Styles Primer

[Jim Speiser]

Can someone please point me to a decent tutorial on the use of styles? I
can see their usefulness, but every time I think I've got the hang of it,
something unexpected occurs. Thanks for any help. I checked on the MVP
site, and there doesn't seem to be an FAQ on this subject, even though they
claim that Styles is the most powerful feature in Word.

==JJS==

 

[Shauna Kelly]

Hi Jim

Well I'm biased <g> but try
http://www.microsoft.com/office/using/column14.asp
and
http://www.ShaunaKelly.com/word/concepts/styles/

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word
Melbourne, Australia

 

[Jim Speiser]

Very well written, Shauna, but a little too basic for my needs. Perhaps I
should just ask some questions here.

My current problem is, changing a user-defined style in the normal.dot
template. I have a style called Highlighted, which I have decided to change
from a paragraph style to a character style. I have tried to do this two
ways. First, I tried to copy the style from a document that I used it in
over to the normal.dot template using the Styles Organizer. It did not
"take"; subsequent documents that I create still have the old definition of
"Highlighted". Then I tried opening a blank document and changing the style
in there, then tried to save it as a Document Template File, overwriting
normal.dot. Apparently you can't overwrite normal.dot. You also can't
directly edit a template (like you could in WordPerfect...<sigh>) So how do
you make changes to the styles in normal.dot?

==JJS==

 

[Jim Speiser]

Disregard previous. Apparently you CAN overwrite normal.dot, if you open it
directly. For some reason I thought this was a no-no. I succeeded in making
the change. Still not sure why the other methods didn't work, though...

==JJS==

 

[Shauna Kelly]

Hi Jim

I'm glad you got it to work. Just for the record, you can open any
template for editing with File > Open. What you *can't* do is directly
open a template with File > New. When you use File > New, Word creates a
new document based on the template.

From Windows Explorer, to open a template for editing, right-click and
choose Open. If you just double-click, Windows invokes the default
action, which is New, and which will create a new document based on that
template.

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word
Melbourne, Australia

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Note also that when you make changes in styles in a document, the changes
apply to that document only unless you write the change back to the template
by checking the "Add to template" box.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi, Jim,

One more "for the record" item:

In another branch of this thread you wrote...

My current problem is, changing a user-defined style in the normal.dot
template. I have a style called Highlighted, which I have decided to change
from a paragraph style to a character style. ...
First, I tried to copy the style from a document that I used it in
over to the normal.dot template using the Styles Organizer. It did not
"take"; subsequent documents that I create still have the old definition of
"Highlighted".

I suspect that you didn't *delete* the paragraph style from Normal.dot
before you tried to use the Organizer. If you had, it would have
worked. Note that you can't delete the built-in styles, but you can
delete user-defined ones. However, that action would change all
paragraphs formatted with that style to Normal style. :-(

By design, Word won't overwrite a paragraph style in one template with
a character style of the same name from another template. To
overwrite, they would both have to be the same kind of style.

 

[Jim Speiser]

AHA! THAT'S why it didn't work! Thanks!

Hi, Jim,

One more "for the record" item:

In another branch of this thread you wrote...


I suspect that you didn't *delete* the paragraph style from Normal.dot
before you tried to use the Organizer. If you had, it would have
worked. Note that you can't delete the built-in styles, but you can
delete user-defined ones. However, that action would change all
paragraphs formatted with that style to Normal style. :-(

By design, Word won't overwrite a paragraph style in one template with
a character style of the same name from another template. To
overwrite, they would both have to be the same kind of style.