[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi David--

What kind of things are you tweaking? Templates won't really change
anything that is going to make a difference to the content of the help.
Make sure the template serves all your structural and logical needs
before sending it to anyone, and the rest is just cosmetic
presentation. Cosmetic effects aren't worth the frustration of trying
to control multiple authors.

So my advice would be to just handle it on your end. If you want, you
could send the authors your template with instructions, and tell them
what to do if they want to see how their final product would look, but
make it optional.

Your real problem is that "automatically update styles" refuses to
default to "on" for documents created from a template. Someone else may
know the answer to that.

If not, a workaround would be to or ask for help writing a macro that
will go through all the files in a folder and turn on "automatically
update styles". Run it periodically as you receive new help files. Or
make it MANDATORY that your authors check that box.

DavidS wrote:
I have a Word 2007 template, for some help files, that is likely to be
tweaked. A number of authors are using the tempalte and creating
hundreds of small help documents. I want to be able to:

1 - Send out an update of the template to the authors and have all of
their documents reflect the changes in the template next time they are
opened.

2 - Receive the files back from the authors and have them update
against the office master version of the template as they are opened.

I can achieve (1) by displaying the developer tab and in the Templates
group, clicking Document Template, then setting the Automatically
update document styles option. However, I cannot get this to default to
being checked. Inevitably users will forget to check this as they
create new documents.

The problem achieving (2) is that the location of the templates folder
is beyond my control on the authors' machines, and the template
location stored seems to be an explicit path
(C:\windows\user\...\help.dotx). Is there any way of replacing this
with a symbolic path (%workgrouptemplates%\help.dotx)???

What other hints have people got for keeping documents linked to
templates in a nice, neat fashion?

Thanks,

David