Standardizing articles for a book

[Stasha7]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

I need to combine into one book 80 articles written at different times using different styles. I made a master template for the book's styles, headers, etc., but when I "insert file" for each article, they bring in their styles and lose my .dot styles, which requires a lot of work to change. I've started doing "copy all" on each article and "paste special - RTF", and then applying my styles as needed.

This works better, but is there an easier, or more efficient, way? Thanks very much!

 

[Stasha7]

Many thanks, Clive! As a matter of fact a few days ago I did download your comprehensive work "Bend Word to Your Will" and have been studying it (trying to break my 25-year mindset of WordPerfect). It's a masterpiece, and I'm most grateful to you for providing this help. But I wasn't sure if I grasped this part, and you've clarified it well now. Some things are just tedious and require patience and perseverance, but I agree that it's worth the effort to preserve the integrity of the file. Thanks again!

 

[Clive Huggan]

Thanks for your kind comments, Stasha!

I never used WordPerfect much, but I know how fervently some of its features
are regarded by long-term users, with good reason. It's a crying shame
WordPerfect is no longer a force in the marketplace.

My own transition from the last built-for-Mac version of Word, version 5.1a,
to the present-day versions of Word, which is essentially ported from the
PC, was only achieved with much screaming. I wrote the early notes in "Bend
Word to Your Will" out of sheer frustration. Eventually I was "Stockholmed"
and came to appreciate the added features while continuing to loathe the
downsides.

As you say, "Some things are just tedious and require patience and
perseverance". But one moves on, and swallows all the lost time without
compensating gains in productivity ...

Visit us again if you have any observations or need any more info. We're a
friendly bunch in here (well, most of the time ;-)

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
============

 

[Stasha7]

Hello again to Clive and all! Regarding Paste Special, my experimenting shows that Pasting-Special the copied text as Unformatted loses the footnotes. So I'm sticking with saving as RTF, both to keep the footnotes and all the italics, which the documents I'm working with are full of. Thanks again!

 

[Clive Huggan]

Thanks for the feedback, Stasha!

Yes, footnotes can complicate things if there are too many of them.

As for unifying headings to get away from the appearance in the
"contributed" documents: depending on how much they have been manually
formatted you may be able to unify the formatting by just applying styles as
mentioned. But if the appearance does not comply with that of your style
once the heading style is applied (e.g., characters may appear roman whereas
the style is bold), you will need to select and key Control-Spacebar to make
the characters revert to those of the underlying style.

All of this is easy to do in Word 2004 via very simple macros, but Word 2008
doesn't have the same capabilities.

Cheers,

Clive
=====