I use Word to write and format my eBook and printed version of the book because it is easy to use and is a common platform with plenty of online help. However, it has take me a very long time to become comfortable with styles.
The main issue I have had is how to removed unwanted styles. I found that my styles list was made up of styles with similar names. So I had one style called CODEBLOCK and others called CODEBLOCK1 , CODEBLOCK2, CODEBLOCK3 and so on. In some documents this amounted to thousands of unwanted duplicate styles which slowed down loading the file.
I don’t know how these were created, it may have been something to do with Master Pages or possible to do with copying text from one document to another. It made the document larger than necessary and when I did saved the file as HTML I ended up with a massive list of css styles in the HTML document.
I tried a number of methods, one of which was to run a Word make to delete unused styles. This particular macro seemed to work on small documents, but caused Word to hang up when I tried it on large documents.
Eventually I found a way of getting rid of them but event this method can take a a few minutes per file.
First you need to show the styles window which will look something like:
Click on Manage Styles icon at bottom of display.
Click on Import/Export…
This display allows you to select multiple styles in the left hand column and then delete the multiple styles.
Use the mouse button with the Ctrl key to select the multiple styles and then delete them. Note that you cannot delete built in styles and also this displays allows you to move styles from one document to another.