Hi Annamarie:
OK, now you are putting me to work
There is a possibility that either
BizPlan or the documents created from it (or both) are corrupted. If they
are, it will never work, you have to chuck them out, create a new Normal
template, create new templates and documents from it, then paste the
unformatted text into them. Once a template corrupts, it can spread
formatting bugs like a virus throughout your documents.
But that's not what I think. Here's what I think is happening-- I think we
need to go all the way into the details to understand this mechanism so you
can see the problem...
1) The Template is named Bizplan.
2) It has the built-in Heading styles
3) The built in styles in BizPlan do NOT have numbering
4) BizPlan template has numbering applied as direct formatting.
If you create a new document based upon BizPlan, the styles will be copied
from BizPlan to the new document. So will the text.
In this case, the "text" may not have any characters in it: we're talking
about the "Text story" which can be a single empty paragraph. It can't be
any "less" than that -- the single empty paragraph always exists. It could
be a lot more: it could include all of the text that forms the outline of a
Business Plan. No matter: same condition either way. The second is what I
expect -- that's why you create a template, to get the boilerplate text.
OK, now when you copy from BizPlan, you are copying the styles (which have
no numbering) and the direct formatting (which has).
When you paste text in from a different document:
A) If it has no formatting it gets no numbering
B) If it has styles it gets no numbering
C) If it has direct formatting, it gets "something" but what it gets is a
combination of what it had in the source document and how things are set up
in the target document. Always messy and unpredictable.
"Numbering" is like any other formatting, including styles. Internally it
is simply a binary pointer: it's a large number that indicates the rows in
the various formatting tables that contain all of the settings that make up
the formatting.
When you copy text from one document to another, Word attempts to find the
matching entries in the formatting tables of the destination document. If
they are not there, Word brings them over with the copy and adds them.
With numbering, this goes wrong most of the time, because although the
entries are already existing in the destination document, they contain the
wrong formatting.
The only way around this is to ensure that the styles in the destination
document have the numbering you want defined as part of the style, and that
the text in the source document has its formatting applied only with styles.
So long as there is no direct formatting applied to the text coming in from
the source document, the styles in the destination document will take over
and the text will be correctly formatted when it lands. If there's the
merest hint of direct formatting in the source text, Word creates its
formatting as new entries in the destination documents style tables, and at
that point instantly breaks the numbering in the pasted text.
You have to ensure that the pasted text has been formatted with the correct
style names to get it to paste. This is one reason why I always recommend
that users use the built-in Word styles exclusively: it means that whenever
they paste text into any other document, the styles will exist in the
destination document, and halves the chances for things to go wrong.
So now I think you can see what is going wrong. What you need to do is:
1) Open BizPlan as a document
2) Carefully define the numbering to be part of the styles, using Shauna's
method.
3) Remove ALL direct formatting.
4) Close and save the document.
5) Open an existing document
6) Remove all direct formatting
7) Tools>Templates and Add-ins>Automatically update styles
8) Tolls>Templates and Add-ins>Turn Automatically update styles OFF again
(it will instantly update the styles in the document to those in the
template, then you want to turn it off again)
9) Save the document
10) You will then need to run through the existing document and correct the
number re-starts: these cannot come in from the template, they get cleared
when you update the styles.
11) If you now create a document from BizPlan, it should have the correct
numbering on its styles.
12) If you now paste styles-formatted text from another document into a
document created from BizPlan, it should paste correctly and number
correctly provided the text had no direct formatting applied.
When learning to do this, it takes a while to adjust our work practices: for
decent results you must EITHER work only with styles OR work only with
direct formatting. You cannot have a mixture of both.
To make life simple, do NOT use either Table Styles or Number Styles in
Word. These mechanisms are both totally broken from the point of view of
trying to use them in documents. If you use them, they tend to break all
your formatting, and they're cows of things to try to remove once they get
into the document.
Hope this helps
HI there, I posted this reply earlier but put it at the bottom so it may
have gotten missed, I've also tried to make it even clearer.
Argh here's what happened...
Number one did nothing. Made sure Tools/Templates and Add-ins/update box
NOT checked. Several times...
Number two:
I opened New doc in my Bizplan.dot template. Headings had outline numbered
I copied one line from original document that was in Heading 1 and did
paste special/unformatted text. When I pasted it the Headings styles
reverted to default (without outline numbers).
Closed without saving.
Opened "new" doc in template. Copied all of my original document into
TextEdit.
Stripped formatting with Format/Make Plain Text.
Copy and pasted stripped text into the new doc. The Headings styles reverted
to the default versions. (without outline numbers).
Opened another "new" doc in the "bizplan.dot" template. Headings style has
no numbered outline.
Quit Word.
Reopened Word, opened new doc in the template. Headings have outline
numbered.
Interpretation: There is something in my text that despite clearing it of
formatting still causes the template revert to the default Headings styles.
Anytime I try to take text from my document into the template the headings
Revert to the default. I've also done a "clear formatting" on the doc, cut
and paste text and it STILL does it.
Templates aren't supposed to work like this, right? I thought that the
beauty of templates is that one can bring text into them and then apply a
style found in the template.
Thanks.
Annamarie (who is spending way too much time on this.. But I do want to
understand what the issue is.)
Annamarie Pluhar
Pluhar Associates
(e-mail address removed) <--fix this before replying
--
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
