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Peggy Lucero reports: <<... someone has build a WORD template that all are
suppose to use when creating documentation.
I was given this template after I'd put a lot of work into a software
engineering document (build in WORD 2002). Can anyone advise me of the
fastest way for me to get my non-compliant document into the Dept.'s WORD
template?>>
Yup. Start by opening the document and moving a copy of the departmental
template into the Templates directory for your version of Word. (In older
versions, it was C\programs\microsoft office\templates but it may have
changed in Word 2002.) If the template is on the network and can't be moved
or copied, open the Tools menu, select Templates and Add-ins, then select
and "attach" the template on your network. Same result, but longer path.
Now, open the Format menu and select Style Gallery. Choose the correct
template, and you're halfway there. Now comes the hard part: you'll have to
work through the document to replace all your styles with the department's
styles. For example, if all your paragraphs are formatted as Normal but the
department's paragraphs are formatted as Body Text, you need to replace each
Normal paragraph with Body Text.
Fortunately, you can do this using the Find and Replace dialog box. With the
cursor in the Find field, click the More button, then the Format button, and
select Style. You can now specify what style you're searching for (in this
example, Normal). Repeat these steps in the Replace with field to define the
replacement style (here, Body Text). Click "replace all". Repeat for each of
your styles that needs to be converted.
Of course, nothing is ever this simple in Word... now you'll have to go
through and make sure that the style information was applied correctly. If
you override a paragraph's style by (for example) selecting a word and
pressing Control-I to italicize it, you'll find that the paragraph didn't
pick up the new template's styles, even though it displays the correct style
name in the Formatting toolbar. (Word figures that if you really wanted to
override the style, it shouldn't prevent you?) Select the entire paragraph
and press Control-Spacebar to remove the manual formatting and reapply the
template style's formatting. You'll lose things such as custom indents,
boldface, italics, etc., but these are easy to restore manually.
--Geoff Hart, ghart -at- [delete]videotron -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my
telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my
telephone."--Bjarne Stroustrup (originator of C++ programming language)
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