How to control Styles? They seem to propogate like viruses!

[JustSomeGuy]

How does one maintain style control in team projects and prevent Word from
constantly corrupting one's style gallery with each text addition?

Word's styles, while intended to be a powerful document control tool, seem
to function in the 'real world' more like viruses, constantly multiplying
and 're-infecting' people's documents and projects.

Example: Create a master prooject template with all styles carefully
defined. Then use the master template to create a series of project
documents. All styles and formatting are perfectly controlled. Nothing Can
Go Wrong!...

....nothing, that is, until you start receiving documents from team members
and copy/pasting selected contents into your project documents, and copying
selected bits of text from your 'knowledge base' into the project.

Now all your perfectly controlled project documents are a chaos of new,
unwanted, conflicted, or oddly renamed styles, automatically imported by
Word and now running amok in your style library like bacteria in a petri
dish!

Getting all team members and all knowledge base content to adopt, and always
use, the same rigid style set would be an ideal, but frankly impossible
solution in the 'real world'. Even if it could be accomplished over a period
of many months, their styles would in turn be corrupted by other people's
styles as they worked on other projects, eventually migrating back into, and
corrupting, all future team projects.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

...nothing, that is, until you start receiving documents from team members
and copy/pasting selected contents into your project documents, and copying
selected bits of text from your 'knowledge base' into the project.

Edit/Paste Special/Unformatted Text. Apply appropriate style.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

...nothing, that is, until you start receiving documents from team members

Edit/Paste Special/Unformatted Text. Apply appropriate style.

In Word 2004, cmd-C, let it show the paste options button and select Match
Destination Formatting from it should also work, I believe. Or select Keep
Text Only as an alternative route to pasting unformatted text.

By the way: in Word 2004, if you try to record a macro for a keyboard
shortcut for these, recording via Edit Paste Special may not work, but
recording via the Paste Options button will work.

I vaguely believe the latest version of WinWord has made some provision to
fix this problem.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

This issue is the most worrying problem the Documentation Administrator
faces in corporate work.

The problem is that whenever text is pasted in from another document, Word
will copy in the styles applied to it. The exception is if you paste as
Plain Text, as recommended by Clive.

Mac Word is less likely to create style salad than PC word, because Mac Word
has so-far avoided the Char Char bug that afflicts PC Word 2002 and 2003.

What happens there is that unless the user knows to carefully select the
paragraph mark when applying styles, Word will create a new Character style
"based on" the chosen style (which may, itself, be a character style
produced by an earlier formatting operation) and apply that instead. As you
say: the document in the hands of an unskilled user rapidly becomes a toxic
soup of styles.

PC Word 2003 contains the ability to Protect the document for Styles, using
which you can lock the document so that only a defined list of styles can be
used. Regrettably, this protection is removed if the document is opened in
an earlier version of Word. We did not get the feature in Word 2004:
hopefully next time.

To overcome the char char bug, I use a simple one-line macro to apply each
style:

Sub ApplyNormal()
' Apply Normal Style
Selection.Paragraphs.Style = wdStyleNormal
End Sub
Sub ApplyGraphicStyle()
' Apply Graphics Style
Selection.Paragraphs.Style = "Graphics"
End Sub

I produce a special toolbar for "professional" documents that contains a
button for each of the styles I want the authors to use. The buttons call
these macros.

The effect of the macro is simply to apply the style to the entire
paragraph, even if the paragraph is only partially selected. Unskilled
users habitually work with their non-printing characters turned off, so they
have no idea that paragraph marks exist, let alone the importance of them.
(The paragraph mark is also the container that contains all of the
formatting and style information for the paragraph which it ends.)

The real answer to your question is "Use Protect Document for Formatting,
use XML file format, and use a validating parser." Unfortunately, those
three features are not available in Mac Word yet, but that's the way
forward, so start thinking about how you will implement it.

Microsoft has already announced that XML will be the default file format in
the next version of Word, and Mac BU has announced that Mac Word will follow
suit in its next version.

The XML file format is a W3C published recommendation.

Microsoft makes a validating parser available for Windows XP as a free
download. I am not sure where to get one for the Mac.

To use a validating parser, you first need a valid Document Type Definition.
Microsoft Word XML includes a DTD for WordML. There are various commercial
or industry DTDs available. However these tend to be "loose" -- in other
words, they are designed to be as unrestrictive and easy to use as possible.
To these you need to add your own in-house DTD that defines rules the
document is required to follow: one of those rule sets being the style tags
that will be accepted as valid.

Getting all this together for a documentation activity is a solid bunch of
work: best get started

Hope this helps

How does one maintain style control in team projects and prevent Word from
constantly corrupting one's style gallery with each text addition?

Word's styles, while intended to be a powerful document control tool, seem
to function in the 'real world' more like viruses, constantly multiplying
and 're-infecting' people's documents and projects.

Example: Create a master prooject template with all styles carefully
defined. Then use the master template to create a series of project
documents. All styles and formatting are perfectly controlled. Nothing Can
Go Wrong!...

...nothing, that is, until you start receiving documents from team members

and copy/pasting selected contents into your project documents, and copying
selected bits of text from your 'knowledge base' into the project.

Now all your perfectly controlled project documents are a chaos of new,
unwanted, conflicted, or oddly renamed styles, automatically imported by
Word and now running amok in your style library like bacteria in a petri
dish!

Getting all team members and all knowledge base content to adopt, and always
use, the same rigid style set would be an ideal, but frankly impossible
solution in the 'real world'. Even if it could be accomplished over a period
of many months, their styles would in turn be corrupted by other people's
styles as they worked on other projects, eventually migrating back into, and
corrupting, all future team projects.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

The problem is that whenever text is pasted in from another document, Word
will copy in the styles applied to it. The exception is if you paste as
Plain Text, as recommended by Clive.

John, my fairly simple tests suggest that using Paste Options to paste Match
Destination Formatting also works to get the copied text to abandon its
style on entering the new document (Word 2004 only). Am I missing something?

Daiya

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Sounds good, thanks John.

I imagine my macro for Match Destination should work even if I have Paste
Options turned off.... I'll keep the list caveat in mind.

The AutoCorrect clipboards really get in my way sometimes, but paste options
has not been bothering me.

Daiya

 

[Clive Huggan]

John,

Putting the "paste as plain text" macro on to the INSERT key is a great idea
(currently I have it as Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-p). However, when I tried to do that, I
couldn't get the INS/Help key to register as a keystroke in the field
against "Press new shortcut key" (in the "Assign" area). But then, I'm using
the best-ever-but-ancient Saratoga keyboard, talking to USB in my PowerBook
via an iMate adaptor. Maybe that's the problem...

Cheers,
Clive
=======

On 18/6/05 10:14 AM, in article BED9A46C.187EF%[email protected], "John

 

[JustSomeGuy]

That's what's nice about these forums: everyday people get to converse with
Mensas! Many thanks for all the wise counsel!

John, I sure hope you're writing a book and planning on publishing it FAST
with lots of detailed end-user advice on exactly how Document Admins *and
users* can proactively plan for the 'new' XML-based Word. Your "Document
Admins" category includes hundreds of thousands of proposal and technical
documentation team managers & writers in organizations throughout the world,
many of whom are chronically slumped over their computers in tedious
exhaustion, battling with Word's pesky automated features on a daily basis.
Write that book and get ready to become very rich (if you're not already!)

This issue is the most worrying problem the Documentation Administrator
faces in corporate work.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

{Chortle} While I have no in-principle objection to becoming very rich, a
fellow MVP by the name of Bill Coan is already way ahead of me.

Check out his website:
http://www.wordsite.com/

The truly valuable stuff on XML will be appearing there (much of it already
has...)

Cheers

That's what's nice about these forums: everyday people get to converse with
Mensas! Many thanks for all the wise counsel!

John, I sure hope you're writing a book and planning on publishing it FAST
with lots of detailed end-user advice on exactly how Document Admins *and
users* can proactively plan for the 'new' XML-based Word. Your "Document
Admins" category includes hundreds of thousands of proposal and technical
documentation team managers & writers in organizations throughout the world,
many of whom are chronically slumped over their computers in tedious
exhaustion, battling with Word's pesky automated features on a daily basis.
Write that book and get ready to become very rich (if you're not already!)

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[JustSomeGuy]

PC Word 2003 contains the ability to Protect the document for Styles, using
which you can lock the document so that only a defined list of styles can be
used. Regrettably, this protection is removed if the document is opened in
an earlier version of Word. We did not get the feature in Word 2004:
hopefully next time.

John,

As a proposal manager, I got very excited about Sharepoint services, which
provides super team authoring capabilities, automated version checking, etc.
but without a Protect Styles feature that can survive earlier versions of
Word, and without having that feature in Word 2004/Mac, Sharepoint's team
authoring advantages were somewhat negated: I posted a carefully formatted
and styled set of project documents in a document workspace for team
authoring, but as I should have expected, as authorized users accessed and
progressively edited those .docs, they inevitably progressively corrupted
all the documents' style galleries.

The end result: when the team authoring was done, all the proposal section
documents posted on Sharepoint were nicely written, but a style nightmare,
requiring hours of tedious reformatting to make them publishable, just when
time was very short and delivery deadlines loomed.

It would have been nice if Microsoft could have anticipated this problem and
provided some kind of automated style management control or 'style locking'
as part of the SharePoint rollout. Failing to do that, only creates new
opportunities for users to get themselves into trouble with Microsoft's
software tools, and new opportunities to grumble about them! Microsoft's
Marketing Department should pay closer attention to this kind of thing!

Getting an entire 'virtual team' to use Word 2003 is impractical in many
cases; proposal teams are hastily assembled, often including people in other
locations, in other company divisions, or even in other companies teaming
with Company A on the proposal. You're never going to get them all using one
version of Word, and you're never going to get them to use one unified style
set or to follow a complex set of procedures.

Some software tools become so feature-rich, and so hard to deploy, learn and
use, that there's almost no time left to do any actual work with them - all
your time is being spent contending with problems and issues and learning
curves created by the tools themselves. However, we are making progress
here: I doubt many people would really want to go back to the Wonderful Days
of WordStar...

 

[Tim Murray]

As a proposal manager, I got very excited about Sharepoint services, which

provides super team authoring capabilities, automated version checking, etc.
but without a Protect Styles feature that can survive earlier versions of
Word, and without having that feature in Word 2004/Mac, Sharepoint's team
authoring advantages were somewhat negated: I posted a carefully formatted
and styled set of project documents in a document workspace for team
authoring, but as I should have expected, as authorized users accessed and
progressively edited those .docs, they inevitably progressively corrupted
all the documents' style galleries.

Have you given any thought to FrameMaker, particularly, structured Frame? It
has a learning curve, but it does offer a form of "locked-down" styles.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Yeah

As a proposal manager, I got very excited about Sharepoint services, which
provides super team authoring capabilities, automated version checking, etc.

Yeah, riiiight... SharePoint looks good on paper. The reality is very
different. SharePoint provides just enough functionality to be truly
dangerous, but not enough to make it safe.

SharePoint hands untrained users the keys to the corporate documentation
castle, so now they can do real damage to high-value documents

The designers of SharePoint seem to have missed the fact that in
professional large-scale documentation, project governance is far more
important than collaboration. Most times, my most urgent task is to PREVENT
more than one user from making changes to a document, not to allow it.

It would have been nice if Microsoft could have anticipated this problem and
provided some kind of automated style management control or 'style locking'
as part of the SharePoint rollout. Failing to do that, only creates new
opportunities for users to get themselves into trouble with Microsoft's
software tools, and new opportunities to grumble about them! Microsoft's
Marketing Department should pay closer attention to this kind of thing!

The Marketing Department will never understand the problem, and that's the
problem. Microsoft already has an answer: it's called Visual SourceSafe.
Sure, it has nowhere near the Enterprise-scalable robustness of Documentum
or Lotus Notes, but for the documentation management that most of us need in
the real world, it's the answer to a maiden's prayer. Check-in, Check-out,
version control, branching and combining, roll-forward and roll-back,
persistent locking. Best of all, it's utterly transparent to the users: set
up properly, the end user may never be aware that they are using documents
managed by VSS until they try to do something they shouldn't. Even checking
in and out can be automatic and transparent to the user.

What more do you *REALLY* need??

Getting an entire 'virtual team' to use Word 2003 is impractical in many
cases; proposal teams are hastily assembled, often including people in other
locations, in other company divisions, or even in other companies teaming
with Company A on the proposal.

I just completed a medium-scale proposal today. I know all about it. This
one was a tiddler: only 500 pages. The previous one ran to 2,500 pages
(plus another 2,500 pages of attachments...)

The real answer to all of this is XML, and that's coming as a native file
format in the next version of Word, on both PC and Mac.

Cheers

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410