Replies

Thanks for the idea. It is now working. But I don’t know why.

I had looked at the display name and found nothing wrong – no leading space, wrong spelling or anything. A few minutes ago, I changed the display name to “me” and it worked, so I pasted the original display name back and it still works.

Thanks for your time.
Judith

Julia,

I’m glad our ideas are helping you. Here are some more suggestions.

0) The screen shots didn’t attach. Be careful with screen shots, they often exceed the 100K limit for attachments.

1) I’ve noticed that you have used all uppercase. Unless you really need it in capitals, you should use upper and lower case – it is much more readable.

2) Getting rid of blank lines like Stuart suggested is a very good idea.

3) I notice you have put blank spaces in song 4. Blank spaces are a bad idea. If you want to keep “Sai Ram” together, put a non-break space between the words not a normal space. Use Insert->Symbol->Special Characters->Nonbreaking Space.

4) To be consistent with the styles I defined for you, get rid of the capital letters in your new styles and make them Chorus Line and Translation Spanish Line.

One reason for being absolutely consistent is that it is much easier to make changes later.

Best of luck,
Judith

The incrementatl distance that the border moves seems to be related to the grid settings. These are found under Draw on the drawing toolbar.
The grid setting need to be changed if you are trying to create a consistent metric document because they (like the default tab stops) are in fractions of an inch not in cm.
Here is the macro I use on each new Word installion.

Sub FixGridMetric()
‘ make the grid and tab stops metric

‘ FixGridMetric Macro
‘ Macro recorded 30/08/2005 by Judith McCrea
‘
With ActiveDocument
.SnapToGrid = True
.SnapToShapes = False
.GridDistanceHorizontal = CentimetersToPoints(0.1)
.GridDistanceVertical = CentimetersToPoints(0.1)
.GridSpaceBetweenHorizontalLines = 1
.GridSpaceBetweenVerticalLines = 1
.GridOriginFromMargin = True
End With
Options.DisplayGridLines = False

‘ Fix default tabs
ActiveDocument.DefaultTabStop = CentimetersToPoints(1)

End Sub

Hope this helps your understanding of what the table borders are doing.
Judith

Thanks for the reply. It’s getting closer now.

2 is recognised as FALSE since it’s not 1 – but in the real document the bookmarks P1, P2 etc are never on the same page.

I found I had to add an operator and a second expression.

The final field is pretty complex and will need to be revised if I add a Part 9 but it seems to work OK.

The first page of each Part has a local TOC. If the toc goes to a second page, the header is wrong, but that’s not as bad as having the header wrong for the first page of each Part.

Thanks,
Judith

The macro seems to have another consequence.

Because this macro does not select on sty.Inuse, it also affects all built-in paragraph styles that aren’t in use, and because of this they become InUse.
This is probably good. When I’m trying to control users, I find it best to redefine ALL built-in styles to my standard because otherwise users can switch from StylesInUse to AllStyles and chose a style Microsoft have defined.

If you don’t like this effect, you could combine this macro with Hans’s one.

Regards,
Judith

Julia,
We seem to have thrown you in the deep end – but believe me it’s necessary. What you are trying to do is quite sophisticated, and what you’ll learn by doing it will stand you in good stead. Once you’ve found the power of styles, you’ll save so much time and effort.

Numbering in Word is full of bugs! Some are by design and some are just bugs. Shauna’s article is the best starting point I know for avoiding the bugs.

As Stuart said, you need the Outline list because you have two levels.
The point I must stress is “Never change numbering or indents without starting at the highest level of the outline list”.

In your case, always start at First Song Line. You can change the font, space before, justification, language and other features of Other Song Line using Format->Style.

To put it another way, if a feature can be changed through Format->Style->Numbering change it there and NEVER anywhere else.

Let us know how you go.

Judith

Julia,

By the way, you don’t need numbers for an Index. Perhaps you mean Table of Contents?

Are you familiar with styles? Styles are the most powerful feature of Word.

Here is how I would approach the problem:
– Create 2 styles – “Other Song Line” and “First Song Line”
– Change Style for next paragraph in First Song Line to Other Song line.
– Set them up using outline numbering with First Song Line numbered and Other Song Line bulleted.
Be very careful to follow the advice in http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/numbering/…eNumbering.html

I have attached a sample.

Best of luck,
Judith

Thanks Stuart.

I added the parameter to leave nested tables (which are usually real tables) and changed the separator to paragraph mark since the first column of each layout table is usually a Heading 5 that I want to keep.

I cleaned up a 300 page document in seconds. Now I can change a few styles and remove the blank lines and print the finished document!

Thanks again,
Judith

Sub delTablesWithoutBorders()
‘macro to remove borderless tables used for layout in Information Mapping
Dim tbl As Table

For Each tbl In ActiveDocument.Tables
If Not tbl.Borders.Enable Then
tbl.ConvertToText Separator:=wdSeparateByParagraphs, NestedTables:=False
End If
Next tbl

End Sub

Dennis,
I’ve met documents like this with the main body formatted as Header and then direct formatted to “look right” – it’s a real nuisance to sort out.

Have you used the “Style area”? – in Normal and Outline view, you can open up a narrow area on the left that shows the name of the style used in the paragraph. (This doesn’t work in tables).
Also , I use “Reveal formatting” and turn on “Distinguish style source”.

One more thing about character formatting: It acts like a TOGGLE; for example, if your paragraph style font is italic (say you’ve defined a style “DirectQuote” and you apply the character style “Citation” to the name of a book within the paragraph, this will turn OFF the italic since both the paragraph style and the character style toggle italic.

Good luck.
Judith

Thanks Klaus,

I missed those problems. Thanks for listing them.

I’ve just added your macro to my “Fix Up Bugs” toolkit.

I come from a Markup background and NEVER use direct character formatting – Styles for everything!
I have mostly managed to avoid numbered lists (so no resets) and usually don’t worry whether the sub-headings start new pages or not.
Which is why I didn’t think of Restart Numbering as direct formatting.
Thanks for the warning.
Judith

I used Document Map for the first time today and yes the Gremlins attacked the document.

I checked the Help and found Yes the gremlins are by design!

I’m just wondering about a simple fix. I never use direct formatting. If I use Select All ^A, followed by Reset Paragraph, will this fix all the outline levels without affecting any character formatting?

If so, I could use it when I first notice the gremlins, unlike ^Z which must be used immediately after the Doc Map is opened.

Regards,
Judith

Dennis,

You’re looking for the labour intensive way to do it. There’s an easier and more permanent way.

Word has some excellent features including character styles. Why not define a Character Style, for example, “Citation”? Make the style italic. Add this style to your formatting toolbar just next to the italic button. From now on whenever you are citing a book, apply the style “Citation” instead of directly formatting it italic.

To bring all your existing documentation up to your new standard, do a search and replace and replace all italic text with the style “citation”.

Words etc formatted with a character style rarely change when the surrounding paragraph changes style.

Good luck,
Judith

The network method has its own set of problems. I found that if anyone else had an open document attached to the template, I (with full permissions) still could not update the template because it was open. It was not practical to try to make everyone exit Word when I wanted to update the template.

We solved this by having a Drive G: where the template owner (me) had full rights, and a Drive H: where everyone (including me) had read only. Each night, the IT dept copied the templates from G: to H: even if the template on H: was in use by an open document.

This worked particularly well giving us a <24 hour turn around time for template updates.

Judith

Hi,
If your headers are different because they reflect the chapter name, you can create the different headers using a StyleRef field and accept the “Same as previous” setting. For example, StyleRef Heading 1 inserts the text from the most recent Heading 1. So the header changes as the chapter title changes.

In fact, many of my documents have only one section (or 3 if there is an index) thus avoiding all the problems of section breaks.

For a more detailed header I might use two levels of heading:
{STYLEREF “Heading 1” * MERGEFORMAT} – {STYLEREF “Heading 2” * MERGEFORMAT} or use Chapter on left page and Heading 2 on right page.

Regards,
Judith

The icon you have described is probably Notepad. Somehow your system has been set to open Word documents using Notepad.

I assume the files are .doc files. Try this:
Right click on any .doc file.
Select Open With..
Select Choose Program…
Scroll down and select Word
Mark the box “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file”
Select OK.

From now on all .doc files should show the Word icon.

Regards,
Judith