Sean,
John, Dayo, Elliott and Beth have answered your immediate query. I'll answer
your question re Elliott's remark earlier ('The best way of avoiding
'Normal' muck-ups is the template method of Clive Huggan, as seen in "Bend
Word to Your Will"').
Elliott was referring to a practice that some people who use Word
intensively move to -- poorly documented but referred to on this newsgroup
now and again (do a Google search to get to them).
Essentially it is to make and use your own templates instead of the Normal
template for documents of a particular type. It gives you more flexibility,
in that the template is designed around the requirements of say, one client,
or one type of strategic plan. Like so many thing in Word, it's darned easy
once you realize you need it -- and when you end up doing it you wonder how
on earth you managed in the past. Some of the people who do this more or
less leave the Normal template alone.
One of the minor advantages of this approach is that you're asked whether
you want to save the changes made to your template on the first occasion you
save the document after making changes to the template.
Commands, toolbars etc etc are very easily transferred between these
templates -- but customizations of default toolbars made in a Normal
template can't be -- another point of vulnerability.
"Bend Word to your Will" is a downloadable Word document of my notes on the
way I use Word, available at
www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/WordMac/Bend/BendWord.htm
Some material relating to the concept is in the section on styles beginning
on page 63, and there are others, such as the pros and cons of changing
toolbars or keeping the default toolbars in Normal. And there's an appendix
on a number of features of "minimum maintenance" documents that are also
relevant.
Don't be put off by Dayo saying (correctly) that the document is pretty long
-- other than the intro and one section on styles, the rest is in dictionary
form, with lots of hyperlinked cross-references. The Find command is best
used, in addition to the table of contents of course, to find a discussion
-- which can sometimes be peripheral to a different topic.
(One other point: if you are in Word 2001 or earlier and you want rock-solid
stability when working on long documents, you should consider quitting Word
now and again and re-starting, for several reasons mentioned in the
introduction to "Bend Word to your Will" -- about page 20 if I remember
correctly.)
-- Clive Huggan
* Please post all comments to the newsgroup for the benefit of others who
may be interested.
* Remove "the" from my address above if you need to send an e-mail to me
directly (although that would be exceptional). Please note that e-mails
with an attachment will be automatically rejected.
* If anyone is still reading down this far, here's a question: is it time
for you to back up your Normal template and all your Word settings? (This
should be on a medium other than the internal hard drive and, to protect
against theft and fire, stored in a different building.)
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