Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
#1
Posted to microsoft.public.word.docmanagement
|
|||
|
|||
Automatically updates document styles--ever a best practice?
Hi All,
We recently came across a set of documents that were set to automatically update document styles. I've always read on this forum and pretty much everywhere else that you don't want to have this option checked. But, in seeing hundreds of documents having this option set, I thought, "maybe I'm missing something here". And, then, thinking as a web developer which I am, thinking of external style sheets and server side includes and things--it sounds great to have a scenario where the tightly permissioned template can be modified and documents attached to the template are then modified. A couple of big IF's in the scenario of course, including users applying direct formatting and copy/paste without paste special and etc. So, I've read about all the problems "Automatically updates document styles" can cause--bullets and numbering and such, but is it ever a best practice to use that option, and keep it on, for sets of documents? thanks all. Ben |
#2
Posted to microsoft.public.word.docmanagement
|
|||
|
|||
Automatically updates document styles--ever a best practice?
Leaving that option on is OK only if the document formatting is *extremely*
disciplined -- ie with no manual formatting applied. This is very rarely the case: beginners just aren't that well-behaved, and for experienced users there is always scope for typographic improvement (a little more space here, force a page-break there, etc). Of course there are exceptions: there are documents constructed with a very restricted set of styles (like the early HTML documents, with nothing but headings, body text, and lists; and documents that are machine-generated (database output, XSLT conversions, etc). For these, forced reversion to style is entirely reasonable. "bdog_jdog" wrote in message ups.com... Hi All, We recently came across a set of documents that were set to automatically update document styles. I've always read on this forum and pretty much everywhere else that you don't want to have this option checked. But, in seeing hundreds of documents having this option set, I thought, "maybe I'm missing something here". And, then, thinking as a web developer which I am, thinking of external style sheets and server side includes and things--it sounds great to have a scenario where the tightly permissioned template can be modified and documents attached to the template are then modified. A couple of big IF's in the scenario of course, including users applying direct formatting and copy/paste without paste special and etc. So, I've read about all the problems "Automatically updates document styles" can cause--bullets and numbering and such, but is it ever a best practice to use that option, and keep it on, for sets of documents? thanks all. Ben |
Reply |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Forum | |||
How to automatically turn on and off the document map. | Microsoft Word Help | |||
Styles Growing | Page Layout | |||
Style lists in the Styles and Formatting task pane | Formatting Long Documents | |||
Best approach to getting styles into a document | Microsoft Word Help | |||
Save 'Automatically update document styles' option to template | Microsoft Word Help |