Philisophical discussion about Styles and getting the best use of

[dylane]

Not sure if this is the best place to post this question, but since there are
so many Word MVPs who frequent this place, I thought I would give it a shot.
I've been tasked with improving the efficiency of assembling documents for
our small organization. Upon researching this, I of course came across
plenty of references to using styles in Word, including an interesting
archived discussion on Usenet that focused on the best method to implement
styles in a law firm.

We have never used styles in a conscious manner in our firm, and I was
planning on trying to change this, but reading this discussion has almost
convinced me that the idea is practically impossible for us. The discussion
thread is quite old however (2001 I think), and perhaps there are changes in
the way Word works in newer versions that makes things easier with regards to
styles. Our organization is currently using Word 2003, but would consider
upgrading to 2007 if a compelling case could be made.

OK, with the preamble out of the way, here is a short description of our
business and how we currently use Word. We are a small research firm, that
conducts research both internally as well as paying independent consultants
for the rights to some of their work. Typically a documents life will start
out as a series of quick notes written during a meeting or conference call.
To the notes various tables and figures will be copied in from Excel and the
Web, maybe from PowerPoint or some other program. Each table and figure is
then direct formatted until it can actually fit on the page in a readable
fashion, this often times means ignoring current page margins and other page
setup options. These notes are forwarded around the organization, with
different analysts either adding info to the original source document, or
more likely copying into their own existing Word document. All of these
elements will eventually be used in multiple documents, most with slightly
different formatting needs.

Currently each time we try to copy between documents table formatting gets
completely out of whack, and we end up spending a bunch of time manually
reformating trying to get it to look identical to the source document (it
seems that keep source formatting does not apply to source page margins?)

Proper training and use of styles both by our consultants and primary
employees (both of which tend to live overseas and work independently or in
small offices) unless it will save them time and/or effort...since they are
not responsible for the final "look" of the research this seems unlikely. So
bottom line is the use of styles is something that I will only have the power
to implement in my own office of 3-4 people, who are the ones responsible for
final assembly and output of all documents.

So my questions are.

1) At this point of the process is it "too late" to try and use styles. The
goal is always to assemble a 10-20 page report from 4 or 5 source documents
within 1-2 hours.
2) Should we be looking at another tool besides Word for document assembly?
We always need to have the ability to do some editing of sentences and
figures, but our primary use of Word isn't really for composition.

I appreciate any specific advice people can give, but I'm looking for
discussion as much as help with any one problem.

Dylan

 

[Graham Mayor]

You cannot avoid using styles in Word. Word is a style based application.
Evey bit of text has a style applied, and as such the use of styles makes it
relatively simple to reformat a document to your personal requirements. With
a set of styles suited to the layout of the finished document, it should be
relatively simple to apply the styles to the texts you import. There will be
difficulties (see http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/CleanWebText.htm for
example), but most of the problems you are likely to encounter are
surmountable and can probably be automated. If you want to shoot over some
samples and the finished result from those samples to my web site link (home
page) I could have a look a the scale of the problem and may be able to
offer more assistance.

The alternative would probably be to employ some form of desktop publishing
software to layout the elements as you require them.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[dylane]

Hi Graham, thanks for the response. I apologize for the delay in posting, my
internet connection at home became very spotty the last couple of days.

I realize that you can not avoid using styles in Word, but it is very
possible to not use them in any methodical or conscious manner (in fact I'm
fairly sure that this is how most people use Word). My question is more
along the lines of, if I am resigned to the fact that all of the source
documents we receive will be in the form of style "Normal + 14 pt, Bold" if
it becomes worth the time and effort to go through these documents and
manually change the style on each item to "Header" or "Table" or if it is
better to just accept the formatting and muddle through with a modified
normal style for everything. (I realize that this is a bit of a personal
call, but am interested in how other people deal with these issues).

The majority of the document will never be used again, but usually at some
point we will want to pull out a table or figure and use in another document,
which seems to be when styles would be helpful to us (i.e. Table 1 becomes
Table 3 automatically).

I will take a look to see if I can find a couple of good examples of the
types of files I am working with and post to your website. I would certainly
appreciate any comments you can give whenever you have time.

p.s. I have used your boiler add-in for Word and it has saved me a great
amount of time and hassle. So a sincere vote of appreciation for making that
available.

Thanks,
Dylan