[Fabricator]

I have come into a technical writing position at a company which has virtually all of its technical manuals in Word. My background is in Framemaker, so I have been learning a lot about Word in order to survive.

These documents suffer the effects of many people going into them and making changes, additions and deletions over a period of many years. There seems to have been styles set up for these documents, but I find that high percentages of the text and headers have been manually changed [including rampant use of space bar, tab key, and returns] from some other style by people who had little or no knowledge of styles. In some cases they did modify styles, but had the update all feature enabled. So there were global problems created.

The header/outline hierarchy is all over the map and very inconsistent/nonsensical in many of the documents, which is a problem because many of them are 60-70 pages long. A lot of the numbering strings are messed up, too.

What I think I would like to do [and maybe I will not be using Word terminology correctly] is create a new template, populated by correctly formatted and desired styles, then repair documents by jettisoning the old styles and importing the new, then going through the document and massaging it so that everything is the right style.

I am still weak on when I want to switch templates and when I want just to modify styles, even after reading a lot about this subject.

I have done lots of research and have gotten pretty proficient, I think, in the correct use of styles. I am still struggling with regard to diagnosing just how to fix some of these documents. I can change a style in a paragraph and it affects other paragraphs, indents, and numbering. Some of the documents almost seem corrupted to me, if that is possible.

So, some questions.....

Have any of you ever inherited a situation like this and how did you deal with it?

What would be the best way to totally replace all of the questionable styles?

If you have a document associated with one template with named styles, and you switch templates to another one with the same style names, but different formatting for those styles, and you switch between the two templates for a document, will that change the appearance of the document, or will it retain the previous style formatting?

I could use any helpful thought you would care to share.... :-)