Why Choose Body Text Instead of Normal in Word?

I cannot count the number of times I've had to clean up a Microsoft Word document for one of my co-workers in which unexpected things started happening to the formatting, and they couldn't figure out why. In almost every case, the problem was that they were using the Normal paragraph style for their text and had changed the style properties. But other paragraph styles then changed, and suddenly their document was a mess.

The solution is to not use the Normal paragraph style for anything. Instead use another style (generally Body Text) and base your other styles on that (where appropriate). I was always careful to do this when I designed document templates; the trick was then to get people to use the templates.

In "Why choose Body Text vs Normal in Word" the Office Watch site explains why and how to use Body Text (or another style other than Normal) as the basis for your Word documents and templates. I can't stress strongly enough how important it is to do this, and the Office Watch article is about the best I've seen on the subject.

And while you're at it, if you use Microsoft Office, I recommend subscribing to their newsletter. I've been a subscriber for many years.