People who use Dreamweaver to edit departmental websites may notice that Dreamweaver unexpectedly assigns a style called "depttocsect" when text was only to be bolded.

Example screenshot: clicking the Bold button has resulted in the "depttocsect" style setting. (See enlargement)

This happens because some (if not all) versions of Dreamweaver are set to attempt to use cascading style sheet (CSS) definitions instead of normal HTML tags, when appropriate. The difficulty comes when Dreamweaver makes an assumption that isn't exactly what we want. It takes a style from one of the university-wide stylesheets and (mistakenly, most likely) assumes this is the style we want.

The solution is to set Dreamweaver so you are in control: you can choose HTML tags when that is what you want; CSS "style" markup when you want.

In this particular case, to get <bold> or <strong> tags instead of the "depttocsect" style, you will need to make a change in the Dreamweaver preferences.

1. Click on the Edit menu, then Preferences
2. Under the "General" category of the Preferences window, uncheck "Use CSS instead of HTML tags" (see sample screenshot)
3. Click "OK"

At this point, the changes should have taken effect. Try bolding text again. This time, the style should not change to "depttocsect" yet the text should indeed still be bold. This is because it has applied normal HTML tags to bold your text.