Wrestling with MS Templates and Styles

[Jerry Franklin <jfrankli -at- zantaz -dot- com>]

Greetings, all.

I'm the first staff tech writer at a small software company, so among the
cool opportunities here is the chance to establish a house technical style,
from scratch. But I feel I've gone as far as my knowledge of MS Word will
take me.

I've created a house template, but despite consulting several manuals and
articles I remain unable to delete many unwanted styles (e.g. "Normal" and
the native "Heading" styles). I can change them -- I just can't delete them,
and I don't want any extraneous styles to appear in my template. I also seem
unable to override someone else's standard "Normal" template with my own, no
matter how many times I try to attach my template; invariably I seem to have
to move, delete, re-format, and/or reapply the same styles, repeatedly.

My ideal situation: A template populated solely with locked-in styles that I
created. I'd like to be able to paste content from other Word docs into this
template and not have the other docs' styles intrude, and I'd also like to
share this template with others and have them return their docs to me in the
exact same template, without my having to reapply styles, or attach my
template, or what-have-you. In a related matter, I've also been unable to
have Word open up with my template, instead of the Normal template, even
though I've tried scrupulously to follow the instructions in Word Help and
the Word 2000 Bible to do this (I keep getting an unrecognized path error
message).

So I'd love to learn about some best practices vis-a-vis creating,
disseminating, and enforcing a discrete house style. Should I be creating a
style sheet instead of futzing around with templates? Is it operator
ignorance or error? Or could I have a funky instance of Word? And who
figured out you could eat an artichoke, and how?

FYI, I'm pretty much wedded to Word for now, both because it's the easiest
way to exchange comments and drafts with others throughout the company and
because most of my documents thus far are short -- well under 25 pages in
length. I'm using Word 2000, SP-3, running on NT4.

This is my very first posting to your marvelous group, so please be gentle
-- and thanks much! :>)

Regards,

Jerry Franklin 
jfranklin -at- zantaz -dot- com 


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