Using a new template

[Word Doofus]

Okay folks, here's a couple for you:

I created a new template with several distinctive
paragraph styles.

[a] When I copy text from an existing document (NOT in an
attemtp to convert it for now) and paste it into the new
template, all of the styles are changed to a mixture of
mostly those in the old file and some from new template
(especially those with names dissimilar to those in the
old file).

How do I copy large portions of text and not have it do
this? Paste Special as Unformatted? Any other sugestions?

Now on to conversions. I have, say, 500 documents I
want to convert to the new template. Is the best method
to attach the template to the existing files, and then go
in for cleanup on each one? Anyone ever done this on a
large scale and found a successful approach?

Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

Thank you, gentle souls.

 

[Cindy Meister -WordMVP-]

Hi Word,

I created a new template with several distinctive
paragraph styles.

[a] When I copy text from an existing document (NOT in an
attemtp to convert it for now) and paste it into the new
template, all of the styles are changed to a mixture of
mostly those in the old file and some from new template
(especially those with names dissimilar to those in the
old file).

How do I copy large portions of text and not have it do
this? Paste Special as Unformatted? Any other sugestions?

Word is *designed* to do what you describe. If you insert
text from another document into an existing one:
- styles not in the target document will be created in the
target
- text formatted with styles in the target document will
take on the style definition of the target document.

If you want to retain the original style, you'd need to
rename that style with a unique name before copying (or
inserting) the text into the target document.

If you have Word 2002 you can use the Paste Options button
to "retain source formatting". This will apply the
formatting as direct formatting on the Normal style.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep
30 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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