>>When you modify Word in this way, you are attempting to impose WordPerfect’s character-based formatting on an application that bases its formatting by paragraph. By doing this you disable one of Word’s most powerful features: styles.

Wrong. Choosing a different style set, such as Word 2003, does not disable styles. It has nothing to do with Wordperfect character base formating. If that were true, please provide a reference from Microsoft that states that.

>>The reason Word adds the line after a hard return (it’s actually a 12-point space) is because the “normal” paragraph style is whatever default font your selected style set has; no paragraph indent; and 12-point spacing between paragraphs.

Wrong again. That is not the reason. The reason for the extra space was to eliminate the need for pressing return twice at the end of the paragraph. You can add an indent to any style.

>>If you don’t like this format, change it in Paragraph (on the 2007 ribbon). F’rinstance, select first line indent, justified alignment, single space, and no spacing between paragraphs. Apply, then select your newly formatted paragraph. Right-click the “Normal” style on the ribbon and select “update normal to match selection.” It will become your default normal style.

No, doing that will change more than just the extra spacing at the end of the paragraph. It’s safer if you modify the style directly. This article is not about indenting.

>>(There are other steps to make this change “stick” when you create a new document, but I won’t go there now.)

Yes, there are. Use the Word 2003 style set as both the author suggested and Microsoft recommends.

>>If you are manually adding a tab at the beginning of the paragraph and an extra hard return at the end, you may as well use notepad as your word processor.

The author never said that he was adding tabs, did he? You’re missing the whole point of this article. It’s about the extra line (space) after the paragraph, not tabs. There are times when you don’t want the extra line after the paragraph, and there are may times you don’t want your paragraphs indented.

>> If you want to become a Word lover you must learn styles.

No, if you want to become a Word 2007 lover you need to learn style sets and themes; otherwise you can stick with just styles and using Word 2003.