As far as I've been able to see, there is no simple way of mapping document
structure implied by styles to/from an XML schema. Word's use of external
schema seems to be aimed at holding islands of data within a Word document
(for instance, sharing names, addresses and so on with other Office apps)
rather than XML document editing as you might do from something like XMetaL.
There are a number of 3rd party tools that may bridge the gap (you could
look at YAWC, X-ICE, X2XML, W2ML for instance) but whether they would help
probably depends on what "problems" you are trying to solve.

You might get some more information on the XML front from the
microsoft.public.office.xml newsgroup. If you post back in more detail here
what you are trying to do in Word - what causes the current problems - there
may be other suggestions or specific solutions.

--
Margaret Aldis - Microsoft Word MVP
Syntagma partnership site: http://www.syntagma.co.uk
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.word.mvps.org


"FCS" wrote in message
...
Hello,

The company that I work for has a department that creates manuals and to
format those manuals, they use styles. They have been having problems
with
them lately and the IT dept is trying to see if by using xml will help. I
learning xml and trying to create an schema. Can you help me with that?

Also, is there anyway that I can use the styles in the master documents to
create the smart tags or do I have to start from scratch?

I would appreciate your help