I’ve become a real style nazi. Not in the way that most people think of it in that I disapprove of people’s brightly patterned leggings and quiff combo, but in the sense that they are used in word processing.

This is really very sad, but I like it. It goes along with my doctrine of extreme laziness.

For the uninitiated, the idea is that you don’t specify the formatting for each bit of text, you specify a style for it, then you can go back and change the style and all applications of that style change throughout the document. you can even nest styles, but I’ll spare you that.

Anyway, you can do this in InDesign, Word, Open Office Writer etc. and it is great. The problem occurs when you need to intercept a document that someone else has done a blinding job of cocking up.
In InDesign it is easy, there is a button to clear style overrides, but in word [ctrl]+[space] clears the local formatting, and [ctrl]+[q] clears local spacing overrides. I got this tip off Susan Daffron at logicaltips.com

This is a mega dorky topic, but really, if you use styles you’ll have much more time to invest in snorting cocaine off strippers and going base jumping.