Thanks for your replies everyone. There’s a lot of very useful advice in your
responses.
(I don't understand how my initial post was made 'unknown' on the
microsoft.com version of this thread -- very confusing. It looks fine over at
www.officekb.com. I'm reposting it again just for reference.)
fumei, I'm really interested to hear that disallowing all manual formatting
is working for you. I've actually been trying this out with documents I
create for myself for the last little while. It's wonderful how clean the
documents end up coming out, but pretty frustrating when there isn’t a style
set up that does what you want to do.
Your reprogramming of Font formatting buttons is a really interesting hack.
I’d be interested in learning how to do this. However, it seems to me that
this is only a partial fix. It solves some of the problems with all of the
“List Paragraph + Bold†things but doesn’t contribute anything to styles’
role as formatting guidance. You just end up with a bunch of styles named
‘Bold,’ ‘Bold + Italic,’ ‘Italic + Underline’ right?
Is there any consensus on this? Is it fine to use formatting-specific
character styles while keeping your main paragraph styles use-specific? I
could try to make these character specific styles use-specific but I feel
that that might lead to considerable confusion and push people back to manual
formatting.
Mind you, it certainly proved an effective fix for my 30+ 70 style document.
By reassigning all those “List Paragraph + Bold†styles (is there a name for
these?) to the “List Paragraph†paragraph style and “Bold†character style I
was able to get rid of about half of my 70 pseudo-styles. Of the remaining
half most of them were either assigned to the wrong style and had formatting
added to make them look like another style or shouldn’t have had extra
formatting added at all. Using this method, my document went from 30 styles
and 70 pseudo-styles to about 30 styles and 8 pseudo-styles – a pretty
significant improvement.
I also took a look at places where a table would serve the job of a style
with a bit more elegance. This let me trim my document of a bunch of styles
that were just indented versions of my main styles. I added these newly
formatted tables to the Quick Parts gallery so that I could use them
elsewhere in this document and others. (These were things like signature and
date lines which to my only half-surprise were formatted totally differently
throughout the document.)
Suzanne, you’re absolutely right. There’s lots of room for simplification.
There are 6 different numbering styles (with different sublevels, making 11
styles in total) used in just this one document. In some cases the different
numbering makes sense – it’s an easy way to differentiate one list from
another – but most of the time I can’t find any rhyme or reason to it.
Klaus, I’ve found the ‘hide until used’ feature both very handy and
occasionally irritating. I don’t know why, but sometimes a style just refuses
to show up in my styles pallet despite the fact that it’s being used. Usually
this style that won’t show up is one set as the ‘style for following
paragraph.’
Klaus Linke said:
Excellent advice... Some "smaller" tips:
-- Take care to specify the "Style for following paragraph" in each
paragraph style carefully.
The more often the right style is applied automatically as uers type, the
less often they'll apply the wrong style or manual formatting.
-- Group styles according to use (in older versions by giving them names
that list nicely alpabetically, in Word 2007 through their priority
setting).
If the styles that are likely to be used in close proximity in the document
are in close proximity in the styles pane, users will have less trouble to
find them.
-- In Word 2007, you can hide styles until they are first used. That may
come in handy say if your users are expected to apply heading or list styles
or bold/italic through buttons or keyboard shortcuts anyway: These styles
won't clutter the styles list then unless they have actually been applied
somewhere.
-- On trick I use ... though I'm not sure if it would be practical for your
use:
I do make use of color a lot... Say Headings in dark blue and text in black,
quotes in dark green...
Users quickly find that applying these from the styles pane is quicker than
trying to use manual formatting, the styles are easier to find in the styles
pane, and it's more obvious if a wrong style has been applied.
Chosen with a bit of good taste, it looks great too, on both b/w and color
printers.
Regards,
Klaus
fumei via OfficeKB.com said:
Sigh. Indeed it is a problem. I hate those “List
Paragraph + 9pt, Bold, First line: 0.5â€â€ things. I will not tolerate ANY
in
my documents.
It is both a design issue, and a training issue.
The design issue takes time, but is possible.
I have taken two different approaches.
The first was to remove ALL formatting buttons. No Bold, no Underline
etc.
Plus, I removed the Format menu and anything else that can change things.
I
built a new toolbar with the major styles as text buttons. Users just
click
on the style name.
The second was to keep the buttons, but re-write the code behind them.
For
example, the Bold button does NOT toggle Bold. It applies a bold
character
style.
The first approach annoyed the heck out of people for a long time, but now
they love it. They find it faster, and all their documents are
consistent,
which was the desired idea.
Word is designed around styles. That is a fact. People generally get
confused about them, but training helps.
But also management direction helps. We want consistent documents.
Period.
Thou shalt not decide on a whim you want to make a certain element bold.
No..
you will not.
It's a law firm. That means that you're dealing with legal documents. Many
have to meet the requirements of specific courts. That is going to cause
severe limitations at the outset. I don't work in this kind of
environment,
so I won't presume to offer more than a couple of very general
recommendations:
1. Define styles based on purpose rather than formatting: Body Text, Block
Text, etc. When you're not bound by formatting, you can modify a style
within a document as needed rather than feel the need to create a new one.
2. Create specific templates with the specific styles needed for specific
types of documents; don't try to come up with a single template that
contains all the styles needed for every possible kind of document. If a
given document really needs 30 styles, then the template needs that many
styles; otherwise not.
3. But does the document really need 30 styles? It might be time to step
back and analyze them and figure out what is the minimum number of styles
(types of formatting) it could use. Designers say you should never use
more
than three fonts on a page; anything more looks busy and confusing and
just
plain tacky. The same might apply to styles in a document. If there are
really that many different kinds of formatting, then perhaps someone needs
to analyze the logical structure of the document to see if it could be
simplified.
I work in a law firm. We make really complicated documents. Accordingly,
we
have a very complicated Normal.dot default style sheet. It has pretty
much
[quoted text clipped - 29 lines]
What does a best-practice implementation of styles looks like for a case
like ours?
