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Paul
 
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Default Style Naming Convensions

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'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'?
* 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)?
* If you have Strong as Bold and Emphasis as Italics, is there a 'standard'
name for Bold+Italics (Stong Emphasis)?
* Is it 'better' to call indented Body Text 'Body Text Indent' or just
'Indent'?
* Are the list and table styles of much benefit - do experienced Word users
recommend using them?

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.

Thanks

Paul

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