issue with today’s systems loaded with RAM, but removing the unused styles is an option. In a large document with lots of custom styles that you’re not using, you might see a bit of a performance hit.There are three good reasons you might want to remove a document’s unused styles:

Add customized styles, and you can see things grow out of hand. Most of us use only a few styles in an ordinary document, but the underlying template contains dozens of built-in styles. Why should you remove unused styles in Word? Word for the web doesn’t support VBA procedures. For your convenience, you can download the demonstration. I’m using Microsoft 365 on a Windows 10 64-bit system, but you can use an earlier version. How to return first and last times from timestamps in Microsoft ExcelĬhecklist: Microsoft 365 app and services deployments on Macs

Get Microsoft Office Pro and lifetime access to 5 top apps for $59.99 SEE: Software Installation Policy (TechRepublic Premium) More about Software Keep in mind that you can’t delete built-in styles at all though, so this is a solution for documents with unused custom styles. In this article, I’ll show you a VBA procedure that will remove all unused styles in the current document. The Styles pane does a good job of reducing the number of styles you interact with but in the end, you might want to delete all unused styles from a finished document. One of the main reasons styles confound users is because there are so many of them and most go unused.

On the other hand, some users might think of styles as a formatting jungle. If you use Word to write the occasional letter, you probably don’t think about Word styles too often. For more info, visit our Terms of Use page. This may influence how and where their products appear on our site, but vendors cannot pay to influence the content of our reviews. We may be compensated by vendors who appear on this page through methods such as affiliate links or sponsored partnerships. Instead, use this VBA procedure to remove them. There’s no need to keep unused styles in a Microsoft Word document, especially if there are a lot of them. How to delete unused styles using VBA in Word

Remove styles from word ribbon