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Sean Hower quotes a message by Keith Cronin:
>
> ...in building your template, AVOID using a style called Normal, and
> avoid BASING any other styles on Normal.
I disagree. I've had years of success using Word templates with Normal as the body text style and nearly all paragraph styles based on Normal (or on one of the styles I've based on Normal). I've shared these templates and documents with other writers, passing books back and forth dozens of time during the development cycle, with never a problem.
Far more likely to be a problem is the creation and application of styles that aren't in the template and, for that reason, behave unpredictably when moved from one writer to another. A few years ago, I created several macros to report the styles used in a document, clean out unused styles, and import the styles from the official template. I always use them toward the end of the development cycle, or whenever I see an unfamiliar style. They're a great help when I'm sharing a document among multiple writers.
In a similar vein, be sure to use Word's built-in heading styles (Heading 1 through Heading 9) for easiest creation of TOC and running heads. Of course, you can redefine them to look any way you like, but be sure to name them the way Word does; otherwise, you'll have to recreate some of Word's automated features by hand.
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