MS Word - changing old docs to new styles

[<neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>]

I have a large set of docs that have become variously formatted over time. I would like them to adhere to one set of standard styles, and I know exactly how I would do it if I were using a markup language: I would write a few emacs macros that would identify the non-standard markup and make it right.

Unfortunately, everything is in MS Word, and I'm not having too much luck finding any way to do the work other than slogging through the docs making replacements for everything by hand, hoping I'm doing it right, and then checking up to make sure Word hasn't decided to mess up something else while I was in there. Yes, I attach my new template instead of Normal.dot, but there's still all the by-hand work to do.

I'd really like to have an automated way to handle this problem, as additional "existing" docs continue to appear as SMEs take old pre-standards documentation and use it as a template for new material.

Am I missing some tool or technique that'll make it easy?

Should I export all to XML and run an emacs macro on the XML code? Word's XML is, to say the least, immense.


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