Setting up standard word documents (MS Word 2002 SP3)

Topic

New Reply

In our office we are trying to develop some ‘Standard’ word documents that everyone can use so that all documentation coming out of our agency has a common “look & feel” to it. The problem we are running into is that as soon as people start to use the documents formats start changing (color block areas turn gray, footers get shifted, etc.).

Is there any way to create a Word document that would allow us to set things so the documents stop morphing on us and driving our users nuts?

I am posting a copy of one of our documents as an example.

Reply | Quote

Replies

Can you give a specific example of what input triggers what changes? It seems stable on my computer (also running Word 2002).

Does everyone use the same printer drivers?

One thing that concerns me is that Style 2 is set for Automatic Update. I can’t recall whether that’s when applying direct formatting changes the style definition, or the style definition is overridden from the original template each time the document is opened, but I try to avoid any automatic style changes.

Reply | Quote

About Jefferson’s remark: the Automatically Update option that has been set for styles such as Normal, Heading 1, and several others, means that as soon as a user changes the format of a paragraph, *all* text with the same style will take on the same formatting. E.g. if the user makes a Style2 paragraph green or centered, all text set to Style2 will become green or centered.
So if you want stable formatting, modify the styles in the Styles and Formatting task pane, and clear the Automatically Update check box for each.

Reply | Quote

Hans and Jeff,

Thanks, as always for the quick response.

Hans, I thought I had this fixed from the help you gave me a couple of days ago. I did not even think of checking all of the styles for the ‘Automatic Update’.

I know this may sound like I am being lazy but is there a way to turn them all off without going through each one the styles individually?

Reply | Quote

This very simple Macro will do the trick

Sub ClearAutoUpdateFromStyles()
Dim sty As Style

For Each sty In ActiveDocument.Styles
If sty.Type = wdStyleTypeParagraph Then sty.AutomaticallyUpdate = False
Next sty

End Sub

StuartR

Reply | Quote

The macro seems to have another consequence.

Because this macro does not select on sty.Inuse, it also affects all built-in paragraph styles that aren’t in use, and because of this they become InUse.
This is probably good. When I’m trying to control users, I find it best to redefine ALL built-in styles to my standard because otherwise users can switch from StylesInUse to AllStyles and chose a style Microsoft have defined.

If you don’t like this effect, you could combine this macro with Hans’s one.

Regards,
Judith

Reply | Quote

You could run this macro:

Sub SetStylesToNotUpdateAutomatically()
Dim stl As Style
‘ Suppress errors for styles that don’t have this property
On Error Resume Next
For Each stl In ActiveDocument.Styles
If stl.InUse Then
stl.AutomaticallyUpdate = False
End If
Next stl
End Sub

(I assume that you don’t want to put this macro in your standard docs, so either put it in your Normal.dot (which makes it available in each document), or in a new document which you discard when done. Make sure that the document you want to fix is the active document, then run the macro from the Visual Basic Editor.

Reply | Quote

Jefferson, Stuart, Judith, and (as always) Hans,

Thank you all for your assistance. I was out early for the weekend doing some more work on my house so I apologize for the delayed response.

I just finished through all 42 documents (made very easy by your macro directions) and have turned them over (electronically) to our format to go test them to make sure they are all fixed. Once that is done they will be secuely locked down and made available to the hordes to do their worst with.

Thanks again,

Reply | Quote