Re: System for cleaning up legacy Word docs?

[Suzy -dot- Davis -at- doi -dot- vic -dot- gov -dot- au]

Rebecca

Apart from the other great advice you've already received regarding styles
and templates, Peter's point below is the best way to start, but I would
skip the section breaks as well and recreate them in your new doc.  Also be
suspicious of graphics that may be corrupted.    Legacy documents are
notorious for having survived multiple crashes, and are therefore most
likely to be corrupted.

In summary:
1. Create a clean template with the styles you need.  (Rename your Normal
template so that Word generates a new Normal template, and create your
template.)
2. Create a new document from your template, and copy your document over
section by section, and without the last paragraph mark.
3. Remove formatting and apply your styles (as described in other posts)
4. Create a new document from your template and copy your document over
without the last paragraph mark.  (You now shouldn't have any of the legacy
styles left in your style list).

As a new user to Word you might find it useful to subscribe to the Word-PC
list:
mailto:word-pc-subscribe-request -at- liverpool -dot- ac -dot- uk to join
(no subject or command text required)

regards
Suzy





                                                                                                                                                    
                      <neilson -at- alltel -dot- net>                                                                                                          
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                      echwr-l.com                           Subject:  Re: System for cleaning up legacy Word docs?                                  
                                                                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                                    
                      06/01/05 08:05 AM                                                                                                             
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Rebecca Stevenson asks:
> I'm going to spending a lot of time in the near
> future working on legacy Word documents...

Sometimes if things are a real mess what you need to do is
to copy everything except document's final paragraph mark
and paste it into a new document.  Then use your own
styles on the new document.

The reason is that Word stores all the nasty formatting
information inside that final paragraph mark.  (Umm, I'm
assuming that you ALWAYS have Word set for
tools/options/view/formatting marks/all
so that you can see what Word is doing to you.)

Unfortunately Word has nothing like Wordperfect's reveal
codes.  Even if you think you know what it's doing, you
may still be wrong!

--Peter Neilson
  North Carolina








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