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Re: Wrestling with MS Templates and Styles

Subject: Re: Wrestling with MS Templates and Styles
From: quills -at- airmail -dot- net
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 22:59:57 -0500


Welcome to Microsoft Word, where you work the way Microsoft has decided you will work. Period. You cannot get rid of the "Normal" or other system styles that come with MS Word.

To get around this, create your own styles without using the MS Word tag names, and use the User only setting to display them.

There is only one assumption you can make about other users and Word. They know even less about using the Styles, etc. than you do. As for enforcing a style usage, I recommend either a .45 Government model Colt, .44 AutoMag, or .50 caliber machinegun. In other words, you probably won't be able to enforce any style guide in your company without the energetic support of ALL senior management.

Your best bet is to arm yourself with the authority to approve release of any document that you want to have the Style. No on but yourself should be authorized to publish any document that you are responsible for writing and/or maintaining.

Scott


At 3:47 PM -0700 4/30/03, Jerry Franklin wrote:

Greetings, all.
<snip>

I've created a house template, but despite consulting several manuals and
articles I remain unable to delete many unwanted styles (e.g. "Normal" and
the native "Heading" styles). I can change them -- I just can't delete them,
and I don't want any extraneous styles to appear in my template. I also seem
unable to override someone else's standard "Normal" template with my own, no
matter how many times I try to attach my template; invariably I seem to have
to move, delete, re-format, and/or reapply the same styles, repeatedly.

My ideal situation: A template populated solely with locked-in styles that I
created. I'd like to be able to paste content from other Word docs into this
template and not have the other docs' styles intrude, and I'd also like to
share this template with others and have them return their docs to me in the
exact same template, without my having to reapply styles, or attach my
template, or what-have-you. In a related matter, I've also been unable to
have Word open up with my template, instead of the Normal template, even
though I've tried scrupulously to follow the instructions in Word Help and
the Word 2000 Bible to do this (I keep getting an unrecognized path error
message).

So I'd love to learn about some best practices vis-a-vis creating,
disseminating, and enforcing a discrete house style. Should I be creating a
style sheet instead of futzing around with templates? Is it operator
ignorance or error? Or could I have a funky instance of Word? And who
figured out you could eat an artichoke, and how?

Jerry Franklin
jfranklin -at- zantaz -dot- com

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