Styles (2003 XP)

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Styles and templates are great but they often lead to massive amounts of pain and frustration (for me at least) when there are multiple authors working on a document. Does anyone have suggestions on:

• getting rid of corrupt styles
• updating the whole document so that all the styles are based on the template
• quick ways of applying styles to paragraphs
• any other style / template ‘cheat’ that you might want to share[/list]

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> updating the whole document so that all the styles are based on the template

Select Tools | Templates and Add-Ins…
Tick the check box labeled “Automatically update document styles”.
Click OK.
Each time the document is opened, the styles in the document will be re-loaded from the template.
This does not prevent the use of styles that are not present in the template.

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Styles and templates REQUIRE user education. There is no way around this, no matter what advertisers might say. That being said, I find it helpful to create a template which has both customized menus and toolbars with the template styles “in plain sight.” It becomes a shade easier to explain to a user that after you type a paragraph, you should highlight it and click the “Major Heading” style button or use the “style menu” and auto-magically, it has the right formatting.

I typically do have a “STYLES” menu with Major Heading, Minor Heading, Plain text, Bullet level 1 and Bullet level 2 on a short report, with a “STYLES” toolbar with these same styles.

Word’s “helpful” features to auto-update styles is not very helpful when you have multiple authors, who typically paste in from lots of different documents.

I can sympathize with you, as I’ve often worked jobs where I can’t force users to learn styles, but I won’t dumb down my “good Word” habits.

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Hi,
I also create toolbars for common styles- both paragraph styles and characters styles. I then go further and remove all direct formatting icons from the standard and formatting tool bars. If the users can’t click on the Bullet button to create bullets, they are much more likely to use the bulleted styles I’ve set up. And if they can’t select Bold, they’re more likely to select my Emphasis icon.

About rogue styles, I once wrote a long macro to find all styles used in a document, compare them with the template and give a report.
If a rogue style was defined but not used, the macro deleted it. If the rogue style was actually used, it went into the report for manual checking.

I’ll try to find it and post it here.

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Rather than just remove the buttons that apply directy formatting, I “re-educate” the buttons to apply styles instead. For example, when an author presses “I” (or Ctrl-I), one of several character styles is applied, based on context (unless they’ve selected multiple paragraphs, in which case nothing happens). Same thing for Bold, Bullets, Numbering, Indent, etc. User education is difficult — relatively speaking, button education is much easier …

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