Word heading styles going askew (Word 2002 /XP SP3)

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Hello

Our Word documents contain heading styles 1 – 7, setup with automatic numbering.

Our workflow process is we send and share our Word documents with our clients. When the documents return back into our offices, the document formatting is gone askew. Alot of time is then spent on reformatting and tidying up the appearance of the Word document, for large documents a minimum of 2hrs is spent on reformatting.

Is there any way we can make these heading styles stable and “fixed”, to minimise our time in reformatting the documents? Do you know of any tools that clean up or recorrect the heading styles?

many thanks
diana

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One thing that helps, a bit, is to define all your styles in a template and to set Tools > Templates and Add-ins… > Automatically update document styles.

You could also try selecting all your headings, and typing Control-Space followed by Control-Q.

StuartR

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Thanks Richard, Stewart.

Stewart – what function does the Control-Space followed by Control-Q?

many thanks DD

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Control-Space clears all manually added font attributes (bold, size, colour etc.)
Control-Q clears all manually added paragraph attributes (indents, line spacing, bullets etc.)

StuartR

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(Edited by HansV to make URL clickable – see Help 19. BTW, his name is Stuart)

Thanks Stewart.

Anyone had experience with this software product Numbering Assist from PayneConsulting group?

http://www.payneconsulting.com/products/metadataent/%5B/url%5D

diana

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We use Payne’s Numbering Assistant and it works great! Can’t say enough about it.

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In Word 2000 and earlier,( I haven’t tested later versions) it also removes all CHARACTER STYLES.
I consider this a bug.

Regards,

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Sorry, I should have warned you about that. You can find a Macro attached to post 309,846 which will enable you to reset formatting without losing character formatting.

StuartR

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Hi Diana,

When a document is sent outside the firm for editing by client, you never know what’s been done to it while out of your control. If the numbering scheme has been edited many times, this can lead to corruption. If the client copies from a WordPerfect document (or some other source) and doesn’t use Paste Special to paste into the Word document, corruption is sure to follow at some point. If you are suspicious about a document, your best bet is to select the whole document, without the last paragraph mark, copy everything, and then paste into a new blank document. You’ll likely have to do some re-formatting, but you’ll be fairly sure of having left any corruption behind. If you reformat the same document, you may be just fixing these cosmetically, but the real problem lurks beneath the surface.

One thing Word doesn’t like is blank paragraphs. Be sure to use styles with space after (or before) rathen than using a blank paragraph as a spacer between paragraphs. If your document has a lot of tables, try to use line feeds (Shft-ENTER) within the tables where possible instead of paragraphs (ENTER). Lots of direct formatting (rather than unique styles) creates unhealthy documents as well. Generally speaking, the “Keep Track of Formatting” option is rather annoying. But you can turn it on to get a quick idea of what an outisde user might have done to the document. If corruption has started to build, it may be too late to apply proper styles. Create a new document.

Richard Barrett

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Be warned that control space will also remove character styles. I think this command should be to remove direct applied formatting, but leave all styles alone. Alas, that is not the case.

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Did you see post 560,557 above, this gives a link to a Macro that will remove all direct formatting but not character styles.

StuartR

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