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Caitlin Gannon wondered: <<I need to create a bullet-proof Word
template for other people to use.>>
Can't be done without a structured document processor that enforces
strict adherence to a DTD -- which emphatically ain't Word,
particularly in the new version that supports XML as its native
format. Sorry! Next question. <g>
That's just a tad facetious, but it's not far from the truth: the
best you can do is make it easier for them to do the right thing and
harder to do the wrong thing. Then you need to spend time educating
them about how to use the template correctly, possibly by beating one
new concept per week into their heads. This combination makes it
possible to greatly reduce the amount of cleanup work you have to do,
but never gets it completely down to a trivial level. That's doubly
true if these people are moderately clever, and willing to explore
Word's settings. To control them, you may need to implement floggings
and summary decapitation -- or a tad less violently, make adherence
to the template part of their performance appraisal.
<<These end-users are fond of using blank paragraphs for spacing,
adding hard page breaks between sections, using different heading
styles so the TOC doesn't work, etc.>>
Some of this you can fix with a simple and cunning macro: Record a
macro that does a global search and replace to eliminate double
paragraphs, double spaces, hard section or page breaks, and any other
infelicities you can think of. Next, assign it to the keystroke for
saving a document: Control/Command + S. <g> Store that macro and
keyboard shortcut in the template so it will control how all files
based on the template behave.
<<They generally don't use styles even if they are pre-built, and
even if I write a style guide, they aren't tech writers and may not
understand why it's important to follow it.... Is there a way to
create a template that forces the use of styles? >>
There are a few things you can do in addition to what I've described
here and in my article. First, define only your own styles in the
template and set the preferences in the Styles dialog so that it
shows only user-defined styles. (You can't delete the other styles
built into Word, but you can hide them.) Second, display those styles
in a custom toolbar, so that they're easily accessible: make them
easier to assign by clicking the toolbar button than by opening a
menu and scrolling through a list of styles, and people are more
likely to use them. (If people like to use the Formatting toolbar,
which contains the style list, open the Tools menu, select Customize,
and delete the style list from that toolbar.) Third, for each
paragraph style, define the "Style for following paragraph" setting.
So, for instance, when they finish typing heading 1 and press return,
the next paragraph automatically becomes Caitlin Body Text. And so on.
Last but not least: Explain what you've done and why, and make it
clear that if your new setup is causing people problems, they should
come to you to discuss potential solutions. Guaranteed you won't get
the template perfect the first time, and working with them is your
best way to gradually improve it so it meets everyone's needs.
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