Whenever I change the alignment of a line of text (like a heading) in MS Word (v.X) for Mac, Word automatically changes the alignment of the paragraph BEFORE the heading to the same alignment. If I centre the Heading, the last paragraph before it centres. If I change the paragraph back to Left Alignment, the following Heading also changes back to Left Alignment (even if there is a page break between them).

Is there a way to turn this "feature" off?

There may be a couple of reasons for this. I don't do MACs, but I don't think it would be different.

One possibility is that the style setup you for the paragraph is tied to the preceding one so both get changed. Another possibility is that there might not be a new paragraph separating the two, only a line break.

Word is a very paragraph centric word proc. So you need to be aware of where paragraphs really end. For this reason, I always set Word to display paragraph marks. This is done under Tools>Options>View.

Thanks, Dale.

I think you are right about the Paragraph set-up. I found a work-around. By adding a carriage return <CR> after the last character (".") in the previous paragraph, Word would allow me to then change the alignment of the Sub-head, without affecting the previous section.

I assume that this additional <CR> makes Word think that it is a new paragraph and thus allows me to change the set-up.

Gryffwalker