Locking out styles in MS Word?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Missed the original question, but if I've got the context right, it  
seems to be about how to stop reviewers from changing style  
definitions. On that assumption:

I'm not aware of any way to do this (as of Word X on the Mac, which  
is pre-Word 2002 / 2003 on the PC. But you may be able to kludge  
together an approach that will achieve a similar effect if you're not  
doing heavy editing during reviews. Here's how:

Open the Tools menu and select Protect Document. Of the available  
options, try "Comments". (Add a strong password if you want to  
prevent canny reviewers from disabling the protection. You can break  
the password easily enough, but it discourage idle tampering.) This  
tool disables the ability to change the text, even using revision  
tracking, and on my computer, it also stopped me from modifying  
styles. All I could do was insert comments. You may have more  
flexible options in more recent versions of Word, so have a look at  
the options and report back to techwr-l.

Clearly, this won't work if the reviewers must do significant  
editing. Equally clearly, you'll have to tell them what you've done  
so that you don't get an endless series of panicked calls that your  
document has broken their copy of Word. But if you've got to go to  
all this hassle in the first place, then you might as well take the  
time to explain to reviewers the problems they're causing by mucking  
about with the styles. The good ones will agree to help you by  
leaving the styles alone... and for the others, you can always  
protect the document. <g>

On the assumption that you're talking about writers, not reviewers,  
the solution is a bit more involved. First, find out why they feel  
obliged to create their own styles or modify the ones in the  
template. If the reason is simple, the solution is equally simple;  
for example, you forgot to provide a style that they need to use, the  
solution is to add that style to the template. If the reason is that  
they don't like to feel constrained by anyone else's design choices,  
then you've got a management / discipline problem: someone with  
authority needs to explain to them that this isn't how life works in  
the working world, and if they want to be creative, they can do it on  
their own time. In between these extremes lie a range of other  
possibilities, including the possibility that they don't really know  
how to use styles, and only need a bit of training.

----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
www.geoff-hart.com
----------------------------------------------------


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