Hi Paul

No, you certainly don't want or need to ask your users to use the
Organizer - as I guessed there are better ways of skinning this cat, now we
know what you're trying to do :-).

The way to handle this is to set up your styles in a template (.dot file)
which you install for department A (either put a copy in the User Templates
folder, or if there are several machines you might want to share a copy in a
"Workgroup template folder" location). The template can also contain any
boiler plate for the regular document - replacing whatever model document
they use now.

A will then create the regular document each month by first creating a new
document from your template - if they don't know how to do that from Word,
or you want to make it really simple, put a shortcut to your template on the
desktop - double clicking will open a new document in your template. (If
they edit a previous month's version, they can still do that, once you've
moved the first version into a fresh document made from the template.)

You can help A use your styles by customizing the view they get in the
Styles and Formatting dropdown and/or putting common styles onto a toolbar.

On bullets and numbering, two points:

* make sure you set up the list formatting for the style correctly, working
from the top level style in any multi-level list, and leaving Format B&N
well alone. Read Shauna's instructions again if you have any doubts here.
(Actually, since you've obviously had to make a lot of visits to Format
Bullets and Numbering and will have built up a lot of list formats in your
template, you'd do well to start afresh - copy across your unnumbered styles
from work in progress, but recreate the numbered ones.)

* If you (or A) have to paste B&N items, you need to be aware that Word will
not always respect the destination style formatting. What happens is that
the list formatting gets applied as direct formatting. If you get numbers
disappearing or similar odd effects on pasting, selecting the paragraphs and
pressing Ctrl-Q will remove that direct formatting and return to the number
formatting of the style.

(Note that this last isn't the same as the problem you were getting with the
style copy - as you guessed Word is not bringing in the correct list format
linked to the style. The "Copy 3 times" in the Organizer is a trick which
corrects for this - you may yet need this advice when you are building up
your template.)

Hope this helps

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

"Paul_at_Work" wrote in message
...
Hi, Margaret, (et al),

Thanks for the suggestions. I read about setting up numbered lists, and
while it's interesting, it doesn't seem that applicable. Maybe I need to
described what I am trying to do. I get a document for review from
department A, and once I make updates/corrections, it get's incorporated
in a
larger document by department B. We had 2 types of problems, the input
from A
was all over the map in terms of formatting, and even after I cleaned it
up,
B would end up changing it when they added it to the larger document
because
their format definitions would override mine. It seemed the way to solve
this
was to create a unique set of styles for A to use thus standardizing their
input to me, and making it "change-resistant" for B since I used unique
names
for my custom styles. To make this work, it must be easy for A to use
these
style while creating the original document for me. It seems that A can get
these styles into their document either by pasting the example
paragraphs/tables from my master document, or by importing these from a
template (dot) file that I provide using Format Theme Style Gallery to
select the template containing my custom styles. The problem is that
bulleted
and numbered lists get changed. These are *simple* formats that have
either
special alignments/indenting and tabs and/or spacing charcters [")" vs.
"."]
after the list item numbers. What I see is:

- bullet lists lose the bullet character
- bullet lists changed to numbered lists
- numbered lists with formatting change, sometime even within the same
list

I tried re-applying the custom style to the "corrupted" items, but this
does
not work. When I look at my styles with Format/Styles, the definitions
still
look "right", but when I look at them on the drop-down style list on the
formatting toolbar, they display as described in the list above. When I
open
Format Tools Bullets and Numbering with the cursor on one of the
corrupted items, the gallery position is not what I had set when I defined
the style, and I can correct the problem by re-setting the style to B&N
gallery position I originally defined for it. These seems to be the root
of
the problem (or at least the symptom), i.e., the B&N gallery position for
my
custom style gets changed by Word when I copy the style.

I have not tried your suggestion about using copying 3 times in Tools
Templates and Add-ins Organizer, which seems really cumbersome to expect
department A to follow it. I have a question about this:

For bullet and numbered styles, even if the style names match, you will
generally
have to Ctrl-Q to reset to style.

Where/when do I do the Ctrl-Q? It does not seem make any difference if I
do
this while I highlight one of the corrupted items.

Thanks/Paul