Templates vs. Style Sets in Word 2007

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Which is better, and why? I have alswyas used Word’s Styles extensively and now I have converted to Office 2007 and I am setting up personalized templates for Letters, Commentary, Memoes, etc. But in looking at Style Sets, I am wondering what is the difference between creating a new letter using File, New, using Letter.dotm OR using Style Set, MyNameLetter? Are there advantages of using one way or the other????

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Which is better, and why? I have alswyas used Word’s Styles extensively and now I have converted to Office 2007 and I am setting up personalized templates for Letters, Commentary, Memoes, etc. But in looking at Style Sets, I am wondering what is the difference between creating a new letter using File, New, using Letter.dotm OR using Style Set, MyNameLetter? Are there advantages of using one way or the other????

Hi Cmonk,
Templates and Styles are two different animals. Templates can contain styles of your choosing, but not vice versa. The choice is highly personal. The more documents you create, the more crystal clear you know your preference. Without your knowing, all Word documents require a template. Templates should best be created for specific purposes such as a book, a meeting minutes, a scientific thesis, a forensic report, a motion picture scripts, a legal brief and motion,…etc.
Armstrong

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Armstrong,

I think that cmonk knows the difference between styles and templates. Word 2007 has a new concept called “style sets”. The question is about those.

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I think that cmonk knows the difference between styles and templates. Word 2007 has a new concept called “style sets”. The question is about those.

HansV,
Sorry for my misunderstanding. Thanks pointing out my error.
Armstrong

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HansV,
Sorry for my misunderstanding. Thanks pointing out my error.
Armstrong

Thanks, Armstrong for making the attempt ! But HansV is correct in that I understand the differences between the two…just not sure when to apply the one or the other.

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Which is better, and why? I have alswyas used Word’s Styles extensively and now I have converted to Office 2007 and I am setting up personalized templates for Letters, Commentary, Memoes, etc. But in looking at Style Sets, I am wondering what is the difference between creating a new letter using File, New, using Letter.dotm OR using Style Set, MyNameLetter? Are there advantages of using one way or the other????

Office MVP Stephanie Krieger calls style sets a type of template that contains only paragraph and character styles. She says style sets can be used to quickly change the look of a document without changing a template and to provide users with a set of styles regardless of the template used (say your company’s name appears in a particuar font face in all its documents). If you have several reports that have basically the same section/document settings (page orientation, margins, header and footers, page number, and such) but different fonts, paragraph spacing, and different treatment of, say, in-text notes or warnings, you could use the same template but different style sets.

I think the advantages or disadvantages will be discovered when lots of people start using the feature.

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Right now, the most popular use of style sets is to change the defaults from the W2007 style set (1.15 line spacing and 10 pts after) to W2003’s. I changed normal styleand defaults in normal.dotm to my preferred settings before I knew much about style sets, but later noticed that the style set and theme features didn’t work consistently. Style sets work by changing the document defaults, so if the normal style has its own settings, they won’t change when the default settings change.

From what I’ve read in Word forums, most document developers and formatters are not concerned so much about new features and instead are concerned with making sure documents work in W2007 as they did in W2003. And most of the docs will, but because of settings in the normal style, they may not work as expected with style sets. So that’s another reason we haven’t seen much talk about style sets. BTW, I fixed my normal style after reading this
MS Word team blog. (Well, my main reason for the change was for tables.) You may find it useful.

Pam

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Right now, the most popular use of style sets is to change the defaults from the W2007 style set (1.15 line spacing and 10 pts after) to W2003’s. I changed normal styleand defaults in normal.dotm to my preferred settings before I knew much about style sets, but later noticed that the style set and theme features didn’t work consistently. Style sets work by changing the document defaults, so if the normal style has its own settings, they won’t change when the default settings change.

From what I’ve read in Word forums, most document developers and formatters are not concerned so much about new features and instead are concerned with making sure documents work in W2007 as they did in W2003. And most of the docs will, but because of settings in the normal style, they may not work as expected with style sets. So that’s another reason we haven’t seen much talk about style sets. BTW, I fixed my normal style after reading this
MS Word team blog. (Well, my main reason for the change was for tables.) You may find it useful.

Pam

Thanks for the responses. I particularly appreciated the link. It helped me to understandd the direction I think I want to move it.

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For individual users, the new style sets feature might be helpful, because it provides a quick way to change the ‘styles theme’ of a document, without your having to go in and redefine the properties of each of the built-in styles.

For many organizations, the new style sets feature could present a nightmare. Organizations often use custom style definitions in their templates to enforce a standard and consistent look to their documents, whether it’s a ‘house style’ consistent across a number of different document types produced, or whether it’s for specific types of documents, like reports, that need to have a very specific and particular set of styles.

The style sets feature is dangerous if you’re an organization that needs to enforce standardized style formatting, because it puts in the hands of users a powerful way to subvert the standardized style – even if accidentally!

I’d recommend that organizations that use custom styles, advise their users that the style sets feature is off-limits.

A related new feature, that I think is best left turned off for organizational users, is Live Preview. It’s a powerful feature, but it makes it way too easy for a user to accidentally hose the entire formatting for a document.

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I believe there’s an option in the Styles Manager to block style set switching — but presumably someone (an IT person?) would have to enable that option on individual users’ work stations after making sure that the active Style Set on each machine was the one the organization wanted to use as a default.

No?

Incidentally, it’s my understanding that the Default.dotx (the file that contains the settings found in the “Word 2007” Style Set) can be modified, which might be useful in certain situations. Of course, I typically make a backup before modifying any built-in files, especially those that contain default settings.

Jan

For individual users, the new style sets feature might be helpful, because it provides a quick way to change the ‘styles theme’ of a document, without your having to go in and redefine the properties of each of the built-in styles.

For many organizations, the new style sets feature could present a nightmare. Organizations often use custom style definitions in their templates to enforce a standard and consistent look to their documents, whether it’s a ‘house style’ consistent across a number of different document types produced, or whether it’s for specific types of documents, like reports, that need to have a very specific and particular set of styles.

The style sets feature is dangerous if you’re an organization that needs to enforce standardized style formatting, because it puts in the hands of users a powerful way to subvert the standardized style – even if accidentally!

I’d recommend that organizations that use custom styles, advise their users that the style sets feature is off-limits.

A related new feature, that I think is best left turned off for organizational users, is Live Preview. It’s a powerful feature, but it makes it way too easy for a user to accidentally hose the entire formatting for a document.

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Jan,

Up til now my use of Word 2007 has mainly been dabbling on my home PC, so my thoughts on effects on organizations are just ‘thinking ahead’. Thanks for the heads up about those settings; will take a look.

Gary

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One thing that is useful with Style Sets is that only the styles which are in the Quick Style Gallery are saved to the Quick Style Set. You can clear all of the styles out of the Quick Style Gallery (write a macro to do that), and then add, for example, Heading 1 through Heading 5 by right-clicking in the Styles Pane and adding those styles to the QSG. Once saved as a personal Quick Style Set, you can then easily apply that Quick Style Set to another document. But only Heading 1 – Heading 5 will be copied into the document. It’s like using the Organizer to copy *specific* styles. It’s actually very useful when you get the hang of it. Heading styles with outline numbering seem well-suited to Quick Styles Sets. Unfortunately, when a Quick Style Set is applied to the document, only those styles are displayed in the Quick Style Gallery. Styles previously in the QSG are removed.

In a business setting, the Quick Style Sets can be distributed to the personal Quick Styles folder (which does not exist until first use) under the user profile. Word does not seem to recognize Quick Style Sets that are added to the public QS folder. If you delete the native files from that folder, those Quick Style Sets will not display. But if you add to that folder, nothing new appears in the list of Quick Style Sets. I would have thought that Word would “see” all files in that folder, but non-native files are apparently ignored.

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… I am setting up personalized templates for Letters, Commentary, Memoes, etc. But in looking at Style Sets, I am wondering what is the difference between creating a new letter using File, New, using Letter.dotm OR using Style Set, MyNameLetter? Are there advantages of using one way or the other????

If I understand them correctly (from reading on the web), style sets are an independent group of style definitions. Regardless of the original or current template for the active document, applying a style set overwrites the style definitions in the document (similar to using the Copy feature of the Organizer, but hopefully without the bugs). Style sets might be especially useful if you have to “clean up” old or third party documents. However, you cannot store layout or predefined text in a style set, so you will still want custom templates for commonly generated documents.

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It seems to me also that you would need an actual template rather than just a different style set if you wanted to have variety in things like margins, headers and footers and so on.

Ian

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