Hello Paul

Paul wrote:
I am setting up a few templates for users who have long documents which have
been re-used for many years (e.g. for 2003 document the 2002 one was used
and overwritten) and have text pasted in from other sources and in terms of
formatting/styles are a complete mess.

I guess most in here can feel your pain! :-)


I'm quite comfortable creating and modifying styles and going through the
documents and removing all the manual formatting in favour of the styles
(styles and formatting pane is great for this, although I wish it was a bit
more stable and quicker to update - it tends to claim formatting is still in
the document after you have removed all instances).

What I want to know is, can anyone point me to a good guide for style
use/naming. Headings, captions, page numbers etc are obvious but I would
like to know (for example):

* Is it better (or more common) for the 'standard' paragraphs to be defined
as 'Normal' or 'Body Text'?

From all I read, this seems to come down to personal taste. I prefer
Body Text in longer documents. For letter templates, I usually don't
bother beceause I know users will not adhere too much, anyway.

An interesting idea was reported in here to, if Body Text was used, to
define "Normal" as something like Arial Bold, 13 pt, purple, with red
marching ants around it; this serves as an indicator that, at this
paragraph, the correct style has obviously not been applied yet ...


* Is it considered better to use a character style 'Strong' to apply bold
than to apply manually (in 2003 I would say yes, as you can then lock the
document for formatting but still allow Strong to be applied to text in any
other style)?

Very good reason in Word 2003. In earlier versions, I'd vote for
Strong/Emphasis, too, esp. if you plan to export to (X)HTML from those
documents. The bad part of Word is that it treats character styles as
direct formatting (which you have found out if you are familiar with the
CTRL-A | CTRL-Q and ... | CTRL-Space Shortcuts). There are macros out
there that preserve character styles when resetting direct character
formatting to the famous "Font of the underlying paragraph".


* If you have Strong as Bold and Emphasis as Italics, is there a 'standard'
name for Bold+Italics (Stong Emphasis)?

I'd probably rather try not to use that combination (unless with "real"
crafted fonts for that purpose), but that's personal typographical
preference, I'm sure.


* Is it 'better' to call indented Body Text 'Body Text Indent' or just
'Indent'?

I'd use the former simply beceause that is part in a Normal.dot, anyway.


* Are the list and table styles of much benefit - do experienced Word users
recommend using them?

I see the former recommended around here, and the latter rather
discouraged. Personally, my list numbering seems stable enough without
having to delve into the realms of list styles. Table styles seem to be
a bit weird when you want to control paragraph style/formatting of the
table text, but for the rest seem to be OK. My "production" templates
still use mere table AutoTexts (with para styles for heading row and the
rest applied); if I ever wanted to globally change table properties
aside from the para styles, I'd use VBA.


In an ideal world everyone would adhere to these naming standards so that
copying and pasting text between documents would not cause so many
formatting problems, but Word Help does not seem to offer any guidance about
such standards.

Hear, hear!

Greetinx
Robert
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