Word 2007 style sets

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Hi all,

I work with an organisation that will shortly be upgrading to Office 2007 (I know…only 7 years behind the times ). This is a done deal and we are not able to upgrade to anything higher, though I would dearly love to go higher..

Anyway. I want to be able to roll out a specific set of styles that can be used within documents, and have achieved this in normal.dotx. When opening a new file, the styles that are available in the gallery are only the ones I want people to be able to use. I have created a Style set of this set of styles, and I have also managed to remove the extra quick styles to stop people from being tempted to use styles outside of the visual identity.

Everything works perfectly when you create a new file. However, when opening a file that already exists, or when creating a file from a template, the style gallery shows the standard Word 2007 styles – the blue Headings, italic subtitles etc, all in calibri. My Style set exists, in the Change Styles drop down, but I want this to be available in the gallery. It woudn’t be that difficult to go into the main templates and change the style set in the gallery to be mine – but if anyone is aware of a way that I can force my styles to display in the gallery I would be very grateful. Ideally I would also like a way to be able to force display of my styles int he gallery for all documents that are opened, even if they were created within out 2003 environment..

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks

Lauren

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Save the styles in your new normal template as a quick style set, e.g. “Normal styles”. Then when users open a document that was not based on your new normal template, they can apply quick style set “Normal styles”. You could force that on documents as they open, but you might be hiding styles that the user might need. If the user is in control, there’s less chance of such a situation.

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Thanks for the response Richard!

That is exactly what I have done – however we have a very specific visual ID and people should only be using the styles that are defined in normal and no others. I know that this sounds a bit anal, but our marketing department is determined that each document that goes out our door uses these styles and no others. I just know that if people open a document and are presented with Heading style in a lovely shade of blue in a non-compliant font, the temptation will be too much, and our marketing team will have kittens when they see it.

Thanks anyway!

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You might need to consider documents that originate outside your company, perhaps something you are collaborating on with a client or another business. If the document uses styles that aren’t in your style list, they might become inaccessible if you hide them because they are “not acceptable.” If a “foreign” document uses a numbering scheme based on something other than Headings 1 – 9, and you hide the styles used in the original document, your own users might be tempted to use Heading 2 instead of the level 2 style in the original document. I understand the desire for uniformity, and I agree with it, but you might be inviting trouble if you overzealously hide styles from the user. Savvy users will probably know how to show the styles that have been hidden, but it’s the not-so-savvy users that you need to consider. Of course, if you never collaborate on outside documents, none of this is an issue.

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Then you need to force an update of styles from the attached template upon opening. Note that this can be a document setting. If your documents are going outside your organization,this is a bad choice, though. See What happens when I send my document to someone else. If that is the situation, you will need an AutoOpen macro in your normal.dotm that imports the styles to each newly opened document. See A Global Stylesheet for Microsoft Word for an example of the code.

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Lauren

If you want to provide a shorter style list for users who have legacy documents then you will need to run a macro to do this. The following macro shows a way of organising a limited style list into an order you determine.

Code:

Sub CleanStyleList()
  Dim aSty As Style, i As Integer
  Dim bSimple As Boolean
  Dim sListNames As String, sList() As String
  
  For Each aSty In ActiveDocument.Styles
    aSty.Priority = 99
    aSty.Visibility = True
    If aSty.Type = wdStyleTypeParagraph Then aSty.QuickStyle = False
  Next aSty
  
  sListNames = "Normal,Heading 1,Heading 2,Heading 3,Heading 4,Heading 5,Caption,Caption Table," & _
                "List Multi,List Multi 2,List Bullet,List Bullet 2,List Number"
  sList = Split(sListNames, ",")

  For i = 0 To UBound(sList)
    Debug.Print sList(i)
    ActiveDocument.Styles(sList(i)).Priority = i + 2
    ActiveDocument.Styles(sList(i)).Visibility = False
    ActiveDocument.Styles(sList(i)).QuickStyle = True
  Next i
  
  'And show a table style
  ActiveDocument.Styles("Table Grid").Visibility = False
  
  'configure the style list to show only recommended styles in the recommended order
  ActiveDocument.FormattingShowFilter = wdShowFilterFormattingRecommended
  ActiveDocument.StyleSortMethod = wdStyleSortRecommended
End Sub

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If IT is willing to listen they might want to read these pages that suggest Office 2007 may have already reached End of Life, 1 year after release of SP3.
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/default.aspx?LN=en-us&x=13&y=12&p1=8753
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2526086/en-us

Before you wonder "Am I doing things right," ask "Am I doing the right things?"

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