Problem with applying styles document wide

[suttonj]

Here is my situation. I have an existing document which has existing
Normal Template styles implimented throughout. I took some pieces of
example text from this document and put them into a new document.
These example texts include an example header, sub header, and text (I
am keeping this simple for now). I save this new document with the
example text as a template. Then, I define new styles for each example
text based on the style the text was already using. Once the new
styles were created, I made sure they were applied to the example text.
I saved the template. Now, I open the original document I pulled the
example text from, go to Tools > Templates and Addins and 'attach' this
new template to the document. I expected the styles in this new
template to overwrite the old existing styles in the document, but that
does not happen. The only thing that happens is that the new styles
are available to use in the document (which is great but not the result
I was looking for).

Is there anyway to attach this template to the document so that the new
styles overwrite all of the old styles they are based on in the
document? I have searched and read everything I can find on this, and
it sounds like it should work the way I am doing it, which means I am
probably missing one small detail that is crucial for this all to work.
Please help me!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

When you attach a new template, style definitions apply only to styles with
the same names. You can use Find and Replace to replace a given style with
another style, however.

Is there some reason you don't want to just modify Word's built-in styles in
your template?

 

[suttonj]

The reason I dont want to modify Word's built in styles is because we
want this template to apply to any of our report documents, and many of
them have different styles for the same header (we have a pretty
standard report format, but the actual formatting varies, mostly due to
manual formatting being applied to each individual report by whoever is
working on it). For instance, in Report A the main header uses the
"Heading 2, Primary" style while the same header in Report B, while
visually looking the same, uses the "Heading 2" style. With my
original thinking, I thought that the new style would replace the old
style because the new style was based on the old style. I realize that
this would obviously pose a big problem when trying to apply this
template to any document other than the "tester" document that I took
the example text from. But if I cant even get the tester document to
work, I am not yet worried about other documents.

So I guess my new question should be: Is there any way (other than
going to Outline view, selecting a certain style, clicking on "select
all", and then changing the style; repeating for each style I want to
change) to create a template with a small set of custom defined styles
that could be attached to any document that has X style being used for
the header or text and have that template overwrite the old styles?
Note: When I first started looking into this, it didn't seem like this
would be possible, as you would have to somehow define what old styles
the new style will replace, and there doesnt seem to be any option to
do that. I have been told that this can work, is there any way this
could be possible?

I will keep your idea of changing Word's built in styles in mind
because that seems to be my only option at this point, although it is
not ideal.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I don't think you understand what styles are intended to do. You should use
styles based on function. When you attach a different template, you can get
different formatting, but the function is the same. A Heading 2 should
always be a second-level subhead regardless of how it looks. At any rate,
Word is not designed to work the way you are trying to use it.

 

[suttonj]

Thank you for the info. This just confirms what I had originally
thought.