Styles Bloat Problems in Word 2003 and flips back to Normal

[Walter]

I've run into a technical problem with a large document that I am editing.
This document is under a master.doc consisting of over 500 pages and 20
sub-documents.
Problem 1:
I have over 1000 styles in each sub-document and no effective way to remove
them
Tried to remove them from each sub-doc and master.doc but they keep coming
back like the plague.
Tried various vba delete unused styles macros in the opened macro document
and the macro crashes or hangs up
Looked at Microsoft's solution using rtf file conversion and then deleting
the styles in the rtf format .... but with over 1000 styles and 20 docs
that is near impossible.
Plus it is very prone to error.

Problem 2
I think problem two is related to Problem 1 and that is that now when I
apply new modified styles to sections all works fine until I close, save
the master document and reopen it.
Those new styles have reverted back to Normal.
This happens consistently.

I've spend countless hours to try to fix this with no avail.
And of course I have a deadline for the finished doucument

Any help would be appriciated

Thanks

 

[Charles Kenyon]

Sorry, I don't have an answer because I don't use Master Documents. However,
you may need the reason I don't more than you need an answer. "Master
Document" is a term of art in Word referring to a "feature" that not only
doesn't work but also destroys documents. The consensus (with the limited
exception of Steve Hudson) among those offering advice on these newsgroups
is that using the Master Document feature is a good way to destroy your
document. It can destroy parts of your document that you are not even
working on! I think John McGhie said it succinctly when he said that there
are two kinds of Master Documents: Those that are corrupt and those that
will be corrupt soon. See
http://www.addbalance.com/word/masterdocuments.htm for information on the
Master Document feature and workarounds. See
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/General/WhyMasterDocsCorrupt.htm for more
information on what goes wrong, and
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/General/RecoverMasterDocs.htm for ideas on how
to salvage what you can. See
http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/magazine/technical/masterdocs.doc for
Steve Hudson's instructions if you are willing to follow them very
carefully.

 

[Walter]

Thanks for the reply and the added links to the master problem.

Actually master.doc is the least of my problems and seems to be fairly stable.

I don't know if master has been fixed since the problems that were reported
in the links.

My problem are the styles ... and how hard it is to get rid of them

I have actually hit the limit with "the style sheet is full" Word cannot
define a new style.

I have found a temporary fix ...which is to go in and delete some of the
styles using organizer in each of the documents..

But to fix the whole problem is 20 doc x 1000 entries 20,000 edits

Also if there was a way to directly select unused styles then the process
would not be so time consuming and prone to selection errors.

 

[Charles Kenyon]

The problems referred to in those pages persist in Word 2003.

Unless you are using Steve Hudson's methods, exactly, you are virtually
certain to experience document corruption. What you are seeing could be a
symptom of that.
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide

See also the MVP FAQ: http://www.mvps.org/word which is awesome!
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