[td]

Hi,

I have a problem related to how to stop certain entries in a document from
ending up in my table of contents.

I work for a government agency, and we often receive many comments filed on
certain proposed policies. We have made a really useful little program which
allows us to go through those filings and "mark" the text in them as
belonging to a specific topic. When we're done, we run another program which
goes through all of the filings, "collects" entries it sees as being marked
for specific topics and creates separate "topic documents." Those topic
documents begin with a table of contents which lists the party names of the
commenters for that topic. In the body of the topic document, each entry has
a heading (Heading 1 style) that is the party name, and then the pasted text
from that party's filing that relates to that topic.

Here's my problem... Some of these parties already use certain styles and
formatting in their submitted documents. Some of them already use Heading 1.
Some of them don't use Heading 1, but their custom styles end up in my table
of contents (which is set to only include level 1 text) anyway.

Question: I'd like to make a macro which somehow "lowers" the level of the
text in the submitted documents, but without actually changing the physical
format. In other words, I don't want to change how the documents look, just
whether their text interferes with my table of contents. There are so many
different settings though, and I'm not sure which are relevant. And I just
generally get confused with Word's styles and formatting. It seems that if I
manually reduce the heading level (if they even used a heading level) or the
outline level, it changes the formatting. What, if anything, can I do?

So far I've been just manually setting everything to body text, but this
really screws up their formatting, which sometimes can make it difficult to
tell how their original document was organized with headings and such.

Thanks,
Tom