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And to tag along with Lauren's last point below and some earlier
comments, Jack Lyons of The Editorium has a "delete unused styles" macro
if you hunt and peck among the archives. This does a nice job of
removing the digital dust bunnies -- or maybe **gremlins** is a better
word -- once you have your Word styles the way you want them.
Jim
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+jim -dot- pinkham=voith -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+jim -dot- pinkham=voith -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On
Behalf Of Lauren
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2007 11:28 AM
To: 'Van Boening, Tammy'; TECHWR-L -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: RE: Globally changing word styles?
Hi Tammy,
What you are describing is a messy process, but it is doable. Here is
how I handle situations like this. Other people may have different
methods or a different order to some of my method.
1. Define the new or target styles for your document.
2. Perform a replace (Ctrl+H) in Word. Click "More," then "Format," and
select "Style..." and choose a style. For "Find what" choose the
document style that you want to replace and for "Replace with" choose
the new style to use. Make sure that the text boxes are empty and that
nothing else is in your search. Click "Replace" if you want review each
change or "Replace All" to globally replace every occurrence of the
style.
3. Search (Ctrl+F) for "Normal" as in #2. Apply the correct styles to
the text where Normal is over-ridden while the text still indicates what
the correct style may be. Later, Normal will look normal, so it will be
harder to tell what style a block of text should have.
4. Review, or at least spot check, the document to make sure that you
have changed all of the bad styles.
5. Select the entire document (Ctrl+A) and apply "Default Paragraph
Font" to get rid of remaining style overriding. This style, or option,
may need to be enabled through the custom "Show" menu of the "Styles and
Formatting"
task pane. (Task pain, if you ask me.)
6. Review the document to make sure that all text has an appropriate
style.
7. Show all styles, or at least the styles in use if performing step 10,
in the "Styles and Formatting" task pane and delete all of the bad
styles.
8. Search for the style, "Normal" because text that was not corrected
and still had a bad style will revert to Normal. Apply appropriate
styles to Normal text if Normal is found.
9. Review the document again.
10. If you don't want to risk retaining bad styles, then after your
document has the right styles and none of the bad styles in use, copy
all of the text from the document into a new document. Only styles that
are used will be copied. Check your new document to make sure that you
have only what you want.
Lauren
P.S. About your tag line, what do after you get your own way? Frown,
laugh, or just stop smiling?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: techwr-l-bounces+lt34=csus -dot- edu -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+lt34=csus -dot- edu -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf
> Of Van Boening, Tammy
> Sent: Friday, June 29, 2007 8:08 AM
> To: TECHWR-L -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Subject: Globally changing word styles?
>
> All,
>
> My group has inherited tons and tons of Word docs written in a very
> old version of Word. I have Word 2003 on Windows XP2. I am able to
> open the Word documents just fine. They are a mix of styles and
> overridden Normal. Eventually, we want to get these documents
> converted to Framemaker for use in ePublisher. (I know ePublisher
> converts Word, but our internal standard is Framemaker with
> ePublisher.) For now, we are tasked with getting these cleaned up and
> serviceable so that we can they aren't a one-off, but lend themselves
> to reuse and easier conversion. My first task is to get the paragraph
> styles we use in Framemaker and the styles used in these Word
> documents in synch. For example, we have a
> HeadLev1 paragraph style in our Framemaker templates so I want to take
> all the Heading 1 styles in these Word documents and get them
> converted to HeadLev1. Is there a way to globally change styles in
> Word like you can globally change paragraph tags in Framemaker? Right
> now, I am using the very labor intensive process of selecting all of
> one kind of style and then one-by-one manually changing each
> selection. Ugh - for the volume of documents that I have inherited,
> this really isn't the way I want to go, but . . .
>
> Thanks!
>
> TVB
>
>
> Tammy L. Van Boening
> Senior Technical Writer
> Fiserv Insurance Solutions
> Property and Casualty Division
> 303-729-7733
> tammy -dot- vanboening -at- fiserv -dot- com
> **************************************************************
> *********
> Keep smiling, at least until you get your own way.
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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True single source, conditional content, PDF export, modular help.
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