‘Lock down’ styles (XP)

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Hi everyone,

My team wants to “lock down” the styles in several of our documents so users can not add new styles nor modify the definition of existing styles. Is there a way to do this? Seems like there should be, but I can’t recall ever seeing it done.

Thanks,

Beej

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While there are some formatting protection features in Word 2003 (I don’t recall offhand if they’re in XP), they’re fairly useless. In Word 2003, the options are available from Tools->Protect Document.

Again, these restrictions are *very* easy to get around. If you truly want a rigid document, you’d probably need to explore Smart Documents and Schema-based document work, but those are only available in Word 2003, and require fairly sophisticated development work.

Personally, the way I handle style enforcement is in 3 steps: First, write some code that checks a document for added/missing styles, merely for inspection/reporting. Second, write some code that cycles through a document, identifying invalid styles and offering the user a choice of replacement styles. Third, intercept the common formatting buttons (bullets, numbering, indent, bold, italic) and apply your styles with them conditionally based on the selected text. Not foolproof, but workable.

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