I agree with Charles Kenyon. Save your document (.doc) as a template using
his steps. I have had great sucess with this on projects very similar to the
one you describe, especially when I have many authors working on documents
available on the LAN. It keeps everone's documents looking the same.

I hate to mention it but there is another way. You can copy styles from one
document to another through the organizer. The organizer is available through
the Macro dialog box. But I think the better solution is to actually take
advantage of the template features.

As for page layout, I have a trick. To use it you first have to save your
template as a template and attach your documents to it.

Next record a macro in your template of the page layout changes.
1. Tools-Macro...-Record a Macro
2. Reaccomplish all of the page layout commands
3. Stop the record

Now when you open your documents, you can run the macro which is stored in
the attached template.

If you want to really get fancy, in the template customize your menu bar and
add a menu item for your new macro. You can also assign a keyboard shortcut
to this macro. Then when you open the documents, the new menu item is there
and you can reapply these page layout changes to each document.

If you change your mind on the page layout, edit or modify (or replace) the
macro in the template. Then re-run the macro in each document.

Good luck, and welcome to the wonderful world of macros.
--
Jack Rumple


"WebColin" wrote:

Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. :-(

I should acknowledge that I may have misused the term "template." I simply
created a new document (.doc) file that has all the styles and page
formatting I want the resulting documents to have. It's not actually a
TEMPLATE in any technical sense.

But I have dozens of documents, each with many sections. I dread copying
them over one section at a time.

In WordPerfect, I could simply grab the style formatting in Reveal Codes,
and paste it over the Style formatting in the older documents. I guess
there's no equivalent in Word?

Thanks for any additional suggestions,
Colin

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote in message
...
The styles can be imported into the documents by attaching the new
template
with "Automatically update document styles" checked, but this procedure
will
have no effect on the document layout (margins, header/footer, and other
document/section properties). Truly the easiest way to take care of all of
this is to create a new blank document based on your template and paste
the
text in, one section at a time, without section breaks (which would import
the formatting). See
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting...thSections.htm and
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting...ectionInfo.htm

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup
so
all may benefit.

"WebColin" wrote in message
...
Or maybe someone can suggest an alternative solution. Here's my
situation:

I have several large documents with many sections each. They are set up
correctly using styles for most formatting (headings, normal text, etc.).
I
want to reformat all of them to use the styles and layout I've created in
a
separate template document. Specifically, I want to replace the page
layouts
(margins), and paragraph styles (normal, headings, etc.) with the ones
I've
created in the template.

I'm hoping I can just copy the styles from the template doc over to each
of
these documents. What I don't want to do, because it will be a lot of
work,
is copy the text over, piece by piece, and paste it into my new template
doc.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Colin