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Subject:RE: Word without proliferation of styles From:"Dan Goldstein" <DGoldstein -at- riverainmedical -dot- com> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 16 Mar 2011 17:28:10 -0400
That depends. Assuming that we're talking about the infamous "Char"
styles, I know a few easy macros for getting rid of them.
Another approach would be to search for text that's in your original
styles, and still in the original default font. Mark that text, and then
convert everything else to plain text. That way, at least you won't lose
the stuff that wasn't tainted.
-----Original Message-----
From: McLauchlan, Kevin
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 5:10 PM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Word without proliferation of styles
Document was created in Word 2003, several years ago, and great care was
taken to create and use only a limited set of styles (none based on
Normal), with almost no spot formatting.
Document was then used by other parties as basis for documenting an
offshoot product. The other persons entirely ignored styles, did
everything via spot formatting, and even imported sections from other
docs - which brought in hundreds more styles.
Offshoot product became mainstream and landed back on my table.
I stopped counting at around 1000 "styles".
I'm thinking that the best approach is to just suck it all into Notepad,
then start pasting, piecemeal, into a clean LibreOffice document, and
applying the clean style scheme from there.
But, if there's a reasonable way to attack the clean-up in Word, I might
try that.
This is not something I expect to do every year, or even three, so it's
not really worthwhile to invest a lot of money or time in tools or
learning the scripting or otherwise ramping up to tackle just two docs,
totaling less than 300 pages between 'em.
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