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Thanks so much, this did nicely. I actually had to take out the error checking because I use en-dashes instead of zeros, and apparently that doesn’t count as numeric. go figure

I’m impressing the hell out of my workmates, and that can’t be a bad thing in this economy.

DeltaView does not have a WordPerfect version — Comparerite did have both WP and Word versions, but I think Comparerite is no longer around.

I defer to the information presented on Charles Kenyon’s site, AddBalance, that numbering schemes are stored in the Registry, without a front end to sharing customization (although there appears to be an easy work-around presented on AddBalance) and that using numbering without using styles can lead to document corruption. Again, the WP users I worked with relied on direct formatting rather than styles, your users may be more used to styles.

Caution: It has been about 2.5 years since I have dealt with WP, and somewhat longer since I worked a word processing legal job.

The people I knew switching from WP to Word always found it a huge deal about reveal codes, not because they couldn’t discover the barely-equivalent feature in Word’s task pane, but because the concept of storing formatting information in the ending paragraph mark in an opaque manner was so completely different from WP. They were accustomed to editing their formatting as they typed text, rather than treating typing and formatting as separate processes. This becomes particularly apparent when dealing with section formatting, and as I recall, a tremendous amount of direct formatting applied rather than creating proper styles.

In the legal field, outline numbering is a VERY BIG DEAL, and Word’s outline numbering is structured to work best for students writing academic papers in a solo manner. Documents in a law office, which are shared/edited with multiple people/computers across networks, make Word’s outline numbering explode in a very messy way. ESPECIALLY with Word’s so-called helpfulness in the default AUTO-FORMAT options.

Blacklining/redlining and versioning tend to be legal features — in my limited experience, law firms did better to pick up DeltaView to compare documents rather than relying on TRACK CHANGES and/or COMPARE SIDE-BY-SIDE, but you may want to discuss this. Also, I was always cautioned against using Word’s native versioning feature (although I cannot recall specifics)

Is your law firm using any sort of third-party document management software? If not, how do they identify their documents? The documents property window and some custom fields may be of interest to them.

Sounds like TRACK CHANGES is on. Go to the Tools menu and turn it off.

I think we need to hear more of the WHY you are attempting this task. My only solutions are somewhat ungraceful, because PPT was not designed with that end in mind — most humans see full-color, and those that do not have their own “gray-scale converter” . Is the subject of the presentation related to color/grayscale? Graphic pros will tell you that converting color to greyscale is not an automated click and forget. There are subtleties that require an interactive, informed approach.

If you have a PDF creation tool (such as Acrobat Standard) I think printing the grayscale 4-to-a-page handouts to PDF would enable you to send or post electronically a consolidated grayscale version of your presentation — you could open up the PDF on most modern PCs/Macs, rather than open the PPT. The PDF is not easily editable, it would be easier to edit the PPT, then redo the print to PDF as needed.

PDF pros will tell you that you should have some idea of the final output method, there are some tweaks that may come into play.

If the above doesn’t suit, You should probably recolor your graphics individually to a “gray-scale” format before sending to Word — it’s tricky to do inside of PPT, I would recommend instead a true graphics program (Corel/Adobe). I would also design a POT file inside of PPT which would only have black, white & grays in the color scheme. So it would be fix in graphic program, paste into new version of the PPT file using the “bw.pot”, then send to Word.

Hitting the F8 key four times usually selects the paragraph, if your cursor is already somewhere in the correct paragraph but I’m not sure that the macro recording is smart enough to allow you to do what you are hoping for.

I’m not a great macro writer, either, but it is helpful to record the macro, and then go in to edit the macro just to see what the recorder has written. In many cases, an experienced Word user will recognize portions of the code. Copying the written code in a message here gives other Loungers a better idea of what you are trying to accomplish, and sometimes they will give you suggestions of what to write.

As a guess, I would say that printer drivers may be slightly different between the 2 systems. When pasting to Word, are you pasting inside a table or to an empty NORMAL paragraph, and are the pictures significantly larger or smaller than you expected? Is the page orientation of the Excel chart the same as the orientation of the Word document? Do the margins of the Excel chart include headers/footers?

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.

I’m partial to the INSIDE OUT series for reference (Word, Excel, etc.) as I find helpful to flesh out my explanations to end-users. It’s thorough, though I’m not sure I believe its assurances about the Master Document features. In a similar serious vein, Que’s Special Edition Using Word is also excellent. If you are looking at a more “how do I fix frelling Word” I like the “annoyances” series and Woody Leonard’s Office 2003 Timesaving Techniques for Dummies is just BRILLIANT for how to set up Word (and others) in the first place so it isn’t fighting you. Though technically not a book, Clive Huggans has an excellent book-length Word document about controlling Word and using features smartly. It’s was written about Word’s Mac version, but it nearly perfectly applicable to the Windows version.

An excellent bit of reference is the Word MVP FAQs and Shauna Kelly’s Word site in addition to this fine forum and the Word newsgroups.

Lastly, I’m sure a search of this forum will yield you messages about other people’s recommendations. I suspect most people will say that there isn’t a single Word book that adequately trains users in the intermediate to advanced features because needs vary so greatly. The legal users versus the technical writers versus the mail-merge demon all use intermediate features but with less overlap than you would think.

I can sympathize easily about having to clean up after other people’s ill-behaved documents, but all my “solutions” involve reworking the bad material.

You can strip the formatting of the text before you copy it into a document and format it after it has been pasted into your target document. Keyboard shortcuts, and/or macros provide some speed in doing this). I was taught to select the entire document and turn it to normal, copy, paste, save the new document and then NOT SAVE the original document. I could then reopen the original document to see what the original style looked like and format similarly in the new document. Turning everything to normal and then applying a style seemed to be less prone to corruption than pasting with style/format intact and then making changes.

Have you carefully looked at the Word settings/preferences– TOOLS, OPTIONS, EDIT , PROMPT TO UPDATE STYLE as well as TOOLS, TEMPLATES & ADD-INS, AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE DOCUMENT STYLES, and TOOLS, AUTOCORRECT, AUTOFORMAT, PRESERVE STYLES. The changes that Microsoft applied to styles seem wacky to those of us who have worked with Word for several years — it hands off style control to MS, when it sounds as though YOU would like to have tighter control.

I learned not to use the normal style much in my documents or the body text style — I have instead TEXT or PLAINTEXT for most of my document. I retrained myself to always select a paragraph when applying styles — I’m fortunate that I don’t have a need for character styles. Further, I am pretty strict about using other templates besides NORMAL.DOT wherever I can. At least 1/3 of my documents are either 1-page letters, or our monthly report, so I have MYLETTER.DOT and SUMREPORT.DOT

My own organizational technique would simply be to make subfolders inside the MY DOCUMENTS folder, i.e., a folder entitled New Hire and have all the forms in that subfolder. One thing I find really crucial is to have a footer in EVERY SINGLE document which includes the file path & name — I set it to be in Arial Narrow 8-point size in grey, so it is unobtrusive, but in this way anyone can tell where to locate a file.

However, if you would like to store “several” documents, there’s nothing to stop you. The very rough equivalent to worksheets would be SECTIONS. Each document probably should be separated by section breaks — section breaks can be found in the menu INSERT, BREAK, SECTION BREAK, NEW PAGE. You can print individual sections if you need to. You can change the margins of each section to suit the particular form. If you use a heading style for the title of each document (Heading 1) rather than normal, you can use the DOCUMENT MAP to jump to any section. You can also use the F5 key to move to a particular section. If you use a heading style, you can create a “table of contents” with hyperlinks to each of the sections.

From my many years working for investment banks and pasting charts, here are some practices I adhere to:
The chart should be on a separate chart sheet in Excel, not on the same sheet as the data

The chart sheet should be sized (FILE, PAGE SETUP) so that the chart is approximately the final size it should be in Word. You can look HERE for some sizing hints.

Linking in Word is fragile — one has to make dead certain that the linked file hasn’t been moved and the file with the links hasn’t been moved either, and the link code is absolutely perfect. The code uses relative URLs, and I generally avoid linking unless there isn’t an option. I actually prefer to paste the chart as a picture, and include a comment on where the Excel file lives. It does mean I have to repaste the picture when I make edits, but I find that a cleaner way to operate.

I prefer to have either a style defined just for pictures, or a 1-cell table to keep the picture well-behaved

One can make “bookmarks” and name those. A bookmark can be anything from a single character to a lengthy selection that might include an entire section. Bookmarks can be flaky, though. The naming convention for bookmarks don’t allow for spaces; bookmarks are normally invisible, so it can be tricky to see the boundaries to avoid overwriting them; and overlapping bookmarks can be created inadvertently.

You can design a CONDITIONAL FOOTER in footer 1 that says IF this is the last page of the document, print this in the footer by using the IF FIELD, else stay blank. In section one the footer might look something like this: /

{ IF { PAGE } = { numpages} “last page footer text or footer fields”,”” }

The curly braces must be inserted by using CTRL-F9, you cannot manually type them. Using this NESTED FIELD approach, you don’t have to put in a section break. The Lounge has a search function where you can see other people’s threads about this and get the exact syntax.

There has been some discussion at Macintouch regarding this, with it appearing to be an Apple Mail issue (someone suggested that Mail reads HTML (via the Safari web browser HTML rendering engine) but sends only plain text OR RTF, not HTML mail). My version of Mail (1.2.5) indeed only lists these two options, but I use MS Entourage as my mail client which explicitly allows HTML and Plain. If your Mac friend has tried Firefox, he/she may be interested in trying out Thunderbird as a mail client, or Eudora or other mail client that fully supports HTML format. I haven’t tried, but possibly using the SAVE AS feature in Mail will allow the HTML to be preserved and sending that file as an attachment will allow the images to be seen in-line once you open that particular attachment.

For many Mac questions, I find the MacFixIt forums to be useful.