[Michael Mannion]

Greetings,

I've spent a fair amount of time over the past few years crafting some
templates for my company which, at this point, are relatively mature and
serving their purposes well in production. The primary customized content in
these templates comprises styles. I am obsessive about tagging every piece
of text with a style, and never overriding the style with manual formatting.
This, coupled with a resistance to adding new styles - in order keep the
total number of styles to a minimum and, in turn, usable - has yielded a
collection of documents that are easy to reference, reformat, and reuse for
other purposes. So far so good.

I am now in the process of moving from Word 2003 to Word 2007. Aside from
the minor release-specific adjustments I need to make, this also presents
and opportunity to re-visit the templates, en masse, and clean up any issues
that have arisen over the past few years.

The one nagging problem I have not been able to fix during this overhaul,
however, has to do with sharing styles among templates. This is not a Word
2007 issue, per se, but rather a generic one that I am just endeavoring to
understand concurrently with my release upgrade. In brief:

o All of my templates share a common set of styles

o Each template differs only in the page layout (headers/footers,
watermarks, etc.)

What I would like to do is have one core template that stores all of the
custom styles, and make the other templates (with the customized page
layouts) reference the core style template.

From researching this periodically over the years, I believe that I have
determined that Word does not support such 'cascading' templates for
styles - with the exception of the Normal template. I do not believe I can
rely on the Normal template to store company-wide styles, however, becuse a
separate Normal template exists for each user. I've resigned to the fact
that this is a limitation, and am not necessarily looking for a solution
here.

What I would like, however, is to understand why styles cannot be stored in
global templates. It seems that many other types of customizations - such as
macros and auto-text - can be stored in global templates which, in turn, can
be referenced by other templates in a cascading manner. Styles, though,
appear to be explicitly disallowed.

I think that I am mis-understanding something fundamental about the way that
Word works, and would like to be more informed, even if I can't solve the
techical problem I'm encountering. So, simply:

QUESTION: Why does Word not allow me to reference styles stored in a
global template?
(Alternatively, why do I have to use a document template in order to
reference styles?)

Thank you for your feedback, and for helping me sleep better at night. Have
a good day.

-Michael