I'm coming in late, but I'll join the others in recommending Body Text over
Normal (see http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting...BodyStyles.htm) and
for using the built-in styles (modified as desired) whenever possible. This
is especially important in the case of headings (see
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/numb...ingStyles.html).

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
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all may benefit.

"Paul" wrote in message
...
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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