Yeah. Unfortunately, Mac Word is "PC Word Lite". Microsoft in its wisdom
does not think that Mac Word will be used much for serious documentation, so
they have removed or disabled some of the power tools provided by PC Word
for the purpose.
However, that works to our advantage in this instance: because the feature
that causes this pain is one of the ones that got dropped from Mac Word.
It's normally referred to as the "Char char" bug on the PC Word side.
Officially, the extraneous styles are known as "Linked styles".
In PC Word, if you select some of a paragraph but your selection does not
include the paragraph mark, when you apply a style of type "paragraph", Word
creates and applies a new style of type "Character", linked to the parent
style, and containing only the character formatting properties.
These linked styles are what appear as multiple "versions" of the styles.
In Mac BU, they recognised the mechanism for the unbelievable stupidity that
it is, and disabled it. The contracted code monkey that created this idiocy
simply did not understand the fundamental "concept" of styles, and created a
mechanism that prevents styles achieving the purpose for which we use them.
There is no good work-around to it that is reliable. If you tell the PC
users to turn OFF Tools>Options>Edit "Keep track of formatting" you will
see a lot less of the problem, because then their task pane will display
only the parent styles. So while Word will still create linked styles, the
user will not be able to choose them when they apply styles.
Teaching users to run with the paragraph marks displayed so that they can
see what they are doing is never successful. They just won't, because they
see "formatting problems" as "someone else's problem".
You can (and I do...) provide such users with a template containing toolbars
full of the styles you want them to use. The buttons on the toolbars fire
macros to ensure that any styles applied are applied to the entire paragraph
regardless of the selection. And where it matters, I programmatically
inspect the document on save and mark the illegal formatting.
In Word 2003, you can use the Protect Document mechanism to restrict
formatting to a specified list of styles. We didn't get that feature in Mac
Word. Specifying it in PC Word works really well, but the specification is
abandoned when the document goes to 2004 or an earlier version of Word.
However, normally PC Word will not actually display the specific issue you
are complaining of. What has happened is that the List Template linked to
the Styles has been replaced or damaged. That will only happen if when the
PC user opens the document, something changes the styles. That is normally
caused by having Tools>Templates and Add-ins>Attach Template... Left set to
"Automatically update styles on open." If that is turned on, every time the
document is opened, its internal style table is overwritten by the one in
the template.
Due to another Microsoft design bug, when this overwrite happens, the List
Template that is attached to the replaced styles is not itself replaced, so
the list template linking is broken and your problem appears.
You can work-around this bug by attaching the document to a template OTHER
than the Normal template. Make sure you turn OFF "Automatically update
styles" and save and close the document. Do not send the template to the
other users (and make sure they do not have one of the same name...). When
they open the document, Word will fail to find the template and will not try
to update the styles regardless of the setting.
The other problem that can cause this is if any of the styles in the
document have been left set to "Automatically update". Go through the
styles and check that they have not been set that way. If they have, and
the user does anything in the Format>Paragraph dialog, Word will substitute
a new list template and your numbering will be broken.
For more, see here:
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/numbering/WordsNumberingExplained.htm
Cheers
Thanks, John
I may not have been totally clear. Within the *bullets and numbering*, the
particular heading (3) has a requirement to restart after Level 1 (that which
contains the chapter number). When the file is opened on a PC, the command
to restart doesn't work. Part of the problem is that the PC Word has several
different *versions* of each heading while the Mac Word only seems to have
the one that's been created/modified.
Everythign else seems portable across platforms. Because this is a document
I ultimately deliver in pdf, but is reviewed in Word, I have to open the
thing on my PC, straighten out all the errors and then finish it before
converting to pdf.
Interestingly, I don't experience the same numbering problem coming back
from PC to Mac.
--
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 (0) 4 1209 1410
