How to Restrict the Use of Paragraph Styles in a MS Word 2010 Document

© Ugur Akinci
Sometimes you may want to allow the use of only specific paragraph styles in a MS Word document.
This would happen in an office situation with multiple technical and other types of writers when one writer might either knowingly or inadvertently override or modify the style choice of another writer.
For example, what you’ve written with Heading 1 style might be switched to Heading 2 style by another writer. The result is confusion and a document getting out of control the more other folks start to “contribute” to the same document according to their own style guidelines or whims.
So to establish a minimum level of stylistic control on such documents, it makes sense to restrict the range of MS Word paragraph styles that successive editors, reviewers or content contributors can work with. Luckily, MS Word 2010 provides a reliable way to establish that kind of control.
1) On the Review tab, click Restrict Editing button to display the Restrict Formatting and Editing task bar on the right:

2) Select “Limit formatting to a selection of styles” check box and then click the Settings link to display the Formatting Restrictions dialog box:

3) Select the styles that you’d like to allow in the document. Click Recommended Minimum button to automatically select a pre-set collection of paragraph styles that would serve a wide range of documents pretty well.
4) Select “Allow AutoFormat to override formatting restrictions” to allow reviewers to change (for example) “1/2” to “½” regardless of the style selected.
5) Select “Block Theme or Scheme switching”  to prevent reviewers from changing the themes that are used in the document.
6) Select “Block Quick Style Set switching” to prevent reviewers from changing the current style set.
7) If your document contains styles that are not allowed (per your latest selection), then MS Word will ask whether you’d like to remove such styles or not:

8) Click OK when you’re done to close the Formatting Restrictions window.
9) Back at the task bar, click “Yes, Start Enforcing Restriction” button to display the Start Enforcing Protection dialog box:

10) Enter your password twice to confirm it. Then click OK to conclude the process.
WARNING: Make sure you never forget your password. If you do, you’ll never be able to change the restriction again.